Uber Alles

With little more than two months remaining until the American-led occupation force hands sovereignty to an interim government, Iraqi citizens are joyfully arming themselves in anticipation of independence.

"Saddam is overthrown! Praise Allah! Iraq is ours once more!" Baghdad native Alaa al-Khawaja said, as he busily shoved boxes of 7.62mm ammunition beneath the bed in his two-room home on the outskirts of Baghdad. "Now is the time for all citizens to prepare for our nation's glorious future—a future certain to contain wave after bloody wave of sectarian violence."

"Excuse me, now," al-Khawaja added. "I must barricade these doors and windows with sheet metal before the wonderful day of freedom arrives."

Also readying himself is Thaer Abbas, a Tikrit shopkeeper who sells handmade baskets, earthenware pots, and surplus AK-47s.

"God bless the USA! God bless Bush!" Abbas said. "America has delivered our country back into our hands, and soon, thousands of those hands will be raised in anger as mullahs and imams lead the fight over what little remains."

As the June 30 date for transfer of full authority to the interim government approaches, the dozens of political factions that comprise the liberated nation are readying themselves to assume rule.

"Finally, we will have the opportunity to lead our own nation and decide what is best for our people," said Shi'ite Muslim cleric Namir al-Safy. "Of course, by 'we,' I mean the Shi'ites."

Unfortunately this is probably more truth than parody.

"Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, charged that the president is playing political games by postponing further funding requests until after the election, to try to avoid reopening debate on the war's cost and future.
Weldon described the administration's current defense budget request as 'outrageous' and 'immoral' and said that at least $10 billion is needed for Iraqi operations over the next five months"

Now anybody that has been paying attention, knew this months ago, I'll be curious to see how much, if any, air play this gets and what the reaction from the fiscal consevatives will be. Note, that this was a Republican making the above charges, Bush better start watching his back or he may get it from his own party in the end.

Democrats obviously are no pikers when it comes to spending. But the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity. Give either party complete control of government, and the Treasury vaults are quickly emptied. Neither Congress nor the President wants to tell the other no. Both are desperate to prove they can "govern"—which means creating new programs and spending more money. But share power between parties, and out of principle or malice they check each other. Even if a President Kerry proposed more spending than would a President Bush, a GOP Congress would appropriate less. That's one reason the Founders believed in the separation of powers.

Consider the record. William Niskanen, former acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has put together a fascinating analysis of government spending since 1953. Real federal outlays grew fastest, 4.8% annually, in the Kennedy-Johnson years, with Congress under Democratic control. The second-fastest rise, 4.4%, occurred with George W. Bush during Republican rule. The third-biggest spending explosion, 3.7%, was during the Carter administration, a time of Democratic control. In contrast, the greatest fiscal stringency, 0.4%, occurred during the Eisenhower years. The second-best period of fiscal restraint, 0.9%, was in the Clinton era. Next came the Nixon-Ford years, at 2.5%, and Ronald Reagan's presidency, at 3.3%. All were years of shared partisan control.

Bush officials argue that it is unfair to count military spending, but Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan also faced international challenges that impeded their domestic plans. Moreover, if you do strip out military spending and consider only the domestic record, GOP chief executives emerge in an even worse light. In terms of real domestic discretionary outlays, which are most easily controlled, the biggest spender in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, with expenditure racing ahead 8.2% annually, according to Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth. No. 2 on the list is Gerald Ford, at 8%. No. 3 is Richard Nixon. At least the latter two, in contrast to Bush, faced hostile Congresses.

Given the generally woeful record of Republican Presidents, the best combination may be a Democratic chief executive and Republican legislature. It may also be the only combination that's feasible, since in 2004 at least, it will be difficult to overturn Republican congressional control: Redistricting has encouraged electoral stasis in the House, while far more Democrats face reelection in the Senate. Thus, the only way we can realistically keep Congress and the President in separate political hands is to vote for John Kerry in November.

Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, warned of a strong Shiite response if U.S. forces entered Najaf or Karbala to capture al-Sadr.

The holy cities are a “red line,” Mahdi al-Karbala’i, al-Sistani’s representative in Karbala, said during a sermon. “We are calling for peaceful solutions, but if the coalition forces are to cross the red line, then we'll take a different stronger position.”

Al-Sistani, a moderate who has opposed anti-U.S. violence, has enormous influence among Iraq’s Shiite majority.

If this happens, all bets are off in Iraq. The coalition (yeah right) has to back to here or face a general uprising in the south, which will be disasterous to say the least. Sistani, now having thrown his glove into the arena, is putting some weight behind Al-Sadr regardless of the eventual outcome.

Is this John Kerry's strategy--lay low and let Bush self destruct? If it is then we are in serious trouble. I know that the campaign season is not yet officially upon us, but letting the other side frame the debate and steal all of the free media attention, whether its good or bad, seems to me to be a fundamental mistake. Kerry should be pounding on Bush right now, giving the American people a contrasting and seductive alternative message and capturing hearts and minds while there is some lingering doubts about Bush's ability to perform the office. What I am seeing from my vantage point, from Kerry, has been anemic at best and I keep having Dukakis flash backs. Hope that that analogy doesn't carry any further forward for all our sakes. I'm not sure this country will survive another four years of this administration at its absolute worst (mark my words, it will be worse without re election hanging over its head). I was kidding my wife about going to check out Vancouver this summer to see how we liked it up there, but I was only partly kidding and she knew it.

I can't wait to see the apologist defense of this one. Kinda knocks heads with what Condi and Bush have been saying, now doesn't it?
'Blinking red'
"The system was blinking red," Tenet told the commission in private testimony, the panel's report noted.

In this context, Bush "had occasionally asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States," the report said. Or as one U.S. senior official more intimately involved in the summer reporting paraphrased the president's question to the CIA: "This guy going to strike here?"

I will admit that I missed most of the opening remarks, but that had to be the worst performance that I have ever seen by an elected official in the public arena. You would be hard pressed to come up with a coherent paragraph out his responses. I'm also glad that we are now spending our nations' resources doing God's work of freedom spreading, I'm guessing he consulted Falwell on that point to get the specifics.

I'm also glad to see that Saddam was a really bad guy and that we've removed him as a threat, though we don't exactly know now exactly what threat he posed...but hey we might just find some old mustard gas under a turkey farm, ya never know, and besides he had something to hide, that's for sure. If only those Iraqi's that knew where these things are weren't so scared (here's an idea for you, offer them a couple of million dollars and asylum in--- say, Malibu. Naw, they'd probably still be too scared to come forward, have you seen the size of the jugs on some of those infidels in Malibu? Better to sweat it out safely in the desert of Iraq.)

I'm guessing, and I'm going to go even farther out on my usual limb here, that we still don't have the foggiest idea how we're going to get those brown skinned guys over there to buy into a representative democracy--remember, the freedom thing is all God's idea, so if it doesn't work out don't blame Bush, it's God's fault.

I would like to move beyond Kennedy's assertion that Iraq has become Bush's Viet Nam to posit that the current devolution into civil war by the native insurgents aided by Islamists from outside has become Bush's Tet Offensive. This action by the Viet Cong has come to be seen by Vietnam historians as the turning point in American support for that war. While we in fact WON every major engagement of that war, these victories came at horrid costs - costs that the American public was palpably unwilling to pay.


THAT is the deciding factor. When the moms and dads of our young soldiers no longer are willing to support the mission upon which Bush has committed them, when the 19-year-old with the rifle realizes that the nation no longer supports him, the people he is supposedly liberating want to kill him, and the politicians (including his commander-in-chief) are lying to him ...... hope dies.


I just spent a half-hour speaking with a man I have known for 20 years or more - but never knew was a Viet Nam vet. He was speaking to these issues in Iraq. I asked him if he saw any parallells to Tet .... and the tears flowed. He said it felt EXACTLY like Tet, shattering beyond belief. He said he feels for the young men caught in this situation, knows their horror and despair. It was utterly moving to see this composed, successful businessman come apart in my office.


He HATES Bush, despises him in a way that only one who lived through such a betrayal could. I dare to think that there are hundreds of thousands like him out there. I almost dare to hope.

At first blush, I just waved off Kennedy's speech about this being Bush's Vietnam as over-the-top political rhetoric. The kind of straw man thing that the Republicans do all the time. But having reflected on it for a couple of days, I now see that I was wrong. The Vietnam analogy is indeed very apt here.

The very fact that this country will forever be divided about, the motives, execution, cost and outcome of this war places it very firmly into the Vietnam realm on the scale of bad decisions. If there was a way for this to be half-assed by the political backers of this war, it was.

The military did a splendid job of taking the country, but were not given the resources, manpower and plan to be successful thereafter. The problem for Bush is his and his administration's utter unwillingness to admit that any of this is anything but according to plan. I think that most Americans can see that things have not gone as planned for the most part, and that simply shrugging and saying that the deaths of our soldiers a year into this thing is all part of the plan and completely expected, is just as unbelievable as them saying that they had absolutely no idea what the cost of the war was going to be before hand.

I realize that there are a great many people who think that they see a 'long term' solution in play here, and that the seeds of a peaceful, cooperative middle east are being sown at a bearable short term cost. I would ask those same people, what they have seen so far about the way this administration has gone about its business that points to their ability to deliver on any kind of sensible long range planning?

If we'd put the boots on the ground to be able to pacify and provide security in Iraq to begin with, I do not believe that we would be having nearly as many problems as we have had. First of all the looting could have and should have been stopped in the beginning, with more boots this would have been possible. Secondly, it would have been far easier to win hearts and minds in a secure environment.

It's kind of hard to get people to see their 'liberation' as a good thing if they are worried about their and their family's basic security and amenities--again, more boots up front would have smoothed the way.

The insurgents have found purchase in Iraq, because the people there don't see any real difference between what they are offering them and what the Americans, canned up in the Green Zone, are offering them. We brought in a cadre of exiles to rule Iraq under the auspices of the CPA, tell the Iraqis that we want to let them pick their own leaders but then do not offer a plan as to how that is going to happen and expect them to embrace this with all their hearts?

These are for the most part a tribal people, used to a oppressive regime to keep their tribal traditions and feuds in check. We have let that djinni completely out of the bottle without offering any real alternative or future that they can understand. They know nothing about American style democracy there, they don't have the vaguest idea of what western style freedom means to their daily lives or their religion.

The Koran, bleeds into the secular life of its followers in a way the Christianity never came close to. The middle east is much more akin to the European middle ages that was ruled by feudal lords with the backing and blessing of the Church, than it is to the Enlighment period in early America. This is not simply a matter of opening up polls and letting the sunshine in, this is a major paradigm shift in a culture that has not been prepared for it. Democracy had to evolve, the idea that Church and State needed to be separated from each other for each of them to thrive was a huge step in thinking on the part of a few influential European outcasts and was brought about because of cultural movements that do not exist in the middle east now.

Think about it, if the Koran is god's law, and it provides the answers to all questions in daily life, the imposition of the 'law of man', in the form secular, modern constitution, has to, in many ways supplant that. There are a great many people here in the US who can't wrap their minds around the idea of a law outside of the Bible, and the Bible is not near the tome that the Koran is with respect to law. Hell, most of the cultural divide that we have in this country is still about the separation of religious law from secular law. The founders won a battle early on but the war still rages in full fury after 200 years. Now we expect the Iraqi's to some how get this in a matter of a year and a couple of months, then go along their merry way and start pumping oil for us?

The problem here is not that the idea of a democracy in Iraq is impossible, it is that there obviously and admittedly was no thought put into how it was going to be done. Saying that that will be left to the Iraqis is like asking a toddler to pick their college major and stick to it. Half-assed planning and execution is what is going to doom this Iraq endeavor and put it side by side with Vietnam in the annals of great American foreign fuck ups, not the idea of making a free society there. "Gooooood morning Iraq!"

"The confrontation with al-Sadr - whose militia waged fierce battles with coalition troops on Sunday - and the offensive against Fallujah appeared to be a tougher approach by U.S. forces ahead of a planned June 30 handover of power to an Iraqi government."

Well, I was kind of hoping that this had come to a head yesterday and that things would settle down, but unlike the Bush administration I generally don't use hope as the basis for my policies, and I am yet to draw my family into any unnecessary wars or prolonged nation building exercises, and I have not been attacked by terrorists yet either.

I am, thinking of raising taxes on my childrens' allowances to help pay for some public works projects (landscaping) this spring, but I'm not sure I can muster the super majority to pass that one (my wife is a notorious household tax hawk--I won't even mention the usage tax fight that we had last session, we wrangled endlessly on what was going to be considered 'usage' and in the end I completely withdrew the proposal.)

I didn't mean for this to devolve into that, but what else is there to say. Josh Claybourne had a post about changing Iran and Iraq's images by changing their names to Persia and Babylonia respectively, I thought maybe Bushylonia or Clusterfuck (The name consensus name given by the troops getting shot up there now.)

I've added some more excellent blog links over to the side if anyone is interested. The new ones are Annatopia a nice progressive blog that's been around for quite awhile, I finally got a link up to The Washington Monthly, where Calpundit's Kevin Drum now eloquates, the Tacitus link is now pointing to his new site, though the content isn't any better, the site is a bit more legible. I've added the very popular libertarian Volokh as well. Basically I got tired of going to other blogs to hit those links and finally encoded them here. And while I'm on the subject of blogs I would like to point out that Michael (one of my few readers here) at 2millionthweblog has been doing some of the very best work in the blogsphere recently and if you haven't checked out his site you are cheating yourself of some very nice reads and insight.

Can we all agree now that Iraq is not a blossoming paradise in the sand and that the occupation hasn't gone near as well as Bushco. told us it would?

The blogsphere is all over this one for sure, and I won't pretend to know what the hell the CPA was thinking, but I will go out on a limb and say that this was 'not' a good week for our efforts to bring the American dream to the middle east.

I expect that operation 'ignore it and it will go away', otherwise known as the Bush Presidency, is going to have a hard time spinning this pile of shit into gold. One thing that is for certain is that if we take Sadr into custody all bets are off. He has been consolidating power and biding his time for months, the hat has been tipped early, but I suspect that we have forced him to make his grab now rather than after the hand over. If I were him, I would disappear for a while and let the Americans go back to ignoring me until there was a real opportunity to grab real power.

I'm taking my monthly jaunt to Mexico through the rest of the week, so I'll probably not be blogging (for the 5 or so people who actually read this drivel). It was a beautiful weekend here in Indiana and I spent as much time outside landscaping as I possibly could, so I feel kind of politically cleansed. I didn't watch Condi Rice, or Meet the Press, or any of the other get-your-ire-up shit that I normally do. I dug holes and got incredibly sunburned and lost about five pounds of that post hernia surgery weight that I had put on (another five and I'll be buff again.)
I've been perusing the blogsphere as usual this morning, but I can't quite get fired up enough to rip anything particularly insightful so I'll leave it at that.

Maybe a few Negra Modelo's and some real taco's will put the spirit back into me. Nothing like seeing a two class society like Mexico to put the good ole rage back in place. I once remarked to a friend after returning to US after a long stay in a nice villa in central Mexico that the rich people there have it particularly nice, 8 bucks a day to buy someone's labor for anything and constant reinforcement for how superior you are. Kick backs and bribery are a way of life and business there (starting to sound like I'm describing the GOP convention, doesn't it).

I really don't care about whether Bush was joking about not being able to find WMD's. I think anyone predisposed to tar him will tar him for it and those who would forgive a gay relationship with the prince of darkness will look the other way as well.

What I do find amusing is that after doggedly refuting that WMD's didn't exist even after the Kay report came out, that the President doesn't see that his credibility in this regard is totally blown. There were those who still held onto his and Cheney's insistence that even though David Kay said that they weren't going to find any weapons that they were still probably there.

I guess the slide show was his way of letting these people down easy--hah, hah... I meant that we should invade Iraq because Saddam's really, really, really, really bad, I mean much worse than you probably think, and the Iraqi's well they might not seem grateful now, but give them a few months and they will be welcoming us with parades and flowers like we said they would. People who are sticklers for the truth are tainted and unpatriotic--everyone knows that, that's why there are so many of these lying crooks quitting our administration and saying bad things about us. They all sound the same, cause they are all telling the same lies, no doubt a liberal conspiracy to impeach the integrity of the president.

I love the retreat into morality that the supporters of this have gone into. There were tons of reasons to go into Iraq, WMD's were just a side show. If they weren't actively sponsoring the terrorists they at least look and sound an awful lot like those guys, right? Look how grateful those people are.

Those heathens needed liberating and it is incumbent on the US to provide liberation and rebuilding help to those who need it (unless you are Tutsi, Congolese or other such oil poor chattel). The great healing of the middle east is at hand folks, let there be no mistake and evidence to the contrary be damned.

I knew that Richard Clarke was going to do some damage to Bush yesterday. I had absolutely no idea about the depth and completely damning nature of that damage though. The fact that the White House is in full battle, spin, nuance and flat out lie mode points to how damaging they see his revelations.
If all the Republicans can come up with is that he is waffling (where have we heard that line of attack before? hmmm.) and trying to sell books, then they really have been caught red handed. I kind of fear for Clarke's life now, no kidding. Fox news released a patched together, scurrilous transcript (see Talking Points Memo). How can this even be legal? It shows how utterly desperate that they are, hell maybe no one will notice. Rush will spout it back to the faithful and Condi will repeat it (shameless liar) and it will enter into the cult fiction circle of the trashy right wing media/blog sphere.

Richard Clarke road in on a pale horse yesterday and laid waste to the core of Bush's presidency. Whether the American people will see that is the real question. The core on the right has their heads buried up to their ankles in the sand right now, so it to those who still have not made up their minds, and those who are not lock step and blind on the right that we must now put our faith in. It is a long time until November, but the Bush camp is bloodied and reeling right now. Here's to hoping that this is their Waterloo.