The Rag Blog

New York, New York: Ok, class. No talking. Pencils up. All eyes on the exam. Here’s the first multiple-choice question:

The Iraq War is Bad Because:

1. It is illegal, immoral, and criminal
2. It has ended up killing and maiming millions of Iraqis we promised to free
3. It has devastated a country and ignited world opinion against the United States and caused thousands of US casualties
4. It has debased our media and turned much of it into a propaganda organ
5. It was badly managed and poorly executed

What was once hailed as a heroic mission is now being dismissed as a fiasco, error and “mistake,” and to some former war boosters, even a “noble mistake.”

The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA — the front page of the New York Times.

The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.

Under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say,” the Nov. 15 front page of the New York Times prominently featured a “Military Analysis” by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that — while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops “should begin within four to six months” — “this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.”

Reporter Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is “simply not realistic.” Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon went on to state in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who will chair the Senate Judiciary Committee next year, asked the Justice Department to release two newly acknowledged documents, which set U.S. policy on how terrorism suspects are detained and interrogated.

The CIA recently acknowledged the existence of the documents in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The first is a directive President Bush signed giving the CIA authority to establish detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees.

The second is a 2002 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA’s general counsel regarding interrogation methods that the spy agency may use against al-Qaeda leaders.

CAMP PENDLETON – In the beginning, there were eight. A squad of seven Marines and a Navy corpsman charged with kidnapping and murdering an Iraqi man, a crime described by a prosecutor as especially brutal.

They faced military trials; the death penalty was possible.

And now there are four. In the six months the men have been held at the Camp Pendleton brig, the profile of the Al-Hamdaniyah cases has changed dramatically. The death penalty is off the table and four of the defendants have struck plea bargains.

Some observers of the military justice system find the developments mystifying.

Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches law of war at Georgetown University Law Center, said he was surprised by the number of plea agreements in this case.

“It’s a wonderment to me that it’s happening in the military system,” he said.

The group was accused of kidnapping 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad in the town of Al-Hamdaniyah, taking him to a roadside hole, shooting him and then trying to cover up the incident. According to court testimony, the service members planned to kidnap and kill a known insurgent, and when they couldn’t get to him, some members of the squad went into Awad’s home.

LONDON — Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said military victory was no longer possible in Iraq in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

In a wide-ranging interview on BBC television, Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter dialogue with Iraq’s regional neighbors — including Iran — if any progress was to be made in the region.

“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday AM program.

But Kissinger warned against a rapid withdrawal of troops, saying it could lead to “disastrous consequences,” destabilizing Iraq’s neighbors and causing a long-lasting conflict.

“If you withdraw all the forces without any international understanding and without any even partial solution of some of the problems, civil war in Iraq will take on even more violent forms and achieve dimensions that are probably exceeding those that brought us into Yugoslavia with military force,” he said.

“All the surrounding countries — especially those that have large Shiite populations — will be, in all likelihood, destabilized,” he said.

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.”

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton’s tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush’s strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said.

Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week.

A month before the November 7 legislative elections, Hersh wrote, Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.

“If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran,” Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions “and thus stop Congress from getting in its way,” he said.

The Democratic victory unleashed a surge of calls for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran.

But the administration’s planning of a military option was made “far more complicated” in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency “challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb,” he wrote.

President Bush speaks Friday with Asian leaders who held a surprise “funeral ceremony for American influence in Asia” yesterday in Hanoi.

Ceremony Announced Only Minutes Earlier

In a surprise meeting for which White House press secretary Tony Snow said President Bush received “only minutes” advance notice, leaders of three Asian nations: Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, announced yesterday what the leaders called the “sudden death and long-overdue burial” of American hegemony in Asia.

According to sources at the early morning meeting, Bush was escorted into a small room off the main meeting hall, where a virtual cornucopia of cut flowers surrounded a casket labeled, “American hegemony in Asia 1800s – 2006”. Alarmed embassy staff said it apparently took the good-natured Bush most of the 45-minute ceremony to realize the event was not a joke, at which time he called for his security detail, which found itself locked out of the meeting and unable to enter.

But Singapore President Muhammad Olbliquar quietly suggested to Bush that translators could be of more use.

“Let us be clear,” said Obliquar. “The world economy runs on oil. China pays generously for oil and gets it; you bomb and kill for oil, and yet you still end up empty-handed, impoverishing your allies and your citizens while enriching your enemies. It therefore makes more sense for us to be your enemy — or at least not your ally — than it does to side with you.”

Taken aback, the US president initially tried to argue his case for “fighting for the petroleum we need,” said meeting attendees. “Cheney says I’m on the right track, and oil company profits are through the roof,” said Bush. “The old paradigm of conquer, steal, and sell is gone,” said Bush. “Today the oil we keep off the market by trashing oil producing nations has doubled the value of the oil we are able to actually get. It works for Exxon, and what works for Exxon works for us,” said Bush.

Obliquar, who said he apparently was designated to try to educate the US president about the waning influence of the US on Asian nations now hewing closer to China said, before he began addressing Bush again that he thought he was chosen to do so mainly because “my city-state is too small to be targeted accurately by US airborne munitions.” He then went on to deliver more bad news to Bush.

“All the Asian nations who want stability are becoming closer to China, and distancing themselves from a nation that seems not to have learned the lessons of even its longest war, held, incidentally in our back yard,” said Obliquar.

For example, said Obliquar, “You said on Thursday that the lesson of your Vietnam war for your Iraq war was that you would win in Iraq if you did not quit, that makes many people think you believe that had you only stayed twice as long and killed twice as many of our people, you might have won. Even if that fantasy were true, the fact you would say it in a land where you escaped being an imperial war criminal only through cowardice, not conviction, would make anyone question your judgement,” the Singapore leader said.

“Moreover, we have real concerns about US money value,” Obliquar said. “China’s money is backed by the value of the countless barrels of oil and oil futures it controls, bought with the prized Chinese yuan and with oil-for-oil-production infrastructure deals with its oil-rich friends, such as Hugo Chavez and the Africans. But US money is good only as long as China loans it to you. Your money is backed only by China’s good will and kindess. And its cleverness.”

“Bush, why do you think the Chinese have never objected to your war against Iraq — never said so much as one word against it?” sources said Obliquar asked the by-the-shocked US president, who had been guiled into the meeting by hotel staff who told him he could catch 30 minutes of the Ohio State-Michigan football game on cable TV, and would not be missed at the APEC summit.

“It’s because China has known that all the money it loaned you to pay for the war would never be used to build US production capacity, and instead would be utterly wasted. Yet China now finances your economy to such a great extent by buying your treasury bonds that if it were to slow down buying your bonds, or heaven forbid, begin to sell those bonds, your dollar would lose enormous value in very short order.”

“Which, quite frankly, has become the largest single reason they buy your bonds,” added Obliquar.

“Given that,” Obliquar asked Bush, “how could you ever meaningfully oppose big-difference items that China supports? Or get support from us for what China opposes, such as boarding North Korean ships to search them for weapons,” Obliquar asked.

“After all, China can protect us from North Korea — and will do so — but you cannot,” sources said Obliquar told Bush. “You are too far away, your military is tied up in a quagmire like your previous one, from which your nation seems to have learned something, but from which your leadership has not.”

“You cannot even protect us from China, which hasn’t grown outside its borders in 600 years, incidentally, but China can protect us from you and your once-ever-widening reach,” noted Obliquar.

Obliquar ended his solliloquy, according to sources at the ceremony, by thanking Bush for listening, and presenting him with a tape of the talk. “If you have any trouble understanding what I’ve just said, ask Karl Rove what it all means,” suggested Obliquar.

After the ceremony, Obliquar was heard telling Bush that Vietnamese officials had expressed concern about the Bush team hotel bill. “If you could settle up on that hotel bill — including the bill for the next few days ahead — before you have any more meetings with the Chinese delegation about North Korea, I know the hotel owners would greatly appreciate it,” said Obliquar.

Sources at the summit said that when the US security team caught up with the president shortly after the meeting, Bush seemed dazed and confused, and asked immediately that a key piece of information be determined by intelligence sources and relayed to him as soon as possible.

“I really, really, need to know,” said Bush, “who won that NCAA game.”

Told the game actually would not be played until the following day, Saturday, Bush was visibly agitated, but his reply could not be heard, as the security team hustled him back to the main meeting.

Later, Chinese officials announced the largest-ever single purchase by China of 10-year US Treasury notes, an amnesty plan for Taiwanese nationalists, and the lend-lease to North Korea of swifter, larger cargo ships to ply the trade routes between Pyongyang and Karachi, expected ultimately to bring North Korean cash from unspecified technology transfers to Pakistan and Iran into Chinese coffers.

Did anyone really imagine it would be any different? The Guardian reports that Bush has already decided on his “new” strategy for Iraq, ahead of the recommendations of the “Iraq Study Group” he appointed – and ahead of the internal government review of strategy which he ordered only this week. And what is the strategy? More of the same. How could it be otherwise? The Decider-in-Chief cannot admit, not even to himself, that any of his decisions have ever been wrong. How can they be, when they are dictated by his “gut,” and his gut is guided by God Almighty?

Yet no man rises to such a position – even with the enormous, endless help of his elitist family and friends – without some animal cunning. Bush knows that he cannot do what he would have to do to “win” the war on his terms: send in hundreds of thousands of more troops in a brutal, no-holds-barred campaign to eradicate all active opposition to the imposition of a docile Iraqi regime and the permanent installation of American bases. He knows there is no political will, even among his own party and most of his “base,” to take this route. (Barring, of course, another convenient terrorist attack on American soil, this time blamed on the Iraqi insurgents. Then there would be no limit to Bush’s “justifiable retaliation.” This scenario, although unlikely at present, is certainly not to be discounted altogether.)

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