Iraq's Fig Leaf Constitution

Robert Scheer exposes the sad truth behind Bush's increasingly foolish assertions that we are making progress in Iraq.

Who lost Iraq? Someday, as a fragmented Iraq spirals further into religious madness, terrorism and civil war, there will be a bipartisan inquiry into this blundering intrusion into another people's history.

The crucial question will be why a 'pre-emptive' American invasion -- which has led to the deaths of nearly 2,000 Americans and roughly 10 times as many Iraqis, the expenditure of about $200 billion, and incalculable damage to the United States' global reputation -- has had exactly the opposite effect predicted by its neoconservative sponsors. No amount of crowing over a fig leaf Iraqi constitution by President Bush can hide the fact that the hand of the region's autocrats, theocrats and terrorists is stronger than ever.

'The U.S. now has to recognize that (it) overthrew Saddam Hussein to replace him with a pro-Iranian state,' said regional expert Peter W. Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and an advisor to the Iraqi Kurds. And, he could have added, a pro-Iranian state that will be repressive and unstable.

Iraq: From Dictatorship to Theocracy?

The argument can be made that the result of Bush's adventurism in Iraq will be to create a theocracy. This might not be an unintended consequence because the pattern is similar to Bush's efforts on the home front to promote a theocracy. Scary thought.

See other cartoons by Clay Bennet.

More Proof for Intelligent Design

Tom Toles

Supporting Bush In Idaho

Boing Boing posted this photo of 73-year-old veteran, Bill Moyer, protecting himself from more Bush bullshit in Idaho. Marvelous.

(AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

Lafayette, CA - Vigil

Photo by Colette Swim-Headley, Walnut Creek, California
Click photo to enlarge.

Pattern Recognition

The critical pattern here is that every poll tracked in Professor Thiel's graph now show's Bush's approval rating below 50%. And they have remained that way for several months.

Obliviously On He Pedals

Maureen Dowd has a good piece in today's New York Times entitled Biking Toward Nowhere.

As W.'s neighbors get in scraps with the antiwar forces coalescing around the ranch; as the Pentagon tries to rustle up updated armor for our soldiers, who are still sitting ducks in the third year of the war; as the Iraqi police we train keep getting blown up by terrorists, who come right back every time U.S. troops beat them up; as Shiites working on the Iraqi constitution conspire with Iran about turning Iraq into an Islamic state that represses women; and as Iraq hurtles toward a possible civil war, W. seems far more oblivious than his father was with his Persian Gulf crisis.

This president is in a truly scary place in Iraq. Americans can't get out, or they risk turning the country into a terrorist haven that will make the old Afghanistan look like Cipriani's. Yet his war, which has not accomplished any of its purposes, swallows ever more American lives and inflames ever more Muslim hearts as W. reads a book about the history of salt and looks forward to his biking date with Lance Armstrong on Saturday.

The son wanted to go into Iraq to best his daddy in the history books, by finishing what Bush senior started. He swept aside the warnings of Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell and didn't bother to ask his father's advice. Now he is caught in the very trap his father said he feared: that America would get bogged down as 'an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land,' facing a possibly 'barren' outcome.

It turns out that the people of Iraq have ethnic and religious identities, not a national identity. Shiites and Kurds want to suppress the Sunnis who once repressed them and break off into their own states, smashing the Bush model kitchen of democracy.

(snip)

The president's pedaling as fast as he can, but he's going nowhere.

Intelligent Design?

Here is Katrina vanden Heuvel over at The Huffington Post on Bush's support for giving equal standing to "intelligent design" in public school science classes.

But what we do know is that when it comes to intelligence and the designing of it, the Bush administration is not to be trusted. Its slam dunk evidence on Iraqi WMD was a concoction of deliberate lies and false hopes. Its democratic designs on the Middle East are bleeding to death in the sands of the Sunni Triangle. And its theory that we fight the terrorists 'over there' so they won't attack us 'over here' is small comfort to the victims in Madrid and London.

We don't need more God in science. We need more intelligence in the White House. Because the majority of Americans have lost faith in this president.

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Juan Cole has written a wonderfully concise history showing how the chickens have come home to roost for American foreign policy (mis)adventurism that started under Ronald Reagan.

He starts with the Reagan support for the radical Muslim Mujahidin in Afghanistan and connects the dots on the blowback resulting from a series of unfortunate policy decisions. These decsions often sidestepped Congress and included engaging Saudi Arabia for support first to arm the Contras and then to fund the Pakistani generals, the Mujahidin (including Osama Bin Laden)who were called "freedom fighters" by Reagan and, of course the self same "radical extremists" on whom the Bush Administration has recently focused its rhetoric.

In 1998, al-Qaeda and al-Jihad al-Islami, two small terrorist groups established in Afghanistan as a result of the Reagan jihad, declared war on the United States and Israel (the "Zionists and Crusaders"). After attacks by al-Qaeda cells on US embassies in East Africa and on the USS Cole, nineteen of them ultimately used jet planes to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The Bush administration responded to these attacks by the former proteges of Ronald Reagan by putting the old Mujahideen warlords back in charge of Afghanistan's provinces, allowing Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to escape, declaring that Americans no longer needed a Bill of Rights, and suddenly invading another old Reagan protege, Saddam's Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the US. The name given this bizarre set of actions by Bush was "the War on Terror."

In Iraq, the US committed many atrocities, including bombing campaigns on civilian quarters of cities it had already occupied, and a ferocious assault on Fallujah, and tortured Iraqi prisoners.

In the meantime, the Bush administration put virtually no money or effort into actually combatting terrorist cells in places like Morocco, as opposed to putting $200 billion into the Iraq war and aftermath. As a result, a string of terrorist attacks were allowed to strike at Madrid, London and elsewhere.

Cole also describes how "the Christian Right adopted the Mujahideen as their favorite project." You can read more about this history in Afghanistan in "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile.

This is really good stuff.