Fatal Touch

Over at the New York Review of Books Joan Didion produces a chilling portrait of Dick Cheney:

In the early summer of 2000, flying home with his daughter Mary from a hunting trip, Cheney, then five years into his job at Halliburton, a period for which he had collected $44 million (plus deferments and stock options) and during which the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root had billed the United States $2 billion for services in Bosnia and Kosovo, told Mary that Joe Allbaugh, the national campaign manager of Bush's 2000 campaign, had asked him to consider being Bush's running mate. In July 2000, after conducting a search for another candidate and detailing the reasons why he himself would be a bad choice ('Knowing my dad, I'm sure he didn't hold anything back as he laid out the disadvantages of selecting him as the nominee'), in other words assuring himself carte blanche, Cheney agreed to join the ticket.

In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael D. ('Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job') Brown. In December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, 'a unique company,' according to its Web site, 'that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq.'

This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun.

Thanks For the War

Click to enlarge

Clay Bennett

WTF?

Click to enlarge

Hard to believe.

Meet Richard Pombo!

Click to Squeeze My Cheeks.

Click to enlarge

Now go to Left On 580!

"We Should Have Learned"

Here's Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, the CIA Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in Harper's:

The main reason for our failure in Iraq was not looking at the “morning after.” It was obvious that the military campaign would succeed, but there was also an ideological view among some administration officials that we would be received as liberators. Those people did not understand that just because the Iraqis hated Saddam, that didn't mean they would like our occupation.

Iraq was more complex than just Saddam. We should have learned from the experience of the British in the 1920s, when modern Iraq was created—namely, that bringing in outside leaders would not work. People expressed views about the need to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq, about the potential for sectarian violence and the rise of militias, about the fact that the Shiites would want to rise politically. These were not minority views in the intelligence community, but the administration ended up listening to other voices. The focus was on invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam, and after that everything would be fine and dandy.

Tip of the hat to Laura Rozen at War and Piece.

Pombo: Have You Had Enough?

Click here to see "Have You Had Enough?"

Vote for Jerry McNerney!

Thanks to Crooks and Liars and Act Blue.

Our Precious Bodily Fluids

Click to enlarge
by Michael Hanson

Rumsfeld: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.

Rumsfeld: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 100 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. Or to Generals. Neither have the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow terrorist infiltration, terrorist indoctrination, terrorist subversion and the international terrorist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Labor Day Cookout

Click to enlarge
Clay Bennett

Whack-A-Mole

On August 30, 2006, ABC News reported:

The security clampdown in Baghdad may be working, as August brought violent deaths to their lowest level this year.

The Baghdad morgue reports 360 deaths compared with 995 a year ago, and much lower than in previous months (more than 1,000 deaths were reported on average from January through July). July was particularly violent, with 1,855 deaths.

On September 6, 2006, ABC News reported:

It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. Now, we’re depressingly used to hearing about deaths here, so much so that the numbers can be numbing. But this means that a much-publicized drop-off in violence in August – heralded by both the Iraqi government and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working -- apparently didn’t exist.

Operation Together Forward, the main thrust of the new strategy, involves establishing pockets of security in select neighborhoods and then slowly adding more. These latest numbers add substance to fears Together Forward creates a whack-a-mole effect: that is, secure one area and the violence will pop up somewhere else. Violent deaths now appear roughly in line with the earlier trend: 1855 in July and 1595 in June.

Lies My President Told Me

Here is the text of Bush's Address to the American Legion National Convention in Salt Lake City.

And here are three rather glaring inaccuracies from that speech.

"We're in a war we didn't ask for, but it's a war we must wage, and a war we will win." Well, not quite. Perhaps we did not ask for the war with Afghanistan but the Iraq War has been the neo-con wet dream for years.

"Democracies don't attack each other or threaten the peace." Hmmmm. Do you think that Bush could name the democracies in the Middle East? Do you think he knows which two were at war in July and August?

"But we should all agree that the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We will not allow the terrorists to dictate the future of this century -- so we will defeat them in Iraq." Wow, if we really believed we were in the ideological struggle of the 21st century, maybe we shouldn't have adopted the Rumsfeld strategy of "just enough troops to lose."

Thanks to John Hickman and his thoughtful OP-ED analysis of Bush's address and reality in the Middle East.

"A Long Habit of Painting its Enemies 10 Feet Tall—and Crazy"

Fareed Zakaria explains how the Bush administration helps Iran's Ahmadinejad seem more powerful than he really is.

One man who is greatly enjoying being the subject of this outsize portraiture is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has gone from being an obscure and not-so-powerful politician—Iran is a theocracy, remember, so the mullahs are ultimately in control—to a central player in the Middle East simply by goading the United States and watching Washington take the bait. By turning him into enemy No. 1, by reacting to every outlandish statement he makes, the Bush administration has given him far more attention than he deserves. And so now he writes letters to Bush, offers to debate him and prances about in the global spotlight provided by American attention.

Ahmadinejad strikes me as less a messianic madman and more a radical populist, an Iranian Huey Long. He has outflanked the mullahs on the right on nuclear policy, pushing for a more confrontationist approach toward Washington. He has outflanked them on the left on women's rights, arguing against some of the prohibitions women face. (He wants them to be able to attend soccer matches.) Almost every week he announces a new program to 'help the poor.' He uses the nuclear issue because it gives him a great nationalist symbol. For a regime with little to show after a quarter century in power—Iranian standards of living have actually declined since the revolution—nuclear power is a national accomplishment.

Extra facts you won't learn from President Cheney:

The Pentagon's budget this year is more than double Iran's total gross domestic product ($181 billion, in official exchange-rate terms). America's annual defense outlay is more than 100 times Iran's.