Words are tools, which may be misused. You can’t run an organization without words. Corporations spend lots of money trying to find convincing mission statements, and so do politicians. The US of A faces many serious problems- problems without easy solutions. We see words posing as solutions- the FDA was quick to appoint a czar for safety of imported foods this spring, but it turned out that the czar had no budget, i.e. he was a symbolic gesture.
Their minders tell politicians “Whatever you do, don’t make important people or interest groups mad”. Speaker Lousy has some good points, not limited to the fact that she’s our first female Speaker. She avoids decisive action until its success has been established by multiple polls and focus groups. She speaks often about the Iraq fiasco, Congressional corruption, etc but ventures nothing. David Betray.US is a studious fellow, much admired by reporters, legislators, etc. They say that he's another U.S. Grant. He stepped up to the plate with an important Washington Post Op-Ed on September 26, 2004 telling the public that things were looking up in Iraq, helping his patron win the 2004 Presidential election.
Quoting Ron Paul, “Saddam Hussein has been removed. The elected Iraqi government meets with US approval. The only weapon of mass destruction in Iraq is our military presence. Why are we still over there? Conventional wisdom dictates that when the ‘mission is accomplished’, the victor goes home.
They claim progress is being made and that we are fighting a winnable war, but this is not realistic. We can't be sure when we kill someone if they were truly an insurgent or an innocent Iraqi civilian. The anger we incite by killing innocents creates more new insurgents than our bullets can keep up with. There are no measurable goals to be achieved at this point.
The best congressional leadership can offer is the concept of strategic redeployment, or moving our troops around, possibly into Saudi Arabia or even... Iran. Rather than ending this war, we might start another one.”
Speaker Lousy won't or can't stand up to President on Iraq; she also blocked resolutions against enlarging the war and attacking Iran when she got the word from her minders. Why is our governing elite afraid of Iran? Iran’s President is a histrionic buffoon, but Iran is surrounded by U.S. military bases and by a much more numerous Sunni world that hates Shi'ites far more than it hates Westerners.
Where is the threat to the United States? Iran poses some threat to Israel, but their clumsy military, nuclear development program, and stumbling public diplomacy pose no threat to the US. No, the threat to the United States comes from two sources. First, the "Iran is the new Nazi Germany" propaganda pushed by Israel and the American citizen Israel-firsters, and, second, continuing failure of the U.S. Congress to address true national-security issues of energy, borders, and immigration. Iran threatens us economically because it could disrupt oil production in Saudi Arabia's Eastern province. Such an Iranian effort might be a causus belli for the United States because our Congress has done nothing other than advance Daylight Savings Time by three weeks since the Saudi-led embargoes of the 1970s.
Iran's government, its Revolutionary Guard Corps, or their Lebanese semi-surrogate Hezbollah won’t launch terrorist attacks in the United States. They would pay dearly for a first strike. However, they have operatives and infrastructure in place in North America that might respond to a U.S. or Israeli first strike on Iran. Such a response could hurt America because U.S. law enforcement knows little of the size, intentions, capabilities, and targets of potential Iranian attackers.
Lousy and CAVEMAN REID don’t want war with Iran; Betray.US probably doesn’t either. Our Democratic leaders talk about “forcing the President to come up with a redeployment pan”. Forcing a cowboy who thinks it’s cool to brag about “We’re kicking butt in Iraq” to devise a plan? What if his plan is to attack Iran and/or Syria? Most career military officials understand our ineptitude for guerrilla wars (our actions speak louder than the noble words of the COIN manual) and the low benefit/high pain result of attacking Iran. Indeed, how can it help us or Israel to increase economic misery in yet another Muslim state? These paragraphs borrow from a recent essay by Michael Scheuer, www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=11559
Diagnosis : fanatical president, disengaged Congress, failed political system. What to do? Go back to 1960. Kennedy eked out a narrow victory over Nixon in 1960, perhaps by voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. Mayor Daly said that the Republicans stole an equal number of votes, but the evidence for Democratic fraud is more persuasive. Kennedy became much more popular after his assassination. LBJ won a landslide victory in 1964, partly on good will toward the assassinated president, partly on the clumsy campaign waged by Goldwater forces and partly on fear of war, which the Democrats used skillfully even as they were upping the ante in Vietnam. I was drafted in September, 1964. White House tapes show that LBJ knew that the war was going to be very tough. He felt that he had to act tough, in part because he knew that he had lost the South by his civil rights policy. His fear of antagonizing the South led him to insure that the Mississippi Freedom delegates, including Fannie Lou Hamer, were not seated at the 1964 Atlantic City convention. There was some logic to Johnson’s thinking but his decision had fateful consequences for later conventions. Party activists made sure that this couldn’t happen again.
A social cataclysm jolted America in the 60s- equal rights for women and minorities, exaltation of a popular culture that often used the lingo of the Black Panthers, no this was not widely accepted, but it was prominent in the media- think of Leonard Bernstein’s’ famous fund-raising party for the Black Panthers. We had the agonies of My Lai, the Kennedy and King assassinations, and the disastrous 1968 Chicago democratic convention. The 1972 Miami Beach democratic convention with its blue jeans, long hair, dashikis and Afros, scared the hell out of white America, including my parents. McGovern’s campaign went into the ditch- VP Eagleton had to quit when his mental hospital record came out, large sections of the Democratic establishment including most of the Labor movement defected to the republicans. McGovern won only one state, Massachusetts. Most Americans told pollsters that the Vietnam War was a big mistake, but the antiwar movement, Jane Fonda and her visit to Hanoi and the counterculture were hated even more than a President who was widely known as “Tricky Dick”.
So the centrist Democratic Party purged McGovern and his movement. Jimmy Carter was more conservative on domestic policy than Nixon- Carter would not have won without Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. Clinton, McGovern campaign leader in Texas, triangulator and democratic centrist par excellence, would not have won in 1992 without Ross Perot who took mostly republican votes. McGovern spoke against the Democratic Leadership Council in 1991 in words that bear repeating, “We need a conservative party in the United States, but with all due respects to the Democratic Leadership Conference, we don’t need two conservative parties.”
Why do so many Americans stick with Bush and his surge? Most Americans oppose the war, as they did in 1972. Supporters of the war and the surge are a minority but a well-organized minority. Dan Froomkin’s Friday column, “Bush Wins Again” points out that Bush should be backed into a corner, that less than half of Americans believe that the Petraeus report will be truthful, and yet, “unless those quavering Dems suddenly grow some spine, it looks like there won't even be any serious debate in Washington about withdrawal until next spring or so.”
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html
Bush and Cheney smirk about their strategy of using contractors and avoiding the draft, which stirred up so much protest in the Vietnam era. Contractors are chosen for political loyalty and not competence, they are poorly supervised and they are costing us a fortune. If Bush/Petraeus throws a bone to Congress by bringing home 3-4,000 soldiers, what’s to prevent him from hiring 10,000 mercenaries and stepping up the air war? Nada.
So what does it take to get the American public up in arms? We had one example this year, where the phone calls swamped and temporarily shut down the Capitol Hill switchboard. Angry Americans were calling and demanding that something be done about immigration and that illegal aliens get no easy way out.
Americans are constantly told “We’re number one” and that Middle East problems are all the fault of “Islamofascists”. Don’t blame them if they can’t separate truth and falsehood about the Middle East- this is not simple. However, they see ever increasing credit card debt, the disappearance of pensions, the dilution of healthcare. So who do they blame? They blame both the politicians and the illegal immigrants. They see their own economic status slipping. Democratic candidates have consistently failed to stress the link between insane levels of military spending and the disappearance of a safety net for “little people”. Can’t afford health care- well, just declare bankruptcy. We need some good songs of resistance to the military industrial complex and its endless war. Our government spends more than they did in Vietnam, after correction for inflation- talk tough Democratic centrists don’t mention excessive military spending because they might have to demand reduced military spending. But they can’t- that would make them soft on defense, according to the DLC, Terry McAuliffe and Harold Ford.
People are insisting that the federal reserve open the money spigot- “it’s free money”- when times are hard, that Apple pay them if it cuts prices on the overpriced iPhone- Americans want free money. We need leaders who tell us the truth. There is no free money, it costs money to solve problems and we must cut military spending. When the government gives you more services without revenue, it is stealing from your grandchildren. Bush wants to keep borrowing billions for this war, borrowing from China. That makes no sense.
General Westmoreland cooked the intelligence in Vietnam. General Petraeus does the same today- sectarian violence has dropped, because they don’t count truck bombings. Maybe Westmoreland believed that he had to cook the books, and maybe Petraeus is sincere, but we need leaders who say, no more, stop the hemorrhage and save the country. Bringing home a few troops and adding more contractors is good for KBR and Bechtel, but it’s not good for the country.
Call Reid and Nancy B at (202) 224-3542 and (202) 225-4965. You can leave a message over the weekend. Be firm but don’t swear. I also called our two Senators and urged Barbara Boxer to filibuster any money for Iraq- “It only takes 41 Senators. Do you have the guts to stop an attack on Iran? Do you want to keep passing ammunition to a serial killer?” Eugene McCarthy and Howard Dean had the guts to oppose war and conventional wisdom. There must be some in Congress ready to take up their cause.
Things may improve in Iran. Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani was just elected to lead the Assembly of Experts, a group of senior clerics who advise the nation's supreme leader and choose his successor. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani in the 2005 Presidential election, an election that my Iranian friends likened to the famous Louisiana election when voters were urged to “Vote for the crook, it’s important”, i.e. Edwin Edwards, against “the fanatic” David Duke. www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=105001969 Rafsanjani was the reliable crook. Iranians choose the fanatic but they may be having second thoughts. Don’t feel too superior- look at the fraud in our 1960, 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections.