JONATHAN RAUCH: Right Vote. Wrong President.

"I was wrong. Like most Americans, I have long since come to believe that the Iraq war was a strategic mistake -- with luck. (Without luck, it will be a strategic calamity.) But let me also say what I was wrong about."


By Jonathan Rauch
National Journal

Five years ago, Congress and President Bush made the most consequential and, as now seems more likely than not, unfortunate decision of this country's still young century. On October 16, 2002, Bush signed a resolution authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Should war supporters apologize?

Democrats certainly think so. In the five years since then, many of them have said "I told you so" -- many more, in fact, than told us so. In a recent paper, Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California (San Diego), unearthed figures suggesting that some Democrats have edited their memories. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 46 percent of them favored the war, according to an average of a dozen surveys. In 2006, only 21 percent of them said they had favored the war. Hmm. Do the math.

Those 25 percent of Democrats who were for the war until they had always been against it were probably not dissembling. They were just being human. "Memory is a self-justifying historian," says Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and a co-author (with Elliot Aronson) of the recent book Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. "Our memories are a better indication of what we believe and how we see ourselves today than of what actually happened."

I believe her, because I was not above a little memory repair myself. Recently, after a book review of mine appeared in The Washington Post, an angry reader wrote, "It will come as no surprise that Rauch was an advocate of invading Iraq." Who, me? I recalled myself as an agonized fence-sitter, more anti-anti-war than pro-war (an important distinction, you understand), maybe marginally in favor but more worried than convinced.

Just double-checking, I reread my columns from the period and promptly found one, from February 2004, in which I described myself as an, er, "advocate of the war." Gee. Imagine that.

So let me say for the record: I was wrong. Like most Americans, I have long since come to believe that the Iraq war was a strategic mistake -- with luck. (Without luck, it will be a strategic calamity.) But let me also say what I was wrong about.

In that February 2004 article, I called the war a "justified mistake." When a cop shoots a robber who has murdered in the past and who brandishes what looks like a gun, we blame the robber, not the cop -- even if it turns out that the robber was brandishing a toy or a cellphone. The robber was asking for it, and so was Saddam Hussein.

That answer, although still reasonable, no longer seems as convincing. Since 2004, it has become clearer that the Bush administration's prewar hype portrayed the intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction as solider and starker than it really was. Not enough people, including people in the media, asked enough hard questions. I should have been more skeptical of the WMD hard sell. That was mistake No. 1.

Mistake No. 2 was forgetting the difference between experts and poseurs. Over the past few years, it has become clearer that the hazards of the U.S. occupation of Iraq were not unforeseeable. In fact, quite a few people foresaw them. And warned about them. And went unheeded. Partly that was because the Bush administration wasn't interested, but partly it was because a lot of us in the media gave a lot of ink and airtime to pontificators who had never been to Iraq, who had never fought in a war or served in an embassy or worked on a reconstruction team, and who did not know Iraq's language, culture, people, leaders, history, or region. Other than that, they were experts.

In 2002 and 2003, of course, there was no way of knowing which of countless forecasts and opinions would prove correct. The experts were divided; sometimes fresh-eyed amateurs see what jaded experts miss; the previous U.S. Iraq policy was no big success. All true. Still, the fact that so many of the war's sturdiest proponents were journalists and pundits -- in other words, hacks, like me -- should have rung more alarm bells. That was mistake No. 2.

Those, however, were small mistakes compared with the fundamental one. It was not, really, a mistake about the war at all. It was a mistake about the president.

Fool me twice, shame on me. In 1990, I was fooled once. In the prelude to the Persian Gulf War, I misjudged President George H.W. Bush. In those days, America's most resounding recent military triumphs had been against the Lilliputian forces of Panama and Grenada, against which weighed the 1975 defeat in Vietnam, the 1980 fiasco of Desert One (President Carter's failed hostage-rescue attempt in Iran), and the 1983 humiliation in Lebanon (where U.S. forces turned tail after losing more than 200 marines to a Hezbollah truck bomb). Saddam Hussein's forces looked formidable and well entrenched in 1990. The sandstorms looked forbidding. And President George H.W. Bush looked hapless. I opposed the war.

The U.S. military proved virtuosic, the Iraqi military proved worthless, the desert proved tractable, and, much the most important, the elder Bush proved dazzling. He marshaled an unprecedented coalition. He won decisively in hours. He quit while he was ahead. He even got other countries to pay. He should not have stood by as Saddam savagely put down postwar rebellions; but otherwise his performance was masterly, not least in its realism and restraint.

As I came to the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Another Bush was president, and the younger one looked as decisive as his father had once seemed dotty. This, after all, was the George W. Bush who had impressively rallied the nation and the world after September 11.

His foreign-policy team looked easily the equal of his father's, or anybody's. Vice President Cheney was the wise man of Washington and the elder Bush's successful defense secretary. Secretary of State Colin Powell was the magisterial architect of the Gulf War. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the man whose plan had worked like a charm in Afghanistan. If Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was not the equal of her 1990 predecessor, Brent Scowcroft, she was no lightweight. Surely if any war Cabinet could inspire confidence, this was it.

Wrong again. Zero for two.

George W. Bush had more than his share of bad luck in Iraq. He bet that Saddam would have an active nuclear or at least biological-weapons program; that Iraq's social and physical infrastructure would be functional; that the war would be short. None of those bets was crazy, but he lost all three.

Still, a good gambler never bets more than he can afford to lose; he scrubs the odds with a sharp eye on the worst case; he hedges to give himself options. Above all, he keeps abreast of the game.

Bush placed too large a bet, padded the odds, and didn't hedge. Worst of all, he never caught up with the state of play. Again and again, he and his team were too slow in understanding and reacting to events, if they reacted at all. They were late to react to wholesale looting; late to understand the scale of the effort and to commit sufficient forces (arguably they still haven't); late to recognize they confronted an insurgency and to fight it with proven counterinsurgency tactics; late to recognize the emergence of a Shiite-Sunni civil war. Today, almost five years on, they are still behind the curve: As Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., plausibly argues, Bush clings to an insistence on a strong central government in Baghdad, despite that strategy's failure and signs that regionalism would work better.

Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln.

Judging presidents' wartime performance before the war starts is hard. No one could have known in 1860 that Lincoln, a lawyer and military novice, would develop into a commander-in-chief of genius. As lessons go, "Don't misjudge the president before committing to a war" is roughly as useful as "Buy low, sell high."

It does, however, provide some insight into the key mistake of five years ago. In February, asked for the umpteenth time to recant her war vote, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., for the umpteenth time refused. "The mistakes were made by the president," she said. In 2004, she said, "I do not regret giving the president authority. ... What I regret is the way the president used the authority."

She had a fair point. She might have sharpened it by saying what I have come to say: I do not regret giving the president authority; I regret giving this president authority. I am sorry. I made a mistake five years ago. But not about the vote. About the leader.

PAUL LOEB: Pre-Empting an Iran War--Make Congress Take a Stand

"The campaign against a new Iranian war doesn’t even have to demand agreement on Iran policy at all. It just has to reassert the right of Congress to be the final arbiter of whether or not we go to war." 



By Paul Rogat Loeb

With the Senate embracing the reckless Kyl-Lieberman amendment, we’ve moved one step closer to attacking Iran. But there’s still time for Congress to assert itself against yet another needless war with massive destructive potential. By defining Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, a core branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization, Kyl-Lieberman put the U.S. Senate on record as vindicating the Bush-Cheney line that Iranian proxies are part of a global conspiracy, linking Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hamas, Hezbollah, and any other enemy the administration wants to list. The bill now makes it far easier for Bush to manufacture some Tonkin Gulf-style excuse, then use it to justify an attack. No wonder Senator Jim Webb called it Cheney’s fondest pipe dream.

But this vote also gives opponents of this astonishingly reckless path a chance to push back, and draw a line against a unilateral war. Last March, Senator Webb introduced Senate Bill 759, to prohibit military action against Iran without explicit Senate approval. The Foreign Relations Committee has bottled up Webb’s bill so far, but he’s working to move it to the floor, and although it’s not perfect (it does make an exception for “activities to directly thwart an imminent attack” that could be manipulated through false intelligence reports), it would still make a preemptive attack significantly harder. When the Senators voted for Kyl-Lieberman, most claimed, with echoes of Iraq, that they really weren’t giving Bush permission to go to war. Webb’s bill gives them a chance to back up their rationalizations with their votes.

This past July, Colorado Congressman Mark Udall introduced a companion measure, House Resolution 3119, with identical language. I’m suggesting they both go even further, to include a pledge to initiate or support impeachment proceedings if Bush initiated such an attack without explicit Congressional authorization. In the House, such a resolution wouldn’t even need Senate ratification (or overcoming a Republican filibuster or Bush veto), since the House can initiate impeachment proceedings on its own. While such a line-drawing Senate bill could be vetoed or filibustered, it can still assert a fundamental constitutional prerogative, with a commitment to follow through if Bush violated it.

You might see Lieberman-Kyl as an indication that bipartisan jingoism against Iran has reached such a fever pitch that none of this could happen. But if they hear from their angry grassroots base, the 28 Democratic Senators who voted for it just might start looking for a way to cover themselves politically, and distance themselves from the Bush-Cheney doctrine of reckless preemptive wars. Even co-sponsor Jon Kyl claimed “this is not intended to be an authorization of military force against Iran.” So with enough popular pressure, even Senators who just capitulated might turn and vote for a pre-emptive resolution reasserting that Bush is not the sole decider.

Not all the Democrats supported the Kyl-Lieberman, of course. Although those shamefully backing it included Hillary Clinton and much of the Democratic leadership, John Edwards blasted her for her stand, and Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson all opposed the bill (though Obama missed the vote when Reid scheduled it earlier than he’d previously indicated while Obama was stuck campaigning in New Hampshire). So did newly elected Democratic Senators Jim Webb, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, Claire McCaskill, Amy Klobacher, and Bernie Sanders, and Republicans Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. But the majority got stampeded once again.

Convincing them to switch course and reassert their right to make such a fundamental decision as whether to go to war with Iran will require a major popular outcry: petitions--from groups like MoveOn, TrueMajority, Working Assets, and Democracy for America--that aren’t just mailed in, but publicly delivered by the basket. It means marches, rallies and endless phone calls and visits to Congressional offices. It probably means people sitting in some of these same offices (and I bet similar efforts around Iraq convinced my own Senator, Washington State’s Maria Cantwell, to vote the right way in this case). We can say these kinds of efforts have so far failed to halt the Iraq war, but they’ve certainly fed the Congressional resistance, and it’s always easier to stop wars before they start. We’re also demanding a far more modest initial goal of Congress and the Senate simply reaffirming their constitutional right to make fundamental war-and-peace decisions in the first place. So it should be an easier sell.

It seems inconceivable that the Bush administration could even contemplate a military attack, given the massive global backlash it would create. But this administration is intoxicated by its own illusions, so we’d be wise to heed those, like Seymour Hersh, Daniel Ellsberg, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who warn that an attack is likely. Working to stop it doesn’t mean sugarcoating Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s more questionable proclamations, though as University of San Francisco Middle East expert Stephen Zunes has pointed out, even some of those are (or have been) misstated. Ahmadinejad’s oft-quoted threat to “wipe Israel off the map” was in fact a mistranslation of a 20-year-old quote by Ayatollah Khomeini, and Ahmadinejad explicitly told a group of American religious leaders that it was “not Iran’s intention to destroy Israel.” We can point out that Iran’s fundamental decisions on foreign affairs get made not by Ahmadinejad, but by the far more cautious Council of Guardians. And we can suggest that those itching to attack try viewing the world through the lens of the Iranians, who remember, as we do not, that we’ve already once overthrown an elected government of that country, in the 1953 CIA coup that deposed elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in favor of the brutal Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Ahmadinejad might not even have been elected to office had Bush not rejected a major 2003 initiative by Ahmadinejad’s reformist predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, that included accepting peace with Israel and tighter nuclear inspections, and backing off from supporting Hezbollah.

But the campaign against a new Iranian war doesn’t even have to demand agreement on Iran policy at all. It just has to reassert the right of Congress to be the final arbiter of whether or not we go to war. For all their cravenness in the face of Bush’s demands, I doubt that most Senators would launch into attacking Iran while we continue to be mired down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pushing for a resolution asserting Congressional rights would provide a concrete focus for those of us working to stop such a war, while placing Congressional Representatives, Senators, and Presidential candidates explicitly on record about whether to grant Bush the power to take this immensely reckless action. The voters could then respond to those unwilling to sign such a pledge.

Kyl-Lieberman is unquestionably a setback, giving Bush and Cheney still more latitude in proceeding toward global conflagration. But the now-more-likely war we’re trying to stop is not inevitable. It’s still up to us and the pressure we can create to stop it before it starts. Demanding Congress go on record about who decides would be a critical step.


Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the No. 3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

PAUL LOEB: Edwards-Obama: Go Edwama

By Paul Rogat Loeb

Barack Obama and John Edwards are competing against each other, including some recent sniping. But more than anything, both are trying to stop Hillary Clinton's momentum, and erode her lead in the polls. Suppose each pledged to focus between now and the primaries on their commonalities, and on their real differences with Clinton's priorities and stands. Even more audaciously, what if each pledged to offer the Vice Presidency to the other if they won? This just might be enough to shift the election.

Personally, I'm backing Edwards because of all the leading candidates, I think he's taken the most courageous recent stands on issues from trade and the Iraq war to global warming and domestic and global poverty. But when young voters get excited about Obama, or I see his vast numbers of grassroots donors, I get excited about the possibility that he might bring a new generation into politics, and combine his undeniable charisma with a vision of justice. When I see someone wearing an Obama T-shirt, my spirits lift. Even though I'm backing Edwards, I feel a sense of kindred cause. I've actually gotten a similar sense of shared hopes in conversations with supporters of both Obama and Edwards. And when I suggest the two running as a team, people respond with excitement. They see them together as powerful standard-bearers.

But for now at least, Obama and Edwards are dividing the bulk of the opposition to Clinton, which makes it far more likely that she'll become the nominee. That's a bad outcome for two key reasons: Clinton is likely to so mobilize the Republican base and demoralize many Democrats (particularly that broad section of the base that's angry about the war) as to jeopardize not only her election, but also other Democrats running for state and federal offices throughout the country. In a recent Pew poll, she had both higher unfavorable and lower favorable ratings than either Obama or Edwards. In a July Fox poll (of citizens, not Fox viewers), 29% of voters (including 27% of Independents and 5% of Democrats) said they would "never vote for her under any circumstances," compared to just 6% overall saying the same about Obama, and less than 1% about Edwards.

Yet even if Clinton does prevail, there's a good chance that she'll be led less by principle than by her own desire for power, as witnessed by her refusal to apologize for her Iraq War vote (and her resistance of any withdrawal timeline until just recently), her support of the recent Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opens a door to war with Iran, and an initial health care proposal so cumbersome and compromised it collapsed of its own weight (with a little help from the insurance and drug companies). Not to mention her mixed record of votes on the highly regressive bankruptcy bill, her cozying up to Rupert Murdoch, and her sitting on the Wal-Mart board for years. Clinton also spent $36 million last November, the most in the country, on a Senate campaign she could have won in her pajamas, while Democratic candidates were desperately scrambling for cash that she could have transferred, and while both Edwards and Obama were pointedly not raising money for their own campaigns, just for others.

But the reasons to choose Edwards/Obama or Obama/Edwards aren't just about an aversion to Clinton, but about the possibilities of shifting American politics. Both campaigns are anchored in genuine grassroots energy, as opposed to wealthy donors and Beltway consultants. Both offer the chance to draw new citizens into politics, for a vision that breaks from the automatic deferral to corporate interests characteristic not only of the Bush and Reagan administrations, but of many of Bill Clinton's policies as well. Where Hillary Clinton abdicated chance after chance to lead the opposition to Bush's destructive initiatives (especially before Bush's polls began to plummet), both Edwards and Obama have repeatedly spoken out (though I wish Obama had more so of late) and worked to rally citizens against them.

Edwards/Obama or Obama/Edwards would draw--in the campaign, and, I believe, in the White House--on Obama's years as a community organizer and experience living abroad and crossing every conceivable cultural line. And on Edwards's gut knowledge of what it means to grow up poor, his willingness to successfully take on some of the biggest corporations in America, and his years since 2004 in traveling the country and listening on issues of poverty. Plus they have eight years of combined Senate experience, most importantly in the degree to which both of them have traveled across the country and genuinely listened to the concerns and struggles of ordinary Americans. Compared to the Republican field, their combined strengths will represent a powerful and hopeful choice.

Clinton is leading right now, through name recognition, sympathetic national media, and nostalgia for the years when we didn't have Bush in the White House, not to mention a tightly controlled campaign that avoids controversial stands. Most Democrats still favor other candidates, but that majority is fragmented, making it hard for any individual candidate to get traction.

For Edwards and Obama to join together would radically change that dynamic. It would let them speak in a common voice, and talk about how much Clinton's vision has been shaped by the pay-to-play nature of Washington's conventional politics. It would allow them to raise the real issues that we face, more fiercely than before. It would let them talk about the kind of administration they could create together.

How could this ticket come to pass? By their talking with each other, to be sure, but also maybe by enough ordinary citizens embracing the idea. I think it's time to initiate a Draft Edwama online petition to begin a groundswell. Perhaps local activists in both their campaigns need to start a dialogue with each other. And maybe, just maybe, the two candidates will sense the potential, begin the conversations themselves, and in the process change the dynamics of this election.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

OPINION: Simplifying the Complexities of Iraq

By Donald Kaul
Via Minutemanmedia.org

You have questions about the war in Iraq? I have answers. These:

Q---Is the surge working or not?

A---Yes and no. When we flood an area with troops, things get a lot quieter. When we leave, those fun-loving Iraqis start: 1) Beheading each other and 2) Blowing each other up. There is no evidence that the surge has or will have a lasting effect.

Q---You don’t think the national government will ever be able to get control of the country, then?

A---Before you have a national government, you need a nation. Iraq ain’t.

Q---What about the documented successes in Anbar province, where tribal leaders have joined American forces in driving out elements of al Qaida?

A---That’s been a good thing, but don’t expect to repeat it elsewhere. Anbar is a largely Sunni area and tribal leaders made common cause with the United States because al Qaida was being positively beastly to them. That doesn’t mean they love us or will ever be able to get a square deal from the Shia-dominated central (ha-ha) government.

Q---Is the partitioning of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sectors the answer then?

A---It’s an answer; whether it’s the right answer remains to be seen. A partitioned Iraq doesn’t address questions of equal access to oil revenues, areas like Baghdad that can’t be neatly partitioned or the specter of a civil war that could draw in Syria, Iran and Turkey, among others. (Even Saudi Arabia has promised to come to the aid of Iraqi Sunnis if they are mistreated, although the next war Saudi Arabia shows up for will be the first). If you want a religious war to engulf the Middle East, partition might be the way to go.

Q---If things are as bad as you say, why did General David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, agree to withdraw the 30,000 surge troops by next summer?

A---He had no choice. Our army is close to being broken. It cannot sustain the surge any longer than next summer, no matter what the situation. In addition, the public clamor for withdrawal is growing daily and Gen. Petraeus had to make it seem as though President Bush’s Iraq strategy had a chance to succeed.

Q---Are you suggesting that Gen. Petraeus is a political general, one who crafts his military advice to fit the president’s wishes?

A---Heavens to Betsy, no. The man is a saint, a regular George Washington. He would never let politics influence his advice on the war. I would point out, however, that generals who give President Bush advice that contradicts his fantasy life---Shinseki, Abizaid, others---are soon colored gone.

Q---What about the Pottery Barn theory---“If you break it, you own it?” Don’t we have an obligation to the Iraqi people to bring some semblance of order and justice into their lives?

A---Yes, we do and in areas where we’ve gotten the cooperation of the population, we’ve done pretty well by them. But we haven’t been able to keep Iraqis from killing each other in much of the rest of the country. Nor do we know how to do it now. We have an obligation to the Iraqis but we also have one to the thousands of American troops we’re sacrificing to this futile exercise and to their families.

Q---What’s the best course of action, then?

A---The difficult truth is that there is no best course; all courses are bad. Certainly, an endless occupation doesn’t seem to be the answer. Abandoning the Iraqis to genocidal warfare is hardly more appealing. The name of the game being played in Washington right now is a contest between Republicans and Democrats to avoid blame when we leave and things go to hell. And they will, no matter when we leave.

Q---What ever happened to the Coalition of the Willing?

A---It went Missing in Action as soon as they started using real bullets.

Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.

OPINION: It's Past Time to Sit Down With Iran

By Eli Lewine
Via Minutemanmedia.org

The drumbeat for American action against Iran has steadily grown over the past year. The latest call to arms came during congressional testimony on the situation in Iraq by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, both of whom reported that Iran is interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq and making the situation there worse.

Iran’s alleged meddling in Iraq, combined with its reluctance to reveal openly the details of its nuclear program, has created a sense of unease about Tehran’s intentions. As one of the strongest powers in the Middle East, Iran’s actions will play a large role in the future of the region. If the United States is to have any hope of helping to establish peace in the greater Middle East, it must immediately initiate robust and direct negotiations with Iran.

Washington and Tehran have been estranged diplomatically for over 50 years. Bad blood still exists from the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran’s first democratic elected government, and from the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, when dozens of innocent Americans were taken hostage. Our regional interests have rarely intersected in any significant fashion, with one notable exception being the Al Qaida terrorist threat after 9/11.

Some hawkish policymakers in the United States have called for a military attack against Iran, arguing that pinpoint aerial strikes would disable Iran’s growing nuclear program in one swift maneuver and send a message that any suspected nuclear weapons activity or meddling in Iraq will not be tolerated. History, however, has shown how ineffective such tactics would be. Repeated military interventions by major Western powers in the Middle East have yet to produce even a semblance of long-term stability. Instead, these interventions have bred fear and resentment of the West throughout the Muslim world.

Any attack against Iran would be viewed as unprovoked aggression and, short of a full-scale ground invasion, would do little to permanently stop Iran’s nuclear progress. A full-scale invasion of Iran, however, is a logistical impossibility given the already overextended state of American military forces, who are juggling simultaneous deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Pro-American moderate Iranians would turn against the United States in response to an attack on their homeland.

Tensions between Iraq and Iran have been recently intensifying. Kurds in the far northeastern corner of Iraq have endured several weeks of rocket and artillery attacks reportedly emanating from Iran. The besieged Kurds and Iraqi officials have demanded that Iran cease the attacks, but Iranian officials have denied the accusations and claim that they have only been attacking Kurdish guerrillas who are making raids into Iranian territory. So far, these border attacks have burned acres of orchards, killed livestock, destroyed homes, and driven about 2,500 Kurds from their villages. Given the protracted violence of the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s –- a conflict in which the United States ironically supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq –- this latest round of violence is dredging up some very bad memories in northeastern Iraq.

When questioned by Congress on September 10 and 11, Ambassador Crocker stated that recent attempts by the United States to negotiate directly with Iran have made little progress. But the Bush administration seems to be using its inability to participate in fruitful negotiations with Iran – which are, not surprisingly, proving difficult to conjure out of thin air following 30 years of mutual hostility – to justify its policy of refusing to reach out to Iraq’s neighbors to help stabilize the situation in that war-torn country.

Negotiations can only succeed when they are part of a fuller strategic process, not simply tacked on as a fig leaf to shield the Bush administration from criticism of its overly militaristic approach in the Middle East. In order for diplomacy to be effective, the United States must invest the full weight of its resources and know-how. So far, the United States has only applied sanctions, worked through United Nations resolutions, and allowed the Europeans to take the lead in discussions with the Iranians.

While these are all sound supplementary strategies, they do not substitute for what is desperately needed: direct talks between Iran and the United States. If the United States neglects its international leadership responsibilities and the Bush administration continues its current adversarial policy towards Iran, we should not expect any improvement in the current situation and things may get much worse.

Eli Lewine is a researcher at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C.

OPINION: More Corn--and a Bigger Dead Zone in the Gulf

By Dennis Keeney
Via Minutemanmedia.org

This summer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that U.S. farmers have planted a post-World War II record amount of land with corn to meet the growing demand driven largely by increased ethanol production. A few weeks later, researchers from Louisiana State University reported an all-time record for the size of the dead (hypoxic) zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Is there a connection?

Well, yes.

We know the amount of algal growth leading to low oxygen levels, and subsequent fish and shrimp decline, in the Gulf of Mexico is directly related to the amount of nitrogen going down the Mississippi River. And we know that much of this nitrogen comes from the fertile farmland in Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, the heart of the Corn Belt.

Corn prices reached as high as $4 a bushel this spring, and are at about $3.40 a bushel now, still a profitable margin. The anticipation of continued high prices has increased the incentive to move land into corn.

This year, the amount of land planted in corn has increased a whopping 18.5 percent, from 78.3 million to 92.9 million acres. These acres come from soybean, Conservation Reserve Land and grasslands. More often than ever, corn is being planted on the same land each year, eliminating the time-proven rotations of the past and requiring more nitrogen use.

This shift toward greater corn acres will greatly enhance nitrogen flow into the Mississippi River. Yet Gulf Coast and Midwest scientists who have been studying the causes of hypoxia and developing models to predict its behavior in the gulf have called for a 50 percent reduction in nitrogen runoff – in order to reduce the dead zone to the level it was about 20 years ago. Clearly, current biofuel policies are pushing the Gulf in the wrong direction.

It is possible that a perfect storm of farming practices and climate change-driven events have caused the record level of hypoxia this year. Last winter was warm and wet, causing nitrogen in crop residues, animal manures and applied fertilizer to be more rapidly converted to the soluble nitrate form. Many farmers applied their nitrogen in the fall in anticipation of greater corn acres. And heavy spring rains accelerated its leaching into the Mississippi River and the Gulf. This was reflected in the high levels of nitrate in Midwest rivers this spring.

Farmers believe increased ethanol demand will keep corn prices high for years to come. So, unless there are major policy changes, it is likely we will see increased corn land and higher use of nitrogen fertilizer for the foreseeable future.

The fertilizer needs for a corn-based ethanol system undercut some of the potential energy gains. That is because nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, requires a lot of energy – up to 29 percent of the energy use in agriculture. Since most corn crops are fertilized with about 150 to 200 pounds per acre of nitrogen fertilizer, it takes between 30 and 40 gallons of diesel fuel equivalent just to fertilize the crop.

There are good alternatives, such as organic farming or long-term rotations, to reduce the use of nitrogen for growing high yields of corn. But right now, these more eco-friendly options do not provide the vast amounts of corn needed to fill the increased demand of the ethanol boom.

We need policies to encourage a new world of energy-producing cellulose crops as an alternative to corn. These perennial crops could provide feedstock for biofuels, clean water and healthy soils. Congress must look at biofuel issues as it finishes writing the 2007 Farm Bill. If incentives for growing corn could be reduced, cellulosic ethanol support could be enhanced and support for more sustainable forms of agriculture could be provided, we could assure a healthy landscape and rural economy – and a healthy Gulf of Mexico.

Dennis Keeney is a senior fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and former director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

OPINION: Pandering to African-Americans

By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Via Townhall.com

"I don't feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don't believe He brought me this far," drawled presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, mimicking black voice to a black audience, at the First Baptist Church of Selma, Alabama. I'm wondering if Mrs. Clinton visits an Indian reservation she might cozy up to them saying, "How! Me not tired. Me come heap long way. Road mighty rough. Sky Spirit no bring me this far." Or, seeking the Asian vote she might say, "I no wray tired. Come too far I started flum. Road berry clooked. Number one Dragon King take me far."

The occasion of Mrs. Clinton's speech was the 42nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday, on March 7, 1965, when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by police with billy clubs, cattle prods and tear gas, one of the high points in the black civil rights struggle. Commemorating a key point in American history is one thing, but a white person mimicking black dialect is demeaning and insulting. And, if it buys her votes from those in attendance, not much flattering can be said about them.

Mrs. Clinton later explained her drawl, around black audiences, to a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, "I lived all those years in Arkansas, and, you know, I'm in this interracial marriage." The interracial marriage bit has to do with the frequent reference to former President Clinton, by the Congressional Black Caucus and others, as the "first black president."

Mrs. Clinton is not alone in demeaning talk to black people; she's in good company with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who talk of "going from the outhouse to the White House" and "from disgrace to amazing grace" and other such nonsense. Neither Clinton nor Revs. Sharpton and Jackson address white audiences in that manner. Before a predominantly black audience, during his 2004 presidential bid, Sen. John Kerry said, in reference to so many blacks in prison, "That's unacceptable, but it's not their fault." I doubt whether Kerry would have told a white audience that jailed white people were faultless. Kerry probably holds whites responsible for their criminal behavior.

In 2004, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said of President George Bush, "We have a president that's prepared to take us back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and dominance." During the 2000 presidential campaign, Rev. Jesse Jackson warned black audiences by telling them that a Bush win would turn the civil rights clock back to the days of Jim Crow. Now that Bush's two-term presidency is near its end, why wouldn't someone ask Jesse and Kweisi about the accuracy of their predictions?

Suppose some demagogue in 2000 told Jewish Americans that a Bush presidency would mean concentration camps, or told Japanese-Americans that his presidency would mean internment? Do you think such pronouncements would have been welcomed and applauded? I'm sure that had someone made such a stupid prediction to Jewish and Japanese-Americans, they would have had ridicule and scorn heaped upon them.

What does it say about blacks who can be taken in by pandering, alarmist nonsense from both whites and blacks as a means to get their votes? As a black man, I don't find the most obvious answer very flattering.

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

JONATHAN RAUCH: Be Angry About Iraq, but Not Impatient

By Jonathan Rauch
National Journal

September 8, 2007

Pity Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander in Iraq. Before Memorial Day, his September progress report from Baghdad was expected to be a turning point in the Iraq war. By Labor Day, it looked like most of the other turning points in this strange war: one where nothing turned.

Partisans worked through the summer to show that nothing as trivial as the field commander's assessment would influence their views. In July, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean announced, "We do not need to wait until September" to know that President Bush's "surge" strategy had failed. In August, Bush's allies shot back that the strategy was plainly succeeding.

People who knew better than to listen to partisans paid more attention to a raft of August progress reports: a partially declassified National Intelligence Estimate; a leaked draft report [PDF] from the Government Accountability Office; early accounts of a congressionally commissioned study of Iraqi security forces; and reports from members of Congress and think-tank experts who traveled to Iraq.

The assessments disagreed on some details, such as how much Iraq's security forces are improving, if at all. Taken together, however, they painted a coherent picture, which Petraeus's report seemed unlikely to change.

* Tactically, which is to say militarily, the troop surge is making headway. Partly thanks to Sunni tribes joining with U.S. forces against Al Qaeda, and partly because the Pentagon is devoting more resources to a better plan of attack, security has improved in Iraq's contested central regions. But:

* Iraq is still a dangerous and volatile place, far from stable. Sectarian militias, foreign terrorists, and domestic insurgents remain potent; violence remains unacceptably high. And:

* Strategically, which is to say politically, the surge is working much less well. As the National Intelligence Estimate summarized, "Broadly accepted political compromises required for sustained security, long-term political progress, and economic development are unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments."

* Absent a political settlement, Iraq's government and security forces are too incompetent, sectarian, and corrupt to stabilize the country without continued large-scale U.S. intervention.

* The troop surge is not sustainable much beyond next spring unless combat tours are extended, which would strain the Army to or near the breaking point. Pre-surge forces could be maintained a while longer but not indefinitely.

In sum: The surge has temporarily stabilized what had become a downward spiral and, by doing so, has bought some time. But not much time, and the Iraqis have done little with it.

Here's a startling headline: "More Troops, Better General, and Smarter Strategy Yield Some Results." It would have been surprising if the troop surge had not yielded tactical improvements. (To the extent that the surge is working, it gives a depressing taste of how much better this war could have gone if Bush had provided adequate manpower and leadership four years ago.) The question has always been whether tactical progress -- suppression of the conflict -- could be translated into strategic gains, in the form of political stability.

Partisans draw opposite conclusions by focusing on different parts of the picture. Bush and his Republican allies use tactical military success to argue that politicians should not undermine the surge just when it is showing some momentum. War opponents and their Democratic allies use the absence of strategic gains to argue that the surge is an exercise in futility.

The problem is that both sides are right. The car has stopped rolling backward, which is good. But it has yet to find a road forward, which is not good. To put the point more precisely, the surge appears to be doing better at peacekeeping than pacifying.

Pacification uses military force to reshape a contested political landscape so as to create conditions for peace on favorable terms -- usually by turning the balance of power decisively in favor of one faction or another. Pacification is what Bush still thinks he is doing in Iraq: turning the balance of power in favor of Sunni and Shiite moderates.

Peacekeeping, by contrast, merely interposes force between parties to a conflict. Instead of rebalancing the power, it suspends the fighting. When peacekeepers leave, fighting tends to break out again.

War opponents believe that, regardless of what Bush thinks, what he is doing in Iraq is peacekeeping -- at an exorbitant cost, if not counterproductively. In July, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, told the Associated Press bluntly that preventing potential genocide in Iraq is not a good enough reason to stick with Bush's policy. "When you have a conflict like this," he said, "military efforts and protective forces can play an important role, especially if they're under an international mandate as opposed to simply a U.S. mandate. But you can't solve the underlying problem at the end of a barrel of a gun."

In a speech last month to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Bush warned of a humanitarian calamity if the U.S. were to leave Iraq in turmoil. But he must know that not even Republicans will sustain a massive and open-ended U.S. commitment to peacekeeping in Iraq. In last month's VFW speech, the president decried the humanitarian cost of America's failure in Vietnam; revealingly, however, he stopped short of suggesting that the United States should have stayed in Vietnam on humanitarian grounds.

For what an amateur's view is worth, I tend to believe, with Obama, that the war has devolved into de facto peacekeeping. I see little evidence that Sunnis would accept any political offer that the Shiite majority would abide by, and vice versa. My reading of the evidence is that Iraqi fundamentals are more conducive to war than peace, and that there is not much the United States can do to change that.

Even so, what's the Democrats' hurry to end the surge? U.S. combat fatalities are tragic, but withdrawing in the midst of an escalating war could bring even more of them. Nor is it anything like obvious that, as Obama told AP, America's presence is making Iraq more dangerous for Iraqis by attracting terrorists and encouraging irresponsible politics. As Bush told the VFW, those who said that the people of Vietnam and (especially) Cambodia would be better off under Communism were wrong.

Here is something that Democrats might want to think about before rushing to shut down the surge: If they managed to ram through a withdrawal or timetable on party lines this fall, when most Republicans think the surge is working, they would be flayed for a generation as the party that seized certain defeat from the jaws of possible victory. For years to come, Republicans would insist that Democratic pusillanimity emboldened jihadism, an ugly narrative that some are already rehearsing. (Last month Peter Wehner, who recently left the White House for a post at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, sent out an e-mail pointing to jihadists' claim that America is a "weak horse" that runs when bloodied. He continued, "If the critics have their way and deny Gen. Petraeus the time he needs to help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq, the jihadists will be right.")

Fortunately, without Republican support, Democrats can't pull the plug or impose a strict timetable this fall. And they don't need to. The war is on a timetable already, one dictated by military constraints and political reality. "I think everyone understands that, by a year from now, we've got to be a good deal smaller than we are right now," Petraeus said last month. By this time next year, Bush's reluctance to scale up the Army to match his rhetoric will have caught up with him.

The military schedule synchronizes with the political one. By this time next year, if Iraq has not turned the corner, a good guess is that the Republican presidential nominee will be facing a choice: Promise to wind down the war, or lose the election. Whichever choice the nominee makes, the die will be cast.

Democrats have every reason to be angry at Bush's evasion of political accountability for the mess he has made in Iraq. Democrats, Republicans, and all other Americans have every reason to be angry at Bush for making the mess to begin with. They have every reason to feel about him the way the wildlife of Prince William Sound felt about Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

But anger does not justify impatience. If Petraeus says he needs more time, he should get it. If he fails, a course correction won't be long in coming. The 22nd Amendment has seen to that.

PAUL ROGAT LOEB: Wild Weather Creates Chances for Political Progress

By Paul Rogat Loeb

It's hard to keep up with the crazed weather. As I write, a heat wave has killed over 50 people in the Midwest and South, with temperatures reaching 112 degrees in Evening Shade, Arkansas. Torrential storms have flooded Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota. California has its second largest wildfire ever. Texas and Kansas are battening down for new storms, while still recovering from last month's floods, along with Oklahoma, which is now getting flooded again. A few weeks before, a massive rainstorm closed down the New York City subways. That doesn't count over 2,000 dead and millions displaced in India and Bangladesh floods, runaway forest fires in Greece, the hottest-ever temperature in Japan, or unprecedented melting of Arctic icecaps. Tomorrow the weather will ricochet off the charts someplace else.

This surge of weird weather offers a powerful warning. Placed in context, its lessons could also help us overcome the denial that's prevented the United States from taking action on global climate change. They could give courage to elected representatives who've wanted to act but have been hobbled by timidity. They could create a political opening to defeat prominent elected climate-change deniers whose seats used to seem unassailable and are running for reelection in hard-hit states. They could help the Senate leadership stand strong and call the bluff of those threatening a filibuster or a Bush veto. As Samuel Johnson wrote, knowing you’ll be hanged in two weeks concentrates one’s mind wonderfully. What's happening to our weather just might foreshadow that hanging.

A few years ago, global warming felt remote to most Americans. Although they heard it debated, it didn’t seem real. The media gave “equal time” to deniers and the most respected scientists. Now 84% of Americans view human activity as at least contributing to global climate change, and 70% demand greater government action. Responses have shifted in the wake of Katrina and the succession of local disasters; Gore's Inconvenient Truth; the international IPCC report and similar impeccably credentialed scientific studies; and the start of serious media coverage, from Parade and the AARP magazine to Vogue. Add the impact of so many ordinary citizens speaking out, and Americans are starting to link the disasters they're seeing around them with what's happening to the planet.

When people's communities are hit with exceptional floods, droughts, tornadoes, heat waves, or runaway wildfires, or they see these events on TV, even conservatives who would have once treated them as random "acts of God" start recognizing their deeper roots in the patterns of human action. In a May 2006 poll of South Carolina hunters and fishermen, for instance, 68% agreed that global warming was an urgent problem requiring immediate action, and a similar number said they'd seen the immediate impact of climate change on local fish and wildlife. Even before this summer's parade of calamities, 75% of all Americans said recent weather had been stranger than usual

So our national frame on the weather is beginning to shift. Each new "natural disaster" now reinforces the sense that just maybe not all these disasters are so natural after all. And if we fail to seriously address their roots, similar ones or worse will dominate our future.

Of course global climate change doesn’t cause every extreme weather event. And not all our fellow citizens are quite ready to act on the full enormity of the climate crisis, still resisting much of what needs to be done, such as increasing gas taxes. But most Americans want someone to do something, even if they're ambivalent about paying the costs. The more our warnings resonate with what people see around them, the more they can draw broader links, and the more the Exxon-funded denials ring hollow.

This situation expands political possibilities. While memory of this summer of disasters is still fresh, why not begin now to make a major issue of the rabid global climate change denial of Senators like Oklahoma's James Inhofe, Texas’s John Cornyn, and Oregon's Gordon Smith. Inhofe, who's called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," has been considered to have a safe seat. But his approval rating, just after last November's election, was a lowly 46%, and Cornyn's 45%, both lower than just-defeated Virginia Senator George Allen. So they may already be more vulnerable than conventional wisdom suggests. Gordon Smith's race has long been forecast as tight. Instead of writing off the prime deniers as unbeatable, or dismissing global climate change as too complex to make an electoral difference, why not brand them with their stands, juxtaposing their dismissal of the crisis with images of flooded homes and farms?

If the opponents of these officials can really tie them to their words, and keep asking why they'd rather stick up for Exxon than act on this ultimate threat to our common security, who knows how the election could turn? That's particularly true given broader discontent over Iraq, health care, and Bush administration corruption. Defeating just one or two entrenched deniers will significantly strengthen the voices of those in both parties who genuinely want to take action. We might even begin approaching the European situation, where even conservative political leaders, like Germany's Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Tory David Cameron, view addressing global climate change as amont their highest priorities.

Even with our existing Congress, the more the temperature keeps soaring and the rainstorms keep pounding, the more political leverage we have. The timidity of elected leaders who've acknowledged the crisis but done little to address it has been nearly as much a barrier as the blindness of those who deny it. So when the weather begins hitting home it gives us a chance to insist our elected officials actually lead.

They have this chance now with a renewed version of a bill that would have reversed oil company tax breaks to pay for $32 billion of incentives for renewable energy production. Given the magnitude of the crisis, that's still far too modest an investment, but it would help. This past June, the Senate leadership dropped the legislation when they fell three votes short of overcoming a threatened filibuster; they also dropped a companion bill requiring all U.S. utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020, a requirement already law in 23 states. They dropped these measures to be able to pass a larger bill that raised automobile mileage standards, supported biofuels development, created new appliance and lighting efficiency standards, and supported research into fuel-efficient vehicles and carbon sequestration.

Now, the Senate and House are about to take up renewable energy measures incorporating their earlier core proposals. The House and Senate versions have some important differences: The Senate bill contains a dangerous sentence, slipped in by nuclear lobbyists, that would let the Department of Energy underwrite virtually unlimited loans for nuclear construction. But if they can eliminate that provision and combine the best of their two bills, passing them would be a valuable step.

So what do they do about the filibuster? They need to call the bluff of the obstructionists. They have one of the necessary three votes with the return of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson from his brain injury. Barbara Boxer, who was attending the birth of a grandchild, gives them another. As they need only one more vote, and didn't have the support of ostensible global climate change leaders like John McCain, who opposed rescinding the tax breaks for oil companies, they can begin by denying the opponents the power simply to table the bill by threatening endless debate.

Imagine if opponents filibustered, and instead of just letting them log in and register their vote, the Senate leadership forced them to defend and keep defending their position for the duration of the debate. Suppose they didn't just do it for a single day or two, as with the Iraq timetable resolution, but used the resistance as an opportunity to hold a national discussion—extended as long as needed—on this fundamental issue. If opponents quoted the scientific deniers, supporters could cite the 99.9% of climate scientists who've described this as a human-caused crisis of the greatest magnitude. They could talk about how oil and coal corporations, led by ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, have used the strategy of the tobacco companies (and even some of the same Thank You for Smoking-style PR firms) to create a strategy of deliberately sowing doubt by supporting these same deniers and the front group institutes that host them. They can talk about how much these corporate interests have given to specific Senators blocking the vote. If the debate goes long enough, the supporters can read the list of political contributions repeatedly, until the links finally begin to register in the public mind. This could even pose an opportunity—before climate change fatigue, like compassion fatigue, sets in—to draw the links between solving the climate crisis and eventual necessity of real campaign finance reform.

After a season of caving until Congressional ratings are now below those of Bush, Democratic leaders in charge of bringing legislation to the Senate floor should welcome a filibuster, not fear it. So should their handful of Republican allies, who want to pull their party back to the "reality-based community." What a chance finally to address core issues, beginning with the costs of doing nothing on climate change. Supporters could discuss the disasters in their own home states and in the states of the legislation's opponents. They could talk of the 200,000 Katrina exiles still dispossessed from their homes. They could describe melting polar icecaps and the potential for a world of climate refugees. They could highlight the value of actually building an American renewable energy industry and moving down a sustainable path. The longer the debate dominated the headlines, the more they could make clear what's actually at stake.

This may not happen on its own. It will likely take sustained citizen pressure. But the floods and droughts signal a world of catastrophe that we've been moving toward, mostly unknowingly, our entire lives. With the scientific consensus on global climate change nearly universal, innocence and ignorance are no longer an excuse. We have an opportunity both to talk about the profound recklessness of our current path and to invest in alternatives that can avert the worst disasters. If we're going to change America's political culture enough to respond adequately to the crisis, we'll have to link the stories of disaster hitting America's eyes with the root choices that have helped make them happen.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See http://www.paulloeb.org/ To receive his monthly articles, email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

OPINION: Bush's Vietnam Rhetoric

By Donald Kaul
Via Minutemanmedia.org

The generally accepted definition of the Yiddish word “chutzpah” (pronounced as though you’re clearing your throat) is the quality exhibited by a man who murders his father and mother, then asks for clemency because he’s an orphan. In other words, brazen arrogance.
President George W. Bush, however, is threatening to supplant that self-made orphan in the Yiddish lexicon.

The other day he said that we couldn’t pull out of Iraq because it would result in a bloodbath and political catastrophe, just like our pulling out of Vietnam did!

Speaking to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, always a receptive audience for saber-rattling presidents, he said:

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and killing fields.’”

Can you believe the gall of the man? Not only is he arguing for the wisdom of having continued a war that he and his right-wing cohort, for the most part, didn’t choose to participate in, he is blaming the people who opposed the war for its consequences.

No, no, no Mr. President. No. As your father (whom you make look better every minute) might have said:

“This will not stand.”

Getting out of Vietnam was not what caused the area-wide tragedy that Southeast Asia became; getting into it did.

Our conduct of that miserable war, which saw us drop more bombs on that relatively small country than we did everywhere during all of World War II, atomized the societies of the region, leaving them vulnerable to their most vicious, lunatic elements.

Perhaps if we’d stayed there forever--bombing, bombing, bombing--we could have held off those elements, but you can’t stay there forever. Sooner or later, you have to leave.

The president is right about one thing, when we leave Iraq we shall leave behind a chaotic situation that could resemble post-war Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. But staying there won’t prevent that either. (The other day dozens died in Karbala when a fight broke out between two Shiite factions, never mind the Sunnis.)

Like a substitute teacher in an unruly classroom, as soon as we turn our backs, the children start lobbing grenades at each other.

Our intelligence agencies, in a report issued the day after the president’s speech, basically agree with that, predicting that quickly pulling out of Iraq would be disastrous but that staying there in support of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government is all but futile. That is the corner into which Mr. Bush and his gang have painted us.

But still the man, armed with nothing but chutzpah, continues to talk nonsense about resisting “the allure of retreat,” to quote another fanciful phrase from the VFW speech.

Right-wing chicken hawks have done a wonderful job of rejiggering the history of the Vietnam War. They seem to have convinced many Americans that the war was lost because the war protesters at home undermined the effort.

You saw that play out in the 2004 presidential election, when John Kerry--who was both a decorated war veteran and later a prominent war protester--chose to emphasize his combat record rather than his anti-war history. All he got in return for his efforts was a Swift-boating.
Believe me on this, kids, the protesters did not lose the Vietnam War; it was lost because we were on the wrong side of history, fighting a colonial war in a post-colonial period. We had no chance.

There is a variation of chutzpah that fits Mr. Bush, as well as the rest of the “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” The word is chutzpahnik, defined (by Leo Rosten in “The Joys of Yiddish”) as “the man who shouts ‘Help! Help!’ while beating you up.”

When we finally do abandon the war in Iraq, as we most certainly shall, the Bush people will blame not their own incompetence but those who opposed it. Count on it.


Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong. Email: dkaul1@verizon.net

OPINION: None Dare Call It Bribery

By Miriam Miedzian and Gary Ferman
Via Minutemanmedia.org

No more gifts, meals, or trips from lobbyists—so stipulate the ethics and lobbying rules Congress recently passed. They represent a significant step, but do not challenge that long-standing but mistaken assumption that expensive dinners, rides on corporate jets and cut-rate mansions are bribes, but millions in political contributions are not.

So when then Congressman Duke Cunningham, serving on a powerful defense appropriations committee, acquired a $2.5 million mansion with the help of Pentagon contractors -- in exchange for getting them lucrative contracts -- it was considered bribery. He was fined and sent to prison. But when any member of Congress accepts $2.5 million in campaign contributions from a large corporation intent on influencing votes, that’s not bribery.

What’s the difference? In one case, the politician is corrupted by the desire for material goods, in the other case, by the desire for power and prestige. For many politicians, what could be more of a motivation than power and prestige?

We Americans love our euphemisms. We call our public toilets restrooms. We downgrade global warming to climate change. We call bribes “political contributions” and refer to the bribe-makers – the Pentagon contractors, drug, insurance and oil companies – as "donors" as if they were making altruistic gifts to a charity. Our Merriam Webster dictionary defines a bribe as, “Money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust.” The key part of the definition lies in influencing conduct by giving money or favors; it does not state that the money or favors have to take the form of direct, immediate, material benefits.

So let’s face it, our government is based on bribes, and the candidate who collects the most bribes usually wins. So how much each one rakes in is an ongoing media focus. Typical recent headlines: ABC: “It's Official: Obama Tops Clinton in Primary Haul.” CBS: “Thompson's Fundraising Is Short Of Goal.” “New York Times:” “Romney Sees Sharp Decline in Donations from 2 States.” Another “Times” article reveals that Barack Obama leads Democrats with $32.8 million and Hillary Clinton is second with $27 million. Obama has gotten big bucks from Wall Street. He voted against a 30 percent ceiling on charge card interest rates. Abandoning her 1993 goal of universal coverage, Clinton has become a good girl on health care reform—piecemeal measures only, please. She’s raked in more than $2 million from the health industry. And if you’re worried about global warming and profiteering at the pump, take note that Rudy Giuliani has received $400,000 from Big Oil.

By the time that those in Congress leave office, like W.J. “Billy” Tauzin, the former Louisiana Republican member, he or she may have laid the groundwork for a multi-million-dollar career. In 2004, Tauzin played a key role in getting the Medicare Drug bill through Congress. In exchange for protecting drug company profits, Tauzin is now paid over $2 million a year to head the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—whose member companies are the beneficiaries of the bill he helped write.

The ethics bill stipulates that representatives have to wait one year, and senators, two, before they can lobby former colleagues and collect their deferred compensation bribes. Hey, with salaries in the millions awaiting them, why not take off a year or two before cashing in?
We are the only advanced industrialized country without universal health care. Moreover, in countries like France and Germany, candidates get free TV time, and elections are to a large extent publicly financed and regulated to avoid excessive corporate influence. No bribes; no catering to insurance companies. But 47 million Americans are without health care coverage, and even the insured suffer huge deductibles and care decisions often driven by profit maximization, not medical need. This endangers the health and well-being of the American people.

Chinese courts condemned to death Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the Chinese version of the Food and Drug Administration, because he endangered the health of the Chinese people. He was executed for taking bribes valued at $850,000. We are not calling for Billy Tauzin’s execution. But we insist on calling a bribe a bribe and recognizing that as long as politicians depend on bribes, not only will government be deficient in providing health care, but oil, coal, and automobile companies will continue to hinder dealing with global warming, and weapons manufacturers will continue to encourage unnecessary wars.


Myriam Miedzian is the author of “Boys Will Be Boys,” and writes frequently on social and political issues. Her website is: myriammiedzian.com. Gary Ferdman is a non-profit executive.

OPINION: A Lightweight Way of Voting

By Donald Kaul
Via Minutemanmedia.org

Mitt Romney won the Iowa Straw Vote recently, thereby establishing himself as the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Perfect.

The Straw Poll (a fraud) is the ideal event to set the stage for the Iowa Presidential Caucuses (a hoax) as we begin our presidential nomination process (a joke).

There is nothing scientific, random or even honest about the Straw Poll. It began life in 1979 as a fund-raising gimmick for the Republican Party in Iowa and a fund-raising gimmick it remains. Romney did not so win it as buy it.

He inundated Iowa with millions of dollars, so many that his truly serious rivals for the nomination fled the field of battle. Left behind were people the average voter couldn’t pick out of a police lineup.

The Straw Poll was never meant to be taken seriously. It was a way of getting Republicans to kick in a few bucks to the state party in years when no Republican incumbent was running for president. They went to Ames for a meal, maybe hear a speech or two and plunked down $25 to cast a vote for one of the candidates. As a poll it had even less validity than a Florida general election.

But the press began to pay attention to the results, so the candidates began to take it more seriously. In 1999, Bob Dole bused in supporters from Kansas in an attempt to fix the election, so they changed the rules to make only Iowans eligible to vote.

Then they found that some sneaky Republicans were voting more than once, so they began stamping voters with indelible ink, as in Iraq. One person, one vote.
And the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press--hundreds of them, maybe thousands--faithfully chronicled the charade as though it mattered.

The tariff for voting went up to $35 this year. The “Washington Post” reported that when Rudy Giuliani heard about the fee he braced an Iowan and said:

“In New York, we call that a shakedown. What do you call it here?”

“Well,” replied the Iowan, “I guess we call it a fund-raiser.”

Which is why it is so difficult for a New York politician to win the hearts and minds of Midwestern voters. They don’t speak the same language.

Somewhere along the way, Iowa Republicans have convinced themselves that the Straw Poll, conceived as a scam, you’ll remember, is actually important. In a recent poll, 63 percent of Republican caucus-goers said that all the candidates should participate.

And they upbraid non-participants like John McCain with searing questions like:

“You ditched Iowa in 2000. I wonder why we should support you now.”

Someone should tell Iowans that if they vote only for candidates who suck up to them, they will get a president who sucks up to powerful groups, most of whom are more powerful than Iowa.

According to William Safire’s “Political Dictionary,” the term “straw poll” derives from a metaphor by John Seldon, a 17th Century writer who wrote: “A straw thrown up into the air will show you how the wind sits, which cannot be learned by casting up a stone.”

Well, the Iowa poll qualifies as a lightweight but I think the concept works better for judging wind than elections. I mean, really, is this any way to choose the leader of the Free World?

I know the arguments for letting Iowa and New Hampshire go first in the presidential nominating process and there’s some validity to them, but things have gotten out of hand. Both are quirky states, uncharacteristic of the nation as a whole--straws, not templates.

More than two dozen states, frustrated at being frozen out of the early voting by two small, relatively homogeneous states, have moved their primaries up to February 5. Which has caused South Carolina to move its primary up, which will cause New Hampshire to move up, then Iowa.

Merry Christmas, anyone?

Couldn’t we just go back to the smoke-filled rooms?

Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong. Email: dkaul1@verizon.net.

OPINION: Let's Keep Monsanto Out of Our Milk

By David Hansen and Michael Wallinga
via Minutemanmedia.org

The recent announcement by Kroger stores to prohibit the genetically engineered growth hormone rbST (also known as rbGH) from its private label milk brand is part of a nationwide trend among dairy processors, retailers and farmers. Starbucks, Tillamook, Safeway and Chipotle Restaurants have already begun to discontinue the hormone and California Dairies, Inc., which produces nearly 10 percent of the nation’s milk, announced it went rbST-free August 1.

Each of these companies affirms that the chief impetus for its actions comes from rising consumer demand for hormone-free dairy products. Those consumers cite legitimate health concerns, including increased cancer risks and antibiotic resistance.

Facing dwindling sales of rbGH, Monsanto, its sole manufacturer, is trying to thwart informed consumer choice by pressuring the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to restrict labeling of such products as rbGH-free. Monsanto claims there are no differences in the milk and that consumers are somehow “misled” by these labels.

Of course, consumers know exactly what “rbGH-free” means, just as they recognize the meaning of “No preservatives,” “No artificial colors” and “No artificial flavors.” These labels are important tools consumers use to make educated choices about products they buy, including additional labeling about how animals are treated in meat, egg and dairy production.

Regardless of the claims of Monsanto and its supporters, there are significant differences in rbGH-treated cows and their milk. Treated cows experience higher rates of 16 harmful medical conditions, including pregnancy problems, diarrhea and mastitis, which Monsanto’s own package insert acknowledges. Virtually every animal protection agency in the country, including the Humane Society of the United States and Humane Farming Association, criticizes use of this synthetic hormone.

Elevated mastitis rates lead to increased treatment with antibiotics. Bacteria resistant to these antibiotics may pass into humans through milk, air, water or soil, or through ground meat, increasing antibiotic resistance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overuse of agricultural antibiotics is a significant contributor to food-borne, antibiotic-resistant infections in humans, a multi-billion dollar problem in the United States.

There is also no doubt that rbGH use in cows increases the level in cows’ milk of another growth hormone found in both cows and humans, IGF-1. While a certain level of IGF-1 is needed for normal development and daily functioning, elevated levels are strongly implicated with increased risk of breast, prostate, colon and other cancers. Advocates of rbGH claim that the amount of IGF-1 taken in from dairy products is not hazardous, but numerous scientists believe that even small amounts of additional hormone exposure can be significant. It’s simply common sense to avoid a higher risk of getting cancer when the source of that risk is completely unnecessary.

Government leaders, scientists and farmers alike criticized the FDA’s controversial decision to approve rbGH in 1993. In contrast, most industrialized nations of the world, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all 25 members of the European Union, have disallowed its use.

The Codex Alimentarius, the United Nations’ main food safety body, twice decided that it could not endorse the safety of rbGH for human health.

Hospitals across the country are also taking action. Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition of over 440 healthcare and public health organizations dedicated to improving health and safety in hospitals, formally declared its opposition to rbGH in 2005. Since then, leading hospitals and hospital systems, such as Catholic Healthcare West, the largest Catholic healthcare system in the country, have begun purchasing rbGH-free dairy products.

Monsanto’s attempt to pressure the FDA and FTC to restrict rbGH-free labeling is a self-serving attempt to save their falling profits. We need our government to reject this assault on the right of businesses to inform consumers and the right of all citizens to make informed choices about what they eat.

Michael Hansen is a senior scientist with Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports). David Wallinga is food and health director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Health Care Without Harm. Their e-mail addresses are hansmi@consumer.org and dwallinga@iatp.org.