The More Things Change: Empire Classic Or Empire Lite?

In the spring of 2007, 6 months after taking control of Congress in the November 2006 midterm elections by running on an "end the Iraq occupation" platform throughout 2006, the Democratic controlled congress under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned around 180 degrees, stuck their thumbs in the eye of the public who had given them their majority based on the expectations of ending the occupation, and gave George Bush the first Iraq supplemental funding bill ever passed by a Democratic congress, in their determination that the US would control the oil resources of Iraq and have a central base from which to attempt to expand that hoped for control across the Middle East.

Their dreams of empire have since developed a badly cracked and shattered facade but not died out, and that first supplemental funding bill was to become only the beginning of a two year long series of betrayals of their mandate, as the Democrats put all of their energy into enabling Bush with multiple Iraq supplemental funding bills and selling the same old deathtrap in Iraq with a shiny new Democratic paintjob, and over the past couple of months enabling and participating in the theft of nearly nine trillion dollars from taxpayers as they have fallen all over themselves to hand bags of cash to their criminal friends on Wall Street who have been busy as beavers all this time wrecking the US and global economy.

Yesterday in Obama's Foreign Policy Team: Pragmatic Chump Change? The Real News talked to Lawrence J. Korb and Phyllis Bennis to analyze the overall message about ongoing US foreign policy that is sent out to the world by Obama's choices as Hillary Clinton was confirmed as Obama's Secretary of State, and three other appointments were confirmed as well: his closest foreign affairs adviser Susan Rice becoming UN ambassador with a seat at the cabinet table, former NATO commander General James L. Jones as national security adviser, and current Secretary of Defense Bush appointee Robert M. Gates to remain in that role.

For his "pragmatic" appointments of some of the most hawkish war and imperialism proponents in and out of the Democratic party...

Barack Obama is riding a tide of public approval over his performance so far as US president-elect, as well as strong support for his top cabinet picks, a new poll showed Tuesday.

Nearly a month after his historic November 4 election, and in the midst of the devastating downturn in the US economy, more than three out of four Americans approve of how Obama has handled his transition so far, according to the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

Of his high-profile cabinet appointments, 69 percent to 25 percent approve Obama's pick of his former Democratic nomination rival Hillary Rodham Clinton to be his secretary of state.

By an overwhelming margin, 80 percent to 14 percent of Americans endorse Obama's decision to ask President George W. Bush's defense secretary Robert Gates to keep his post, said the poll.

We then heard about the propagandizing "Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism" wheeling out the heavy artillery once again of blatant WOT fearmongering with WAPO reporting on them saying:

The odds that terrorists will soon strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction are now better than even, a bipartisan congressionally mandated task force concludes in a draft study that warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling networks and the spread of atomic know-how in the developing world.

The sobering assessment of such threats, due for release as early as today, singled out Pakistan as a grave concern because of its terrorist networks, history of instability and arsenal of several dozen nuclear warheads. The report urged the incoming Obama administration to take "decisive action" to reduce the likelihood of a devastating attack

Today Pepe Escobar at The Real News describes a shiny new Democratic "war on terror" being sold to the American public....

Much has been said about the strong personalities who will feature in President-elect Barack Obama's national security "team of rivals". But Obama has already made it clear that "the buck stops" with him.

Pepe Escobar argues that instead of "change", what America has in fact bought is an Obama vision that may not be too dissimilar from the war on terror framework.


Real News: December 3, 2008
Empire classic or empire lite?
Obama foreign policy does not question basic assumptions of the past

Go shopping? Don't forget to pick up duct tape?

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Surprise Surprise: Troop Withdrawal Delay

Surprise surprise, the troop surge has worked so well that we need to delay the troop draw down. This isn't a quagmire, it's an occupation.

Now that we know either Clinton, Obabma or McCain will be the next president, we know the US troops will be in Iraq, at some level, for at least nine more years, unless they are pushed out.

My estimate of the length of the occupation is still on track, but I'm not sure I haven't under estimated it.


In my original estimate I used a comparison of Iraq and Vietnam as the basis for estimating six more years from January 2007. Here's another possible basis for an estimate of how long we'll be in Iraq.... Bosnia:

TUZLA, Bosnia, Nov. 24, 2004 -- U.S. troops marked the end of their nine-year peacekeeping role in Bosnia on Wednesday as NATO prepared to hand over the task to the European Union in December.

Ooops! Forgot something:

A small number of U.S. troops will stay in Bosnia to hunt war crime suspects and help the country reform its military.

Sound familiar? Obama and Clinton always say have a similar disclaimer, like those words read really quickly at the end of a damn advertisement:

Thecandidatedoesnotrepresentthisstatementasfact and reservestherighttomaintaintrooplevelstomeetunforseenneeds astheyarise
including butnotlimitedto securityforcontractorsandembassyemployees
trainingiraqiforces interdictingterrorists

So, General Petraeus wants a little time for "consolidation and evaluation," and Defense Secretary Gates "had been kind of headed in that direction as well."

Fear and Worry are all Part of a Crumbling Empire:

Some fear the drawdown could result in giving up some recent security gains while many in the military worry that strains on troops from long and multiple combat tours will grow worse unless the troop reduction continues after July.

If people like Barak Obama have their way, who call for increasing the size of the US Military by 90,000, the latter worry should subside... for a while.

Crumble, crumble.

Sources:

CBC, U.S. may delay troop cuts in Iraq: defence secretary, February 11, 2008.


(If there IS no "REST OF YOUR POST" then DELETE the ID tag and both the SPAN tags)

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Lesser Of Two Evils?

Which presidents and political parties were responsible for America's deadliest wars? To what extent can you blame a president or a political party for choosing to go to war? This map may hold some answers. It illustrates the history of American war from 1775 to 2006. War is a necessary evil. Politics, however, shouldn't be.

"Christmas In Fallujah"

Merry Christmas

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Why Is The Middle East So Volatile?

How did we get here? Why is there so much strife in the Middle East? Why are there so many deadly competing cultural, national, political and economic interests there? What is the history behind it all? How can we understand it all without spending years and years becoming becoming scholars of Comparative Religion or Historians?

There is no easy way of course, but the following two 90 second animated Flash maps, courtesy of Maps Of War, can help to give us a good nutshell summary of answers to questions that have perplexed and caused untold misery and death for centuries.

It helps to visualize all that history from an "80,000 foot view" to understand what happened without getting buried by the details of years of history study.

Hint: Hover your mouse pointer over the dates above and below the yellow bar in the first one. There are pop up descriptive balloons.

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Chickenhawks, Chickenshits, Cowardly Candidates and a Craven Congress, Aint That America?

The progress being made in our 4 1/2 year war of terror on Iraq is phenomenal. So impressive are our recent gains that the "top tier" Democratic candidates who have lined up in competition to become the heirs of this great struggle for freedom, for Middle Eastern democracy, for oil and gas rights for western corporations and of course for lucrative contracts in arms sales and private security for campaign contributors, last night went way out on a limb and declared their goal of removing our troops from the quagmire in Mesopotamia by the end of their first term in office in 2013.

Despite their boldness, they did not report whether or not they could guarantee the colonization of Mars, a cure for cancer, or flying pigs within that time frame.

The Congress of the United States of America, a legislative body established by the American Constitution over two centuries ago has declared itself to be toothless, spineless and ultimately meaningless. Yesterday they condemned a reputable political organization for running a completely truthful newspaper ad and voted to declare the military of a sovereign nation a terrorist organization in order to present their Fuhrer with a gift wrapped excuse for his next adventure.

They were asked by Bush's Defense Secretary for an additional 190 billion ($190,000,000,000) dollars to continue their criminal enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite the fact that a sizable majority of the people of our country want to end this war, the cowardly swine will approve it. That will bring the total publicly reported expenditures to 800 billion dollars ($800,000,000,000). Most of this has been spent, squandered, swindled, bamboozled away since our chief arrogant little asswipe stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared that the mission had been accomplished.

Hell, they sacked one of our principle Generals at the outset of this insanity for declaring that the war would cost as much as 25 billion when Rumsfeld and Cheney's various staff were reporting that it could be done for seven billion which would be financed through the sale of, get this,Iraqi Oil.

Congress will of course, make another face saving gesture and ask for full progress reports, which will be dutifully drawn up by the neocon advertising/marketing/propaganda staff in the white House and fed to an "ass kissing little chicken shit" general for presentation to our parliament of gutless wonders and we will continue, down the same path following some vague vanishing point into a future where the only things that are certain are the deaths of thousands more of our troops and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Since our current crop of wars of empire are progressing so swimmingly (as planned at the highest levels) they now are preparing to embroil us in another war with Iran and this time they plan to pull out all the stops and use the nukes that they have been slathering over all these long years.

Last week on television, I witnessed a room full of mostly young college students sit pacifically and watch passively as a half dozen hired goons brutalized another student with Tasers, for speaking. For Speaking.

I felt that I was seeing a vision of America's future.

No matter what this criminal government and their corporate masters do, no matter what the excess, no matter what the crime, no matter what horrors they commit in our name the people of this country are sitting, sitting as acquiescently as that room full of meek children, sitting and cowering in the face of authority.

America in the first decade of the twenty first century is beginning to look a lot like Germany in the third decade of the last century and I'm beginning to be relieved that this is my last decade.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

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Iraq Isn't Working Out So Well

And of course the fact that in invading Iraq Bush fulfilled Osama bin Laden's wishes might have something to do with that, so... it only makes sense to avoid facing reality and repeat the same kind of sheer idiocy on a much bigger scale and attack Iran as soon as possible:

In an effort to build congressional and Pentagon support for military options against Iran, the Bush administration has shifted from its earlier strategy of building a case based on an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program to one invoking improvised explosive devices (IEDs) purportedly manufactured in Iran that are killing US soldiers in Iraq.

According to officials - including two former Central Intelligence Agency case officers with experience in the Middle East - the administration believes that by focusing on the alleged ties between IEDs and Iran, they can link the Iranian government directly to attacks on US forces in Iraq.

One former CIA case officer

who served in the Middle East even suggested that politically framing the Iranians for its own failures in Iraq would allow the Bush administration to avoid accountability, as well as providing a casus belli for an attack.

The Bush Administration "can say it's [the Iranians'] fault we are losing the war in Iraq and that would be a convenient out for their failed policy," the officer said Monday.

The Iranians "have declared war against the US by sabotaging the war on terror is how they might sell it. I would not be surprised to next hear of Al Qaeda-Iranian connections because these people don't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'a."

There were times,

huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that [Donald] Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.
...
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers -- all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
...
For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Of course, if word got out too far that Iraqis trying to take back their country were buying American made land mines and rocket-launchers, the Bush regime might have a more difficult time propagandizing about IEDs purportedly manufactured in Iran being used against American troops in Iraq.

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Don't Watch This Video

From Bear Republic Action Group. This is what is being done in Iraq in your name, while Republicans continue to support George W. Bush and the Democrat controlled Congress refuses to stop funding and put an end to George W. Bush's occupation of that country:

Warning: This video is ugly, savage and without a doubt not for the kids or the squeamish….But it is what George W. Bush and his ‘Rubber Stamp Republican Party’ are doing in the full light of day. Send a link to this to anyone you know who thinks the ‘Surge’ is working or that, in fact, the people ‘running’ this brutal, illegal occupation have any fucking idea what they are doing. And I do mean any idea at all.

[Cross-Posted at Edgeing]

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Republicans Panicking Because the Greatest Heist the World Has Ever Seen is Failing

It strikes me as I listen to the ongoing debate about Iraq that the Republicans are so split because they are beginning to realize that the Greatest Heist the World has Ever Seen is failing. And it scares them spit-less, as no operation of this size has ever been pulled off, and the American people are unwilling to any longer play the willing sheep to the Big Bad Wolf that is the GOP.

The sheer logistics involved, the numbers of people who had to be either corrupted or shut up, the stealing of billions and billions of dollars from hapless Americans in order to strike the jackpot of the old, "Black gold, Texas tea," and steal from the Middle Eastern countries control of all their oil fields is staggering to the mind.

As I see it (and this is admittedly pure speculation, but speculations drawn from reasonable inferences) the plan went something like this:

From the very moment bush/cheney were put into office by the Supreme Court they began planning to attack Iraq. On an otherwise unmarked map of Iraq, cheney and his consultants on his "Energy" task force literally divided the spoils of the war that was to be and broke up the distribution rights to all that Iraqi oil. The only thing the maladministration lacked was a casus belli to attack Iraq, and we already know that bush was so desperate to get his end of the plan going that he deliberately tried to provoke Iraq into an attack on American or UN resources to justify war.

Then September 11, 2001, happened. 14 Saudi Arabians and a few others hijacked commercial airliners, flew them into the WTC, and, manna from heaven, now bush could obtain virtually any authority to form any response he thought necessary. Did he think it necessary to attack those who attacked us, the Saudis who ostensibly were allies, or, knowing it would be impossible to attack the world's leading gas station, did bush/cheney decide it was more important to manufacture an enemy in closer proximity to the Iraqi oil fields? It had to be an country adjacent to Iraq for logistical purposes, Osama Bin Laden played the convenient villain, and Afghanistan was already such a war-torn, run-down, and easy country to attack that it filled bush/cheney's original purposes perfectly. (They made very sure that all the rest of the Bin Laden family, many of them in business with the Bush family, got out of the country safely when no one else in America could fly anywhere.)

Afghanistan went much too well for bush/cheney, the boogey-man Bin laden became trapped at Tora Bora, and our forces were ordered to allow his escape so the "war on terror" could continue. After all, by then bush had ordered the diversion of funds meant for Afghanistan to the build-up towards the war he really wanted, war with Iraq.

The neocons, including bush, fancied that they could dispense with plans many years in the making by our military experts and believed they could blast in with "shock and awe," install a puppet government and grab command of the oil fields. The puppet government would be required to sign the Profit Sharing Agreements (PSAs) that would give American Big Oil 85%-87% of all oil profits for the next thirty years.

The plan was proceeding brilliantly, handing out no-bid contracts to cronies who in turn kicked back billions to the government "off the books," I would imagine, for how else could anyone steal billions and billions of dollars from the mightiest fighting force in the world without some complicity from those handing out wheelbarrows full of cash? Over ten billion dollars stolen! A very small down payment compared to the trillions of dollars of oil profits to be had.

Then something went seriously wrong. The insurgency wasn't it, because any competent military planner would plan for peace as well as war. Did competent people draw up this plan, ignoring the thousands of years of history, or was it the failure to be able to install an Iraqi-American government favorable to this entire endeavor that caused things to go awry? Or did the government we installed come to the realization of our intent to take their oil and decided to fight even harder against the U.S.? Why should they give away trillions of dollars, not a penny of which would be spent to benefit Iraq?

The only way the Iraqi's can seek to hold onto what rightfully belongs to them is to stall, harass, and harangue and continue their insurgency against the U.S.

Now time is running out with the American people, who have grown weary watching their loved ones die to satisfy bush's imperial goal of giving all that oil to American Big Oil. bush now regularly states that the oil agreement is the single-most important thing for Iraq to do. Now the parliament won't meet, vacations while our troops die, can't form a quorum, and failed to meet bush's deadline of June 30th for signing of the oil agreements.

This means that bush/cheney must get a new, more pliable government in place before the American public really rises up and forces troop withdrawal.

Then the failed plan will come to light. The greatest theft of money from our country in history so far, but a theft that will seem miniscule in comparison if bush/cheney manages to steal all that oil.

Until very recently bush never consulted the Democratic members of congress at all, so there is a good chance SOME congresspersons are not party to this grandiose scheme, but Republicans have been briefed every step of the way and I believe large numbers of the Republicans know exactly why we are in Iraq and support this theft on a global scale. That's why so many of them are running scared and trying to distance themselves from the Greatest Failed Robbery in History, for if my speculations here are true, there will be lots and lots of heads rolling for attempting the theft at all, plus tremendous public outrage at finding that this war was not for noble purposes, but was strictly a plan to steal what does not belong to us, killing many thousands of Americans and committing genocide against the Iraqi people in violation of everything for which America used to stand.

It's stealing. It's dying for stealing. It's killing in untold numbers to steal. It's causing incalculable damage to the world in general, and Iraq specifically, just to steal oil.

And meanwhile, China is circling the globe quietly purchasing every oil contract they can snap up, for a fraction of the cost in lives and treasure that the Greatest Attempted Heist in History will cost America.

Watch the Republicans squeal, twist, turn, and scream like a stuck pig as their continuing perfidy becomes clear to the world, they start turning on bush/cheney, and attempting to deny the role of the GOP and their own support for this failed theft.

Cross-posted from VidiotSpeak

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Keith Olbermann: All Hail the Prophetic Gut!

All Hail the Prophetic Gut!
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Countdown, Thursday 12 July 2007 (via t r u t h o u t)

[Cross-posted @ Edgeing]

Explaining Michael Chertoff's counterterrorism stomach.

You have by now heard the remark - instantly added to our through-the-looking-glass lexicon of the 21st century, a time when we suddenly started referring to this country as "the homeland," as if anybody here has used that term since Charles Lindbergh or the German-American Bund in 1940.

Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling."

Which, he took pains to emphasize, was based on no specific nor even vague intelligence that we are entering a period of increased risk of terrorism here.

He got as specific as saying that al-Qaida seems to like the summer, but as to the rest of it, he is perfectly content to let us sit and wait and worry - and to contemplate his gut.

His gut!

We used to have John Ashcroft's major announcements.

We used to have David Paulison's breathless advisories about how to use duct tape against radiation attacks.

We used to have Tom Ridge's color-coded threat levels.

Now we have Michael Chertoff's gut!

Once, we thought we were tiptoeing along a Grand Canyon of possible and actual freedoms and civil liberties destroyed, as part of some kind of nauseating but ultimately necessary and intricately designed plan to stop future 9/11s or even future Glasgow car bombers who wind up having to get out and push their failed weapons.

Now it turns out we are risking all of our rights and protections - and risking the anger and hatred of the rest of the world - for the sake of Michael Chertoff's gut...>>

I have pondered this supreme expression of diminished expectations for parts of three days now. I have concluded that there are only five possible explanations for Mr. Chertoff's remarkable revelations about his transcendently important counterterrorism stomach.

Firstly, Mr. Chertoff, you are, as Richard Wolffe said here the other night, actually referencing not your gut but your backside - as in, "covering it." CYA.

Not only has there not been a terrorist attack stopped in this country, but your good old Homeland Security hasn't even unraveled a plausible terrorist plan.

And you and your folks there have a different kind of stomach pain, knowing that with a track record that consists largely of two accomplishments - inconveniencing people at airports and scaring them everywhere else - your department doesn't know what the hell it's doing, and even you, Mr. Chertoff, know it.

Secondly, of course, there is the explanation of choice for those millions of us who have heard the shrill and curiously timed cries of "wolf" over the past six years - what we've called here "the Nexus of Politics and Terror" - that there isn't anything cooking, and your "gut feeling" was actually that you'd better throw up a diversion soon on Mr. Bush's behalf or something real - like the Republicans' revolt about Iraq, and the nauseating "gut feeling" that we have gotten 3,611 Americans killed there for no reason - was actually going to seep into the American headlines and consciousness.

It's impossible to prove a negative, to guarantee that you and your predecessors deliberately scared the American public just for the political hell of it - even though your predecessor, Mr. Ridge, admitted he had his suspicions about exactly that.

Suffice to say, Mr. Chertoff: If it ever can be proved, there will be a lot of people from Homeland Security and other outposts of this remarkably corrupt administration who will be going to prison.

Thirdly - and most charitably, I guess, Mr. Chertoff - is the possibility that you have made some credible inference that we are really at greater risk right now but that any detail might blow some sort of attempt at interruption. There is some silver lining in this one.

But the silver lining would have been a greater one if this National Counter Terrorism Center Report hadn't leaked out the day after you introduced us to your gut, a report suggesting al-Qaida had re-built its operational capacity to pre-9/11 levels.

Not only did this latest hair-on-fire missive remind us that al-Qaida's re-growth has been along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border; not only did it remind us that your boss let this happen by shifting his resources out of Afghanistan to Iraq for his own vain and foolish purposes, to say nothing of ignoring Pakistan; not only did it underscore the ominous truth that if this country is victimized again by al-Qaida, the personal responsibility for the failure of our misplaced defenses would belong to President Bush and President Bush alone, but on top of all of it, Mr. Chertoff, it revealed you for the phony expert you are - the kid who hears in confidence something smart from somebody smart and then makes his prediction that what the smart kid said confidentially is about to happen.

It reads just as you revised the "gut" remark this morning, sir - the "informed opinion." The kid telling stories out of school.

The fourth possibility is a simple reversal of the third, Mr. Chertoff.

You shot off your bazoo, and then this National Counter Terrorism Center report was rushed out - even created - to cover you, to give you credibility, to cloud the reality that you actually intoned to the Chicago Tribune, the 21st-century equivalent of "by the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes."

But the fifth possible explanation of your gut, Mr. Chertoff, is the real nightmare scenario.

And it is simple.

That you, the man who famously told us "Louisiana is a city that is largely under water," meant this literally.

That we really have been reduced to listening to see if your gut will growl.

That your intestines are our best defense.

That your bowels are our listening devices, your digestive tract is full of augurs, your colon produces the results that the torture at Gitmo does not.

All hail the prophetic gut!

So there are your choices: bureaucratic self-protection, political manipulation of the worst kind, the dropping of opaque hints, a gaffe backfilled by an "instant report," or the complete disintegration of our counterterror effort.

Even if there really is never another terror attempt in this country, we have already lost too much in these last six years to now have to listen to Michael Chertoff's gut, no matter what its motivation.

We cannot and will not turn this country into a police state.

But even those of us who say that most loudly and insistently acknowledge that some stricter measures, under the still-stricter supervision of as many watchdogs as we can summon, are appropriate.

But you're not even going to wring any of that from us, Mr. Chertoff, if we're going to hear remarks about your "gut feelings."

You have reduced yourself to the status of a hunch-driven clown, and it's probably time you turned your task over to somebody who represents the brain and not the gut, certainly to somebody who does not, as you do now, represent that other part of the anatomy - the one through which the body disposes of what the stomach doesn't want.

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