Antony Loewenstein

The Bush administration and the neocons are forever coming up with reasons for why the US occupation of Iraq should continue. No matter how many times their arguments are knocked down by facts on the ground, they simply dust themselves off and recycle a prior bumper sticker slogan.

Now it’s John Burns, pushing the notion that if the US withdraws there’ll a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions as the Iraqis slaughter each other. The administration is seizing eagerly on this, which is a bit like Dracula saying his castle is the best security guarantee against local peasant girls being attacked by vampires.

There’ll certainly be no prospect of peace so long as US troops are occupying Iraq. Ask Iraqis, whom we can safely assume have a clearer grasp than Burns of what might improve the awful conditions of their lives. Outside Kurdistan, continued American occupation is not a popular view. Over 80 per cent of Iraqis tell pollsters they want the Americans out.

Will things get worse if Americans leave? Probably so, at least for a while. In 2005 the US said there would be a bloodbath if they left. So they stayed and there’s been a worsening bloodbath.

This would hilarious were it not so tragic. The bloodbaths the occupation is supposed to be preventing is still occurring. The refugee crisis the occupation was supposed to prevent is worse than imagined, and the puppet government in Iraqi is hanging on by a thread. With the surge going nowhere and no plan B on the table, the neocons are returning to the “genocide” argument.

Increasingly, the preferred argument of the Forever Caucus is that if we leave Iraq there will be “genocide,” as surely as dandelions follow a spring rain.

Here David Brooks shamefullly invents up a number (”10,000 Iraqi deaths a month…a tough moral issue”).

Here (at 5:50 in the video) John McCain says, “the Democrats want to set a date for withdrawal; there will be chaos in the region, and there will be genocide.”

Jonah Goldberg says an impending genocide will be history’s indictment of liberals failings in Iraq!

The saddest part of this tale is that the people being given a platform for framing the debate (by the MSM, of course) are the very people who have not only been entirely wrong since the beginning, but have been leading this debacle since before the invasion and are now denying it.

Hence, today we have yet another Op-Ed declaring that We Really Are Winning in Iraq This Time — this one in the NYT from “liberal” Brookings Institution “scholars” Ken Pollack and Mike O’Hanlon. They accuse war critics of being “unaware of the significant changes taking place,” proclaim that “we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms,” and the piece is entitled “A War we Might Just Win.”

The Op-Ed is an exercise in rank deceit from the start. To lavish themselves with credibility — as though they are war skeptics whom you can trust — they identify themselves at the beginning “as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” In reality, they were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon’s strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well. They are among the primary authors and principal deceivers responsible for this disaster.

Worse, they announce that “the Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility,” as though they have not.

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It’s bad enough that the Howard government has become a group of Bush administration sycophants, but they have similarly adopted the policy of politicizing any arrests that can be linked to terrorism, never admitting to mistakes or recognizing incompetence and worst of all, punishing the victims of their witch hunts for embarrassing them.

Stating that the “disgraceful treatment of Dr Haneef has all the hallmarks of a typical Howard government political play”, the daily criticised the Aussie PM for denying his involvement in the case by claiming that “he knows nothing”, and none of the key decisions in this case were made by him. “When will Howard take responsibility?” it asked.

Howard and his hangers-on are only too happy to grandstand when there is political mileage to be made, but like we have seen so many times during US Senate hearings, all too willing to feign ignorance when the bovine excrement is exposed.

Had Haneef’s barrister not leaked the police report to the media, there is every chance that Haneef would still be in custody, but as we have seen all too often, defending ones self in this climate of modern McCarthyism is not to be tolerated.

“You can’t blame Immigration minister Kevin Andrews. He acted on our information,” the police chief said, and also called on the Bar Association of Queensland to “severely reprimand” Haneef’s barrister Stephen Keim for leaking his client’s police interview to the media.

The decision to cancel Haneef’s visa is nothing more than an example of spitting the dummy.

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While Mao Tse Tung was rightly condemned for refusing aid to the detriment of his own people, the US has been demonstrating that the West is not immune to such deranged policies - all for the sake of the ego of one man.

A new report reveals the US government turned down offers of help from across the globe in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, telling one diplomat “human assistance of any kind is not on our priorities list.”

The report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington relies on a review of 25,000 documents obtained from the State Department. The report reveals the US was interested mostly in cash assistance and materials, rather than direct aid from foreign relief workers and doctors, after Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005.

“A review of the State Department documents reveals distressing ineptitude,” CREW’s executive director Melanie Sloan said in a prepared statement. “Countries were trying to donate desperately needed goods and services, but as a result of bureaucratic bungling and indifference, those most in need of these generous offers and of aid never received it.”

Offers to help came from 145 countries and 12 international organizations. The US did accept help from its top allies around the globe, but CREW’s report shows it left unclaimed hundreds of thousands of prepared meals, water pumps, doctors and medicine.

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The reaction of the right wing blogosphere to the Scott Beauchamp (aka Scott Thomas) affair has been taken to extreme proportions.  Watching the so called “troop supporters” turn on one of their own is like imagining a school of piranha feasting on a new born lamb.

Brother Gavin Explains it pretty well:

1) WingNet accuses soldier/journalist of being an impostor.

2) WingNet proven wrong.

3) WingNet backfills, engages motorized goalposts, attacks with redoubled fury.

3.5) Developing: WingNet completely loses narrative; forms digital lynch mob; redefines success to mean utterly destroying the targeted person by any means available, short of leaving the safety of their heavily-farted computer chairs.

4) Upcoming: WingNet brags about triumphant victory over forces of anti-American calling-them-wrongness which are blatantly in league with the terrorists, enjoys brief period of tumescence, finds new victim.

For a more detailed rundown, see Jon Swift:

But after some clever sleuthing by conservative bloggers, it turns out that Scott Thomas is Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who is, in fact, a soldier in Iraq. Although Beauchamp actually outted himself, it was no doubt because conservative bloggers were closing in on his identity, despite the clever way he threw off the keyboard detectives by actually using his real name as a pseudonym, which would have fooled anyone. But even if Beauchamp really does exist and really is a soldier that still doesn’t mean he isn’t lying. As Hugh Hewitt reveals after a thorough investigation of Beauchamp’s blog, Beauchamp is a fan of On the Road, a book I have not actually read, but which, according to Hewitt, “is thinly fictionalized autobiography,” a damning piece of evidence Hewitt puts in boldface type. People who read fiction, especially autobiographical fiction, certainly can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

Justin Raimondo gives us a peek into the mind of the War Party.

Militarism really is a religion with these people, and they reacted to the debunking of their gods with all the vehemence and shocked outrage that the Islamists directed at Salman Rushdie – immediately declaring a holy war against the blasphemer and his editors. With one voice, the right-blogosphere rose up, declaring the whole thing to be a hoax before having evidence of any such thing.

You see, they don’t need evidence: after all, we’re talking about an ideology that has degenerated into a faith. They know it isn’t true: they know the “surge” is working; they know the “real” story of how we’re winning in Iraq is being blocked by the MSM, which is reporting only the bad news. In the overwhelming face of evidence to the contrary, all they have to do is slip into their alternate universe and deny everything. That’s the psychological mechanism that produces both suicide-bombers and our suicidal foreign policy: the ability to block out all but a carefully pre-selected slice of reality, one that rationalizes and even glamorizes the gritty, bloody, messy reality of war.

Digby theorises that the source of this angst is produced during the formative years.

I hear so much from the right about how they love the troops. But they don’t seem to love the actual human beings who wear the uniform, they love those little GI Joe dolls they played with as children which they could dress up in little costumes and contort into pretzels for their fun and amusement. If they loved the actual troops they wouldn’t require them to be like two dimensional John Waynes, withholding their real experiences and feelings for fear that a virtual armchair lynch mob would come after them.

Thank God Joseph Heller and James Jones and Erich Maria Remarque and countless others aren’t trying to write their books today. They’d be burned as heretics by a bunch of nasty boys and girls who have fetishized “the troops” into a strange form of Boy Band eroticism — that empty, nonthreatening form of masculinity the tweens use to bridge the scary gap between puberty and adolescence. Private Peter Pan reporting for duty.

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While the neocons days appear to be numbered, it hasn’t stopped them from forging ahead with their plans to wreak global chaos; nor have the realities on the ground in Iraq blunted the fanaticism.

These people are prepared to pay any price for the chance to witness the day when bombs are raining down on Tehran.

First we had Charles Krauthammer, who admits that the costs would be terrible, economically, militarily and diplomatically, but is convinced the price is justified to prevent Iran becoming a regional power.

He asks the question:

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

While ironically overlooking the fact that and economically, militarily and diplomatically defeated US would be powerless to prevent another state from becoming such a threat.

More recently, the deranged Norman Podhoretz chimed in with his own take on this brand of nihilism.

Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray we will, we’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest. On the other hand — that’s a worst case scenario, and worst case scenarios don’t always materialize. It’s entirely possible that many countries, particularly in the Middle East — the Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, who are very worried about Iranian influence and power — would at least secretly applaud us.

And last but not least, a recent Heritage Foundation study of the economic effects of bombing Iran concluded that those effects would be bad (oil prices up, GDP down, employment down, recession in the offing, etc.). However, since Heritage is institutionally committed to insane hawkery, they re-ran their model with a few changes and discovered that the results weren’t so bad after all. In fact, bombing Iran might even be good for the economy!

Out of all the possible things they could spend their time doing, these wingnuts invested a substantial effort on torturing the data to come up with some plausible way of claiming that bombing Iran would be just peachy as far as the U.S. economy is concerned. Wow. That’s dedication to the cause.

The serious side to this, of course, is that Heritage now has this study sitting on their shelf just waiting for the next time Iran hawkery is again in the news. The next time someone argues that it would be economically devastating to attack Iran, they’ll be able to very soberly claim that a sophisticated economic model says we have nothing to worry about. And sane people almost certainly won’t have a comparable piece of claptrap to fight back with.

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A very good question.

Boy howdy, the Bush administration is harder to kill than roaches. It seems like every week, sometimes every day, there’s a new revelation that should make the Bushies radioactive even to their own party, that should make the American people clamor for impeachment (at the least), and yet it never… quite… happens. It’s like all those happy turning points in Iraq that never quite lead to a secular democracy.

Not only is the sheer volume of outrages impressive; consider the diversity. You’ve got corruption, contempt, coverups, catastrophic negligence, endless war, torture, illegal domestic spying, leaks, perjury, all-out war on science and the Constitution, rampant politicization of government, people getting shot in the face, and… gay hookers. Hell, I’m already in double digits, and that’s only a partial list of broad categories.

There have been so many times I thought that maybe, just maybe, this will be the one to finally reveal BushCo. and the GOP as a thuggish criminal enterprise fronted by a craven, smirking moron, but their image never quite seems to take a direct hit. I think Katrina being the sole exception - the Bushies couldn’t spin a hurricane.

It’s true, Dubya’s approval and disapproval ratings are inexorably ratcheting down into Nixonland, but I think the national mood is more “This sucks and I can’t wait for it to be over” than “This is intolerable and must end NOW!” The demand for getting us out of the disastrous quagmire of the Bush administration is nowhere near the demand for getting us out of the disastrous quagmire of Iraq.

Quite frankly, I’m not entirely sure why this is. Is it because Clinton’s impeachment was such a farce that it discredited the whole process? Does the improbability of conviction make it look like a waste of time? Does the idea lack legitimacy because Congressional Democrats never talk about it? Or is it possible that Americans still think BushCo. is merely incompetent rather than criminal?

The corollary to the question of Why is the question of What: What would it take for the idea of impeachment to catch fire? What would it take for its necessity to become so obvious that even Senate Republicans and the media admit it? Is there some Grand Colossal Fuckup Threshold that Team Bush has to exceed on their own, or is there something that Congressional Democrats and/or the netroots can do to help them along? Will investigations and subpoena battles be enough? Will talking about impeachment make it seem more realistic?

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If only this were true. Budoswky’s description of neoconservatives is right on the money, and while neoconservatism has been exposed as a failure, it would be a mistake to believe that these people no longer wield considerable influence in Washington.

Charles Krauthammer, not content with having been proven deadly wrong in his world view of many years, learning nothing from the bloody disasters of the policies he so aggressively promoted, now attacks Barack Obama for suggesting America should talk with enemies as well as friends.

Our first and last neoconservative President, George W. Bush, is the lead witness for the prosecution in the case whose verdict is the death of neoconservatism.

Never has any philosophy been proven so wrong, so fatal, so disastrous for our country and so deadly for our troops as the views expounded by neoconservative theoreticians.

Their ascent to power meant tragedy, failure and death. Their arrogance and their imperial grandeur has alienated what Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind. Their tactics have been pursued with contempt for alternate views, corruption of our democratic system, and condescension towards those who know far more about military affairs than they do.

In fact, one of the great specialties of the neoconservative movement is that so many who so ostentatiously failed to serve in the military, when their time came, so sneeringly question the patriotism of others, including those awarded medals for valor in combat.

When Ronald Reagan was changing the world with Mikhail Gorbachev, there were the neoconservatives, uttering their sneering contempt for Reagan, comparing his talks with Gorbachev to Pearl Harbor, comparing his diplomacy to Neville Chamberlain.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their fellow neoconservatives know better than Reagan about negotiating with enemies. They know better than Eisenhower about military industrial complexes. They know better than Ford about seeking diplomatic agreements to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They know better than Nixon about achieving breakthroughs with our major adversaries.

They are very good about hurling insults to attack their domestic enemies and very bad about supporting wounded troops, disabled veterans and homeless heroes.

Neoconservatives are very special people, in their own eyes. When things go wrong they become the party of perjury and pardons, the party of abuse of power and abuse of executive privilege to cover up their failures and crimes.

Neoconservatives champion the politics of fear, desperately seeking to frighten the people to justify their attacks on freedoms guaranteed by statute and constitution.

Neoconservatives embody the politics of profiteering, masterminding and organizing the most corrupt occupation in world history, staffed by ideological partisans, rewarding their campaign contributors, mismanaging tens of billions of lost and stolen dollars, under the imperial arrogance of a proconsul awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom.

Neoconservatives know better than generals, with their contempt for the Geneva Convention and their actions that civilized people call torture.

Our neoconservative theoreticians believe that George Washington was wrong and George Bush is right. Even torture is done with the big lie that they are promoting freedom and democracy with their corrupt occupation, their war against the Geneva Convention, and their shadow CIA created in the bowels of Rumsfeld’s neoconservative Department of Defense.

And then they try to keep their secrets.

And then they lie about what they do.

And then they bear false witness to Congress.

And then they claim that criminal acts are protected by privilege.

And then they complain when confronted by the law.

And then they whine when juries convict their leaders of perjury and demand the first of many presidential pardons.

And then they escalate their catastrophic war over the objection of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And now they want to continue this war in perpetuity and dump this disaster on the desk of the successor, to the man who calls himself the decider.

And there they are, again, today, on the oped pages of the newspapers, in their discredited think tanks, on their hate ridden right wing radio, before the smirking courtiers of the cable networks, still claiming they are right and their deadly blunders must be escalated again, and again.

Neoconservatism is dumb, discredited, and dead.

While they cover up their dirty laundry, and plan their next wars, and hire their criminal attorneys, and lobby for their pardons, the clock is ticking, the day is coming, when a a grateful nation will celebrate their removal from the high councils of government, once and for all.

Neoconservatism is dead.

One can only pray that he’s right.

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This is getting beyond ridiculous. What next, blame Iran for the next freak duststorm?

The U.S. military has noted a “significant improvement” in the aim of attackers firing rockets and mortars into the heavily fortified Green Zone in the past three months that it has linked to training in Iran, a top commander said today.

If the Green Zone has been under attack for at least three months, would it not be expected that the aim of those firing the mortars would improve? Insurgents have intelligence sources too don’t they, or are those Ayrabs just too backward and primitive to consider this possibility?

Here is another pearl.

“We’ve started to see a slow but gradual reduction in casualties and it continues in July,” he said at a joint news conference with Iraqi military commander Maj. Gen. Abboud Qanbar. “It’s an initial positive sign, but I would argue we need a bit more time to make an assessment whether it’s a true trend.”

So when deaths are up, it means the US needs more time to get the death toll down, and when the deaths are down, they need more time to confirm the trend and make an assessment. That’s Bush speak for tails I win, heads you lose.

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