A comprehensive Primer on Iraq.

This is information you need From Mother Jones:

All right, no more excuses, people. After four years in Iraq, it’s time to get serious. We’ve spent too long goofing off, waiting to be saved by the bell, praying that we won’t get asked a stumper like, “What’s the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” Okay, even the head of the House intelligence committee doesn’t know that one. All the more reason to start boning up on what we—and our leaders—should have learned back before they signed us up for this crash course in Middle Eastern geopolitics. And while we’re at it, let’s do the math on what the war really costs in blood and dollars. It’s time for our own Iraq study group. Yes, there will be a test, and we can’t afford to fail.

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If you want a clearer view of what's going on try the foreign press.

From Germany: Bush: The Great Failure
Really sounds complimentary doesn't it?

From the Financial Times Analysis: Bush tries to buy some time
What for? Why, to try to wash the blood off his hands.

From The Yemen Observer, Yemen
Gulf States Must Avoid American Recklessness
This really inspires confidence.

From Tunis Hebdo, Tunisia
Sacrilege Against Islam:
This is how the whole region sees Shrub's 'plan'.

Is This What Bush Wants?

Our little Churchills

If you don't think Dubya is the greatest thing since sliced bread... You must be a 'terrist' sympathiser!

Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory
We've now arrived at the point where the White House and its followers reflexively characterize any criticism of the Leader's war of any kind as aid to the Enemy and an attack on our troops. They don't even bother any more to pretend that some types of criticism are "acceptable." It is now the duty of every patriotic American to cheer enthusiastically for the President's decisions. Anything else is tantamount to siding with the Enemy.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, whose criticism of the war has been as muted and restrained as can be, "accused President Bush of trying to pass the problems in Iraq on to the next president and described his actions as 'the height of irresponsibility.'" The White House's immediate response: that is a "partisan attack that sends the wrong message to our troops, our enemies and the Iraqi people." That's the only response the Bush movement now even bothers to make: those who speak against the Leader hate the troops and help the Enemy.

...Churchill would have recoiled -- he did recoil -- at their argument that criticism of the Leader and the war are improper and hurts the war effort. Churchill repeatedly made the opposite argument -- that one of the strengths of democracies is that leaders are held to account for their decisions and that those decisions are subject to intense and vigorous debate, especially in war. In January, 1942, Britian had suffered a series of defeats and failures (which Churchill candidly acknowledged and for which he took responsibility), and he therefore addressed the House of Commons and insisted that a public debate be held in order to determine whether he still had the confidence of the House of Commons in his conduct of the war (h/t MD):

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Go to this site.

Welcome to Pottersville - Behind Blue Eyes

What are the Neocons selling?

Walrus Speaks at Sic Semper Tyrannis

...I would like to paraphrase what we have seen and can expect to see in future.

To do so, you need to understand what the NeoCons objectives have been from the outset. They are a little Like Kaiser Wilhelms' reasons for encouraging German militarism from about 1900.

1. Protect the existence and power of the "military Industrial Complex". This has been under threat since the demise of the Soviet Union because people started to demand a "peace Dividend". The result was the PNAC and the idea that America, now being the sole pre-eminent superpower, should maintain this position - in other words keep spending on defence.

2. Demonise Arabs, the existence of an enemy is a pretext by a ruling class for postponing any social change aimed at reversing the massive social inequities between rich and poor in America for example reforming taxation, social security, health care, education, etc. etc. "because we are at war". These issues threaten the rich.

In other words, the entire NeoCon thing is all about maintaining the status quo and keeping the lid on the pressures for reform.

Read the rest.

A Mythical View of Today From the Future

Rebecca Solnit writing in The Nation Blog has some questions for us all and especially Dubya.

Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer

For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyist origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisers consciously plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

The Bush Administration's mismanagement of the US economy, while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for--and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then you're less interested in the obvious--why it all fell--than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention in those years.

Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign relations and the notorious USA Patriot Act. For example, as early as 2004, several states, led by California, began setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.

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The avalanch is coming for George W. Bush.

Olbermann does it again. The cut is to the quick, and there is no staunching of the blood.
Booman at Booman Tribune

The country has finally turned on George W. Bush. The country is in a very bad and testy mood. At the extreme, tonight's Special Comment on Keith Olbermann's Countdown was the most blistering indictment of a sitting President in the history of broadcast television. I have never seen anything like it. It violated every law of Higher Broderism. It even passed into raw conspiracy theory at points. In different and more stable times, a rant like Olbermann's would mark the swift end of his career. But our nation has entered into a new stage. Olbermann will pay no price for his outburst because even though it was extreme, it was an extremism that has now entered the boundaries of acceptable discourse. The country has no more use for George W. Bush and it has no will to rally to his defense.

Read on...

Question the Bush White house: Why, no! A Whitewash, if you please!

Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

"Why are the American people such suckers? How could they -- or, to be more exact, how could a significant number of them -- ever have fallen for the transparent bullshit of such third-rate goobers as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all the rest? How could the American people be so ignorant and misinformed about what goes on in the world? How can they be so ignorant and misinformed of their own history, of the dirty deals done in their names for years on end? How can this be?"

Good folk, look no further, for we do indeed have the answer here. If you want to know precisely how the American people are kept deliberately ignorant, simply click on the link to this story in the nation's "newspaper of record," the journal which sets the standard for and largely determines the news agenda of the American press: The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More than 30 Years. There, in the stately pages of The New York Times, you will find some 5,200 words written by Neil MacFarquhar detailing the rise, reign and fall of the Iraqi dictator. You will thrill to the usual gory details of torture, murder and savagery; you will tut at the violent barbarism of the rural riff-raff who got so far above his raising; you will snarl with condemnation at the mad aggressor who launched "continual wars" in the region, as the diligent scribe informs us.

[The actual total number of wars launched by Saddam Hussein was, er, two: the same number launched by George W. Bush -- if, that is, you don't count the never-ending, ever-expanding, great googily-moogily "Global War on Terror and Extremists and Radicals," in which case, Bush's "continual wars" far exceed the two conflicts instigated by Saddam -- one of which was overtly approved by Reagan Administration, the other tacitly approved by the Bush I administration.]

But what you will not find is any detail or examination whatsoever of the prominent, direct and continuing role the United States government played in bringing Saddam to power, maintaining him in office, underwriting his tyranny, and rewarding his aggression. This decades-long history -- beginning with the CIA's assistance in not one but two coups that first brought the Baath Party to power then cemented the hold of Saddam's internal faction on the country through the journey to Baghdad by the obsequious Donald Rumsfeld who came bearing words of support, bags of cash and military high-tech for Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on Iran down to the delivery of money, WMD technology and other goods of war by George Herbert Walker Bush up to the very day before Saddam's long-threatened invasion of Kuwait, which Bush's personal representative had told the dictator was of no concern to the United States -- does not appear in McFarquhar's mountain of prose.

There's more

This is a very curious story. Some of it is probably true, some of it is patently false – and all of it is a massive, panicky CYA job by American officials. However, through the heavy fog of this assemblage of spin, it seems fairly obvious what has really happened: the same group of dim-witted fools, ideological cranks and violent sectarians who have driven the whole misbegotten enterprise in Iraq came up with yet another plan that they thought was a great idea. But as always, it turned out to be a botched job that has made a hellish situation even worse.

Two things stand out in this story by Burns and Santora – or rather, two salient facts lurk behind the furious spin that the reporters have assembled. First, that despite all the protestations by U.S. officials here, it was the Americans who actually had the final say in letting the execution go forward. And second, the rank lawlessness of the execution is in fact a direct emulation of American "democracy" under the Unitary Executive Decidership of George W. Bush.

Read the rest. There are lots of good links.