When Bush's own people tell you we are going to attack Iran, it's time to listen. Then Stop him!

Steven D at Booman Tribune

There are plans to attack Iran, and they aren't merely "contingency plans" that the US Military prepares for all potential adversaries, as many claim. How do I know this? Why is Harry Reid warning the President? Read on ...

US contingency planning for military action against Iran's nuclear programme goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former US intelligence analyst said on Friday.

"I've seen some of the planning ... You're not talking about a surgical strike," said Wayne White, who was a top Middle East analyst for the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research until March 2005.

"You're talking about a war against Iran" that likely would destabilise the Middle East for years, White told the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank.

"We're not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We're talking about clearing a path to the targets" by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that could target commerce or US warships in the Gulf, and maybe even Iran's ballistic missile capability, White said.

When people who served in Bush's administration speak out we ought to take them seriously. Time after time, however, the media has either ignored these voices (General Shinseki, General Zinni) or attempted to marginalize and smear them (Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul O'Neill). Well, it's long past time for that sort of behavior. Mr. White's claims about Bush's war plan for Iran should be front page news on every major American newspaper, but they were not.

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Don't you just love this line? "A Fool's Erranhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifd"

John Holusha at The New York Times

A panel of retired generals told a United States Senate committee today that sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq will do little to solve the underlying political problems in the country.

“Too little and too late,” is the way Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, described the effort to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The additional troops are intended to help pacify Baghdad and a restive province, but General Hoar said American leaders had failed to understand the political forces at work in the country. “The solution is political, not military,” he said.

“A fool’s errand,” was the judgment of Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded troops in the first Gulf War. He said other countries had concluded that the effort in Iraq was not succeeding, noting that “our allies are leaving us and will be gone by summer.”

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"Paybacks are a bitch," thus says the Dark Wraith

...In my editorial of November 6, 2006, "In Moot Defense of Saddam," I set forth my condemnation of what constitutes yet another brutish violation of international law by the Bush Administration and its various agents of opportunity.

Writing at her blog, BlondeSense, Liz notes that Saddam's execution is the result of conviction on capital charges related to "...killing 148 people who were planning to assassinate him back in 1982." In comments on the thread from that article at BlondeSense, I expressed my assessment of what will result from Saddam's hanging. In edited and expanded form, I herewith publish that assessment as an editorial position of The Dark Wraith Forums.

Spiteful vengeance breeds spiteful vengeance. Despite the belief by neo-conservatives and a fair number of supporters of capital punishment that they are the best at all manner of retributive violence, and despite the American people's belief that we are seeing the worst of the quagmire that has become our unjustified, illegal attack on and occupation of Iraq, we as a nation have not even begun to see what horrors may rise from the sands of that grim and ancient land.

[...]

And yet, when that payback is visited upon us—and it will come to us—we shall scream bloody murder at the injustice of the outrage. That, of course, is to be expected of a tribe that has lost its understanding of tradition.

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Sadam is dead. And...?

Exactly what has changed?

Barbara O'Brian at Crooks and Liars

...Patriotism, apparently, demands that we celebrate Saddam’s death, even though he’d been stripped of his power and has been pretty much irrelevant for some time, and even though it’s unlikely his death will change a damn thing.

Josh Marshall gets it:

… This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

The very inauthenticity of the whole farce amounts to Bush Administration fingerprints. The confusion of pageantry and progress, of substituting photo ops and symbolism for actual accomplishment, is a hallmark of the Bush Administration. Yes, they’re all about covering up their ineptitude, but I wonder if at least some of them (like the President himself) honestly don’t know the difference.

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Is snuffing Saddam such a good idea?

Yeah, he's scum. But a recurring thought in Iraq seems to be "things under Saddam weren't as bad as we thought." And many now see him as being an icon for resistance against the occupation.
Steve Clemons at Huffington

The track has been laid. I don't see any way that Hussein can escape execution -- but everyone involved needs to realize that Hussein is no longer just a criminal, thuggish, murderous tyrant in the eyes of most Iraqi citizens.

To many, he has become a defiant leader fighting American oppression and someone who portrays himself as a proud and ferocious Sunni force. Many Sunnis want him back -- and we need to prepare for something big, very big, when he dies.

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Escalation will be Bush's step into hell

(Do you get the impression that I think this is a lousy idea?)
Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque

Bush's "Great Leap Forward." The first two prongs of this strategy seem guaranteed: there will be an escalation of the war and an attack on Sadr. The third thrust – expanding the war beyond Iraq – seems increasingly likely, but perhaps, at the moment, more of an option to be held in reserve, to be brought out when the first two elements inevitably begin to fail and there is, finally, nothing left for them to do but shoot the moon and see what happens.

Yes, they are that stupid. Yes, they are that criminally reckless. And no, they don't care how many American soldiers will be slaughtered in the process – not to mention (which they never do) the countless Iraqi and Iranian – and American – civilians who will be killed in direct assaults and the inevitable, generations-long blowback.

Read all of it.

Surging to Disaster (Seems to be a common thought.)

Lawrence J. Korb and Max Bergmann at The American Prospect

Want to break the back of the U.S. military while failing to accomplish anything new in Iraq? Send in more troops.

In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson began escalating America's involvement in Vietnam, Undersecretary of State George Ball warned that "the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante." In the summer of 1965, when the United States had less than 100,000 troops in Vietnam, Ball concluded that "humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives -- even after we have paid terrible costs." As Ball predicted, the United States eventually increased its troop levels to nearly 600,000 and suffered almost 60,000 deaths to no avail.

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We face a near endless quagmire in Iraq and the mid East.

Would you want to be the president who has to shovel out all the residue from Dubya's 'Excellent Adventure'?
Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

Post-Bush, we'll either have a Republican war hawk like John McCain in the White House or a Democrat who will face the unsavory choice of continuing Bush's Middle East policy as a fait accompli or risk being labeled by latter day Rovewellians as the "Defeat-ocrat" who lost the war Bush was "definitely winning" when he turned over the watch even though the new Democrat on the block had sufficient force--thanks to Bush's foresight, of course--to continue the fight.

The Kristol Palace

Not surprisingly, the Times editorial also follows the neocon company line that makes Donald Rumsfeld the scapegoat for Iraq.

…it took the departure of Donald Rumsfeld — the author of the failed Iraq policy and the doctrine of going to war with less than the Army we needed — for Mr. Bush finally to accept this reality.

[...]

Yes, Rumsfeld was a key member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), but he was hardly alone in formulating the Iraq policy. Other PNAC luminaries who endorsed a ground invasion of Iraq back in 1998 included recently deposed U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, present U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, and PNAC founder Bill Kristol.

Kristol first pushed Rumsfeld on the third rail of the commuter tracks back in 2004 when he lambasted the then SecDef's comment about "you go to war with the Army you have."

If irony were still alive and with us, it would be a funny thing that Kristol and his wingman Bob Kagan thought the Army we had back in 1998 was sufficient to "do this job."

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