Liberal Intolerance

Sometimes I get lucky and find somebody who says what I think better than I ever could. This one is 99.9+%. Nothing's perfect. By Mark Morford in the EssEffChron, in its entirety, without blockquotes:

I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you nefarious and perverted liberal commie tofu-hugging sex-drunk San Francisco medical experiment gone wrong from the land of fruits and nuts (or some iteration thereof -- so cute, my hate mail can be), hey, I notice you love to ridicule those creepy Christian megachurches and you enjoy spanking wide-eyed Mormons and tweaking the litigious nipples of the cult of Scientology and you recoil at toxic Bush policy like a vegetarian recoils at undercooked veal.

And I can tell you think Dick Cheney is pretty much the devil in a defibrillator and that America is so desperately on the wrong track it might as well be North Korea, and you clearly tend to wince in savage karmic pain when looking down the rusty barrel of a welfare-happy red state and I just have one slightly nasty and pointed and cliched question for you -- Here it is: Where is your supposed progressive openness? Your liberal generosity of spirit? I thought you Lefties were all mushy and passive and live-and-let-live?

In other words, where is that famous so-called tolerance I thought all you wimpy libs were supposed to possess like some sort of gentle polyamorous smiling hug for the world?

To which I reply: You cannot be serious. Does the answer really need to be articulated? Is it not painfully obvious? Can I have a shot of Patrуn and a long nap before I answer? Here goes ...

You, hate-mailers from the sanctimonious Right and even some of you morally paralyzed middle-grounders from the Left, are correct. I am, in fact, deeply intolerant. It is true. I can hide my deep biases and predispositions no longer.

I cannot, for example, tolerate the dark and violent road down which this nation seems intent on careering like an Escalade on meth. I cannot tolerate brutal, never-ending unnecessary wars and I cannot allow gay rights to be bashed and I truly loathe watching women's rights be slammed back to 1952. Or 1852.

I really have little patience for the gutting of our school system and the decimation of science and mysticism and the human mind for the sake of a handful of militant Christian zealots who truly believe the Second Coming will be arriving really soon but hopefully not before the next episode of HBO's "Cathouse: The Series," which they watch in secret with the lights off while clutching a Bible in one hand and a big tub of Country Crock margarine in the other.

I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant to be one of the most articulate and intellectually sophisticated leaders on the planet, mumbling his semicoherent support of the embarrassing non-theory of "Intelligent Design," to the detriment of about 300 years of confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to the point where America's armies of dumbed-down Ritalin-drunk children look at him and sigh and secretly wish they could have a future devoid of such imbecilic thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another doomed and fraught generation who will face an increasingly steep uphill battle, who will actually have to fight for fact and intellectual growth and spiritual progress against a rising tide of ignorance and religious hegemony and sanitized revisionist textbooks that insult their understanding and sucker punch their sexuality and bleed their minds dry.

I have surpassed my allowable limit for how much environmental devastation I can willingly swallow or how many billion-dollar tax subsidies our cowardly CEO president gives his cronies in Big Energy while doing nothing to ease our gluttony for foreign oil, all the while trying to tell us how many undereducated misguided American teenage soldiers we have to sacrifice at the bloody altar of oil and empire before we can call ourselves king of the bone pile again.

But I am perhaps most intolerant, not of Christians per se, not of faith, certainly not of radiant self-defined spirituality, not even of organized religion -- though I do fully believe more independent spirits and raw human souls and moist sexual licks have been lost to its often narrow-minded and cosmically rigid brainwashing techniques than have ever been saved. But hey, that's just me.

I am most intolerant of, well, of those who allow such intolerance. Of those who would, based on their narrow views of sex, God, love, hope, war, the mind, the Earth, soil and animals and air and water and fire and love and spirit and drugs and guns and dildos, work to legislate those neoconservative beliefs, codify them, make them the law of the land, force their regressive beliefs on everyone else under punishment of violence and beatings and prison. I am, in short, intolerant of intolerance.

Oh, let us be clear. I love diversity, religious pluralism, peace and love and pacifism and good drugs and open-mouthed sensuality. I'm happy to let you believe in any god you like and marry any gender you like and let you love how you will and be in full control of your sex and your body and your mind.

This, to me, is the America worth fighting for. These are the laws I support. Don't believe in abortion? Don't understand gay people? Sexuality makes you rashy? Think Harry Potter teaches kids evil and witchcraft? Don't marry a sexy gay witch abortionist. But don't you dare, based on your limited understanding of God and life, make laws declaring that I can't.

But maybe this is the problem, especially here in San Francisco, the World Headquarters of Tolerance, where liberals tend to be so PC and open- minded they merely sigh and shrug when our government and half the nation move to outlaw everything they stand for, when those people openly loathe human rights and try to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution and slowly annihilate Roe vs. Wade and treat any display of resistance or questioning of the norm the way a dog treats a fire hydrant.

Enough. Basta. Let's refashion the old, stagnant definition of tolerance and make it less about merely enduring, merely putting up with the existence of other narrow-minded beliefs no matter how devastating and embarrassing they obviously are to the nation's health.

Rather, let's flip that sucker over and baste it with raw goat butter and sear it on the open flames of divine justice and bliss and intellectual fire and white-hot orgasm and burn it new.

Let us take the rather flaccid word tolerance and pump it full of Ecstasy and medical marijuana and sake and real divine love and fancy book learnin', turn it on its head and spin it like a bottle and reclaim it from the neocon Right and turn it into, say, giddy outrage. Or radical reconsideration. Or ecstatic rebellion. Or wet conscious electric pointed awareness. Is this not a better way?

Let us explode those dead meanings, correct the mistaken neocon dictionary. Let us hurl that dying and mealy and abused term back at their powerful and often bigoted scowl. Here is your weak, ineffectual tolerance. We cannot swallow it anymore. In fact, we are choking on it.

Mark Morford's column appears on SFGate.com and in Datebook on Wednesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com

Exactly right

[. . .]

"She's going to kill us," one of the men said.

"She'll be pissed; that's for sure," another agreed.

"She'll understand," her husband said.

The three men were bent over the engine compartment of an old car. A nineteen eighty-eight GT Mustang to be exact, the highly modified five liter engine and T-5 standard transmission sat on a dolly in the corner of the room. Their tenure under the hood of the muscle car was finished. It would probably find a home in another hot rod Ford, maybe someone might even have the testicles to drop it in a Camaro, but its time in this car was over.

The new powerplant that was being installed by the three men was as far removed from the old Five-Oh as the plankton was from the whale. The only resemblance between the two drive trains was that the new one had something that looked like an exhaust pipe. There was no transmission bolted to it either; there would be no need for that. The finned, vented disc brake rotors and four-piston calipers were also sitting in boxes near the old engine. Where the rotors and calipers had lived now resided four small, extremely powerful electric motors and stator assemblies. Zero-gauge wires came from each motor to distribution relays that were operated by an onboard computer that also monitored the powerplant and driver inputs.

"What's the old man going to say," one of the men asked. "After all, he did build the thing. We could have used one of the company's vehicles."

"He told me to do whatever it took to get this operational," the other replied. "Besides, unveiling this in a Suburban or a Crown Victoria doesn't have the same effect as doing it with a jet black GT Mustang."

"I hope you know what you're doing, Ethan," one of the men warned. "Your father-in-law built the car for your wife. I don't relish the thought of having both of them angry at me."

"Leave Kim and the Colonel to me," Dr. Ethan McHenry soothed.

"Do you think we can have this ready for a test tomorrow?"

"Shouldn't be a problem," Hermann Wood, Chief Engineer for NoahCorp replied. Gerald Rienzi, Director of Research and Develop-ment nodded in assent.

"Good." McHenry gave them a smile. "I'll get everything squared away. Can you close up here?"

"Yeah, take off, Ethan," Wood gave him a wave. "We'll finish up."

"Ok, catch you in the morning."

Ethan McHenry left the R&D facility, nodding to the two guards on duty at the entrance of the bay. The existence of the new engine was known to very few. Not even the guards knew what went on behind the big door. He, Wood, Rienzi, a handful of technicians and engineers and, of course, Ethan's father-in-law, were privy to the secrets contained in R&D.

McHenry thought about the Mustang as he boarded the tram that would take him to the administration building, over a mile away. His father-in-law did build the car, but he would understand, Ethan was right about that. His wife would get over it too, although he really should have asked her if he could have the thing. Had it been any other car, Kim wouldn't have batted an eye when he told her what he'd done, but it was her Mustang.

And she wouldn't have cared if it were any other Mustang, but her father had built it and that was the rub. Kim Song Johnson McHenry, supermodel, TV personality, CEO of NoahCorp, his wife, had a love for her father that bordered on the spiritual. They had a bond that was unbreakable; to her, he walked on water, and Ethan thought that was a good thing, most of the time. Yes, Kim would give him hell, but he would deal with it and she would get over it, just like her father, for she loved Ethan also and she knew that he was doing what was best, for her, for NoahCorp, and for Humanity.

[. . .]

Friday Cattle Dog London Blogging

The Princess takes a break this week to let us think about London in happier days.

1. St. Paul's
2. Prince Albert Memorial
3. Tower Bridge
4. Parliament
5. Big Ben
6. Fixer and the Mrs. having our afternoon pint after roaming around all day.

Eminent Domain, Ry Cooder, and Chavez Ravine

Since there's been so much talk about eminent domain in the wake of the recent unconscionable decision of SCOTUS, I think this is very timely. Also, I'm an L.A. contemporary of Mr. Cooder's. We've never met, but we grew up not too far apart, although I didn't know it until I read this article, and I've been a fan of his for years. I remember the whole Chavez Ravine brouhaha. I've never set foot in Dodger Stadium because I didn't like the way it was acquired, even at 10 years of age. Must've been the dawn of any social consciousness I've got.

Ry Cooder has a new album that, given the lead time to do an album, is uncanny in its timing. This article in Mother Jones tells about the album, the neighborhood, and his inspiration.

Cooder's remarkable new album is titled Chavez Ravine, and this little neighborhood is Solano Canyon, the last intact section of the 400-acre district that gave the project its name. One of the most celebrated guitarists alive, best known for his work on Buena Vista Social Club, Cooder has spent the last three years constructing an evocation of Chicano East L.A. in the '40s and '50s - and he has become so fluent in the history of these side streets that he can go door to door telling stories.

As late as the 1940s, Chavez Ravine was an Old World enclave with 300 families of Mexican immigrants - a place where goats wandered freely and kids played in the dirt roads. But in 1950, following a city planning commission study of L.A.'s "blighted areas," it was decided that Chavez Ravine would be cleared out to make way for a low-income public-housing project. Most families took the meager payout and didn't challenge the authorities; when necessary, though, the city invoked the right of eminent domain, seized the land, and bulldozed the residences.

But the real estate lobby (which Cooder calls "hideous villains") saw an opportunity, and cast the idea of public housing as "creeping socialism." They accused the Los Angeles Housing Authority's Frank Wilkinson of being a communist agent, and the FBI stepped in to squash the project. Eventually, the housing authority sold 170 acres of Chavez Ravine back to the city, which offered the site to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley. After a voter referendum and a California Supreme Court decision, construction on Dodger Stadium began in 1961. It's a classic Los Angeles story, full of shadowy deals and backroom corruption, reminiscent of Chinatown or a James Ellroy novel, and Cooder captures it with impressive complexity and nuance.

He drives through the adjacent fields of sprawling Elysian Park and further up into the hills before pulling to the side of the road to look down on the massive spread of the baseball stadium, perched above the city streets on a hill of its own. "That's just the parking lot," says Cooder, 58, from behind oversize yellow sunglasses. "You can see it was an enormous expanse. There's a whole town under there. I love the fact that it's high, it's up. I wanted to say that in the music - that it was set apart, and when you were here, you were somewhere else for real."

RY COODER HIMSELF seems vaguely out of time; in his checked shirt and slip-on Vans, speaking steadily but in no hurry, he exudes something like a beatnik cool (he even says "I dig it" with some frequency). His career defies easy explanation. He has recorded with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, the Monkees, and Little Feat. His solo albums, explorations of "world music" long before such a term existed, have featured Hawaiian slack-key guitars, Tex-Mex accordions, and Indian flutes. He's written scores for numerous films such as Paris, Texas and The Long Riders. His reputation as a guitarist is such that, as he hilariously recounts, Bob Dylan showed up at his door one night, unannounced and shabbily dressed, looking for help learning a Sleepy John Estes blues song (and giving the neighbors a good scare in the process). And all that came before Cooder produced Buena Vista Social Club, which won him a Grammy and introduced traditional Cuban music to the masses.

Yet in almost 40 years of dizzying musical globe-trotting, Cooder had never plumbed the idioms of his native Los Angeles. "I always thought East L.A. music was so dreamy and languid and kinda greasy," he says. "I would think, something's out there - I wonder what? I used to sneak my little East L.A. instrumental ideas into movie scores. If I saw an opening, we'd dream up some little low-rider song."

"I needed a story to go with this East L.A. thing," he says. "You can't just do the old songs; they've done those to perfection. Then I found this book, The Provisional City, that's a history of public housing in L.A., and it told the whole story about the Ravine and the FBI and Frank Wilkinson. It was so vivid to me, so I thought, I'll pretend to score the book. I found the mood I want, I found myself as a speaker - which is what you have to do, you can't just be an observer, you have to get yourself located."

Armed with his research, Cooder continued sketching out the mood, texture, and narrative of the album. Musicians including bassist Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre's musical right hand), jazz pianists Jacky Terrasson and Chucho Valdes, and East L.A. boogie king Don Tosti got involved. Cooder visited with Wilkinson, now 93 years old, who showed the musician the 132,000-page file the FBI kept on him, including details of an assassination plot that J. Edgar Hoover did nothing to prevent. ("He's very proud of that," notes Cooder.) Wilkinson even provided a cameo narrative to the album. More songs, in both English and Spanish, were written or found: the story of the Zoot Suit Riots, an account of a bulldozer driver, and even a tune sung in the voice of the scarred earth. Cooder also came up with the slightly loony character who helps tie the story together - a lonely "space vato" dropping in on the residents of Chavez Ravine in his UFO.

"WHAT A MACHINE!" Cooder beams as he stands in a small garage called CJ's, located at the entrance to the Santa Monica airport, a few blocks from where he grew up and not far from his current home. He runs a hand over the half-constructed '50s-vintage ice cream truck that he's having rebuilt. "It sits just so, I tell you. The slope is the thing - Good Humor figured that out."

He's seeing the new hubcaps (actually replicas from Taiwan) for the first time. In a few days, a low-rider specialist will put in the motor and the brakes. Then Cooder will ship the whole thing to San Antonio, where a young Chicano artist will paint a Chavez Ravine mural on the truck's side; concurrently, a local artist is building a diorama of the old neighborhood that will fit in the back. What will he do with this rolling masterwork? Who knows - it won't be completed until long after the album is out and its promotion is done. "This is for me," he says, shuffling back through the parking lot. "I've been wanting an ice cream truck forever. You can't just work and work and work - and this is worth it! This thing is something else."

One other result of his work, though, was Cooder's realization that the legacy of Chavez Ravine is not entirely negative; the neighborhood's destruction also led to a transformative moment in Mexican American activism. "Chavez Ravine is the dawn of Chicano consciousness," he says. "It was the first time they acted together in defense of themselves as a group. They went down to City Hall to these City Council meetings, to these condemnation proceedings, and they damn sure demonstrated and protested. It didn't get them anywhere, but it was the first time it happened."

Please go read the whole article. Be sure to see the links at the bottom. Oh, yeah, buy the album.

Crap

The report from the team investigating religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy. It boils down to this:

[. . .]

"There is a lack of operational guidance that tells commanders and senior supervisors exactly what is appropriate in regard to free exercise of religion," the general said. "There were some faculty and staff, in efforts that were probably well-intentioned, who expressed their faith in ways that were inappropriate for somebody in a position of authority."

[. . .]

Lack of operational guidance? WTF? You are a publicly funded school. You have a cross-section of America's children studying to enter our officer corps. Read my lips: YOU DON'T SANCTION RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS. YOU DON'T SANCTION THE PROMOTION OF ONE RELIGION OVER ANOTHER. Got it? Leave us move on:

[. . .]

"It is not that minority cadets cannot get accommodation," he said, "but that the academy was not addressing the issue up front, such as including holy days on the calendar. So in some cases, it made cadets feel like the academy was not as sensitive to those needs, and was putting the burden on the cadet to ask for the accommodation."

[. . .]

Cannot get accomodation? When a kid asks for respect and gets called a 'filthy Jew', it doesn't sound too accommodating to me, you twits. When Islamic kids are told Christianity will crush Islam, it doesn't sound too accommodating either. Fucking morons. And you know, it's just a few bad apples:

[. . .]

"We found there was a certain amount of behavior on the part of some 18-to-22-year-olds that is less than it should be," he said. That behavior included religious slurs, jokes and disparaging remarks made by some cadets.

[. . .]

So it's just them younguns, huh? Not that the folks running the place are all Bible-thumping Christians who think it's their way or the highway. Team Jesus and all.

[. . .]

General Brady said cadets indicated religious slurs and jokes have decreased at the academy over the past few years. To further bolster that trend, and in light of recent attention on religious issues, the academy has created a new program specifically designed to help young cadets of any background become more aware of the diversity around them.

[. . .]

They've decreased, but they haven't stopped. I don't know, threatening them with expulsion (for the cadets) and courts-martial (for the commanders) might end them, but that's just me.

This investigation was done the way all Chimpy Inc 'investigations' are done. No rebuke of the commanding officers who condone this crap. None of the upperclassmen who fomented this 'yay God' mentality, none who disrespected their fellow officer-candidates we're expelled or disciplined. This report is good enough to wipe your ass with, better than Air Force TP anyway, trust me. I guess it's time for the kids who are persecuted to start passing out some ass-kickings. It's up to you boys and girls, your government ain't standing behind you.

Hokay, back to the proofs.

Chickenhawks

Here's a good one, via DemVet. Not only is this guy young and stupid, he's also a fucking idiot:

On Jesus General's Operation: Yellow Elephant:

[. . .]

The group was obviously fraudulent. There are specific military rules banning partisan political activities during enlistment. Plus, a Google search shows that no such group really existed. Liberals have no sense of humor, which frankly is why they cannot win elections. (But then again, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to the military rounding up certain Democrats in our society and taking them to labor camps...if nothing else, this would aid the military in doing their job).

[. . .]

It's called satire, dickweed. I haven't been a hippie for close to 30 years, but this little twit must've read a history book once:

[. . .]

Well, this morning, I received numerous emails from various liberal pot-smoking hippies around the country who were amused at the exchange of emails. (Why were they not at work? Well we all know that answer). Here are a few selections:

[. . .]

Although I am liberal and pot smoking, though I think this clown's done his share:

[. . .]

Leftist hippies are the real threat to America - these "domestic terrorists" wish to destroy our country. They hope to remove everything we stand for. They strive the adoption of French as our national language and the forced conversion of the country to Islam.

[. . .]

We're pot smoking hippies, we don't want to force anything. In fact, I want a couple Oreos.

[. . .]

Obviously these hippies would rather support a draft dodger (both Bill Clinton and Howard Dean) than members of the current Bush administration who have extensive military careers.

They are calling us "hypocrites" for the supposed support of a war...but refusing to join the military. Does this even make sense? Since when do I have to support my political stances with physical action. I believe in tougher testing standards for children in schools, but you don't seem me going to become a test writer for the Education Testing Service. Following this round of logic....if these people thing abortion is so great, how come they don't all sign up to be abortion doctors? Because it doesn't make sense!

[. . .]

Extensive military careers. Rummy. That's it. I guess it's good to be 20-something and know everything. But he does support the troops:

[. . .]

I do support the troops and I support their efforts to defend America. I support military action wherever it takes us when the cause is good and just. I am a proud American. If I was asked by my country to join the military in order to preserve these great traditions we share, I would do so in a heartbeat. I salute those men and women who do make the choice to serve in the armed forces and will always continue to be a strong supporter of their efforts.

"If I was asked . . ." Shit, son, Army recruiting's down 40%. They ain't asking, they're screaming.

The bin Ladens

Since we seem to have forgotten about Good Ol' Osama, killer of 3000 friends and neighbors of mine, I figure it's time to see what others have been doing to track him. I mean, it's not like (p)resident Dicknose gives a shit anymore. Osama gave him 9/11. Der Spiegel has done an investigative piece on the terrorist and his family:

The Bin Laden family disowned black sheep Osama in 1994. But have they really broken with the mega-terrorist? Recently revealed classified documents seem to suggest otherwise. Osama's violent career has been made possible in part by the generosity of his family - and by his contacts with the Saudi royals.

In early spring 2002, American intelligence agents tipped off authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina that something wasn't quite right with the "Benevolence International Foundation." Their reaction was swift; special forces stormed eight offices of the Islamic foundation in Sarajevo and in Zenica. They found weapons and explosives, videos and flyers calling for holy war. More importantly, however, they discovered a computer with a mysterious file entitled "Tarich Osama" -- Arabic for "Osama's Story."

[. . .]

But could this really be possible? Are the bin Ladens (or "Binladins," as they more commonly spell it), with their 25 brothers, 29 sisters, in-laws, aunts and, by now, at least 15 children of Osama, nothing but a clan of terrorists? Or are relatives being taken to task for the crimes of one family member, all on the strength of legends and conspiracy theories?

[. . .]

The bin Laden story, with its dramatic twists and turns, almost comes across as an Arab version of Thomas Mann's novel "Buddenbrooks." In both cases, it's the story of an imposing patriarch, who has managed to hold the clan together, and of his sons, who cannot or do not wish to stop the family's moral decline.

[. . .]

In late 1979, Osama, with the royal family's blessing, set off for Afghanistan to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union, which had invaded its neighbor to the south. Both the CIA and Saudi Arabia helped fund the Mujahedeen's armed struggle against the communist "infidels." Prince Turki, head of the Saudi secret service, visited Osama several times in Afghanistan and heavy equipment provided by the SBG family business was used to excavate secret tunnels. For Osama, the support of the Saud family and the bin Ladens became a reliable source of funding.

[. . .]

On Jan. 9, 2001, OBL attended his son Mohammed's wedding in Kandahar, accompanied, according to CIA sources, by his mother and two of his brothers. The CIA also claims that "two of Osama's sisters traveled to Abu Dhabi" a month later, where they met with an al-Qaida agent at the Gulf emirate's airport to deliver large sums of cash.

In mid-January 2005, New York federal judge Richard Casey wrote, in his grounds for allowing the civil suit against SBG filed by the families of 9/11 victims, that "the Saudi Binladin Group maintained close relationships with Osama bin Laden at certain times," and that it remains "unclear" whether these ties continued when OBL became involved in terrorism.

[. . .]

{former CIA Agent and author of Imperial Hubris anonymously Mike] Scheuer's axis of evil differs markedly from the president's. He believes that Pakistan and, even more so, Saudi Arabia are the epicenters of global violence. "Many Saudis support the terrorists in Iraq to this day - but we're the ones who are putting up the money -- by paying $50 for a barrel of oil and making ourselves dependent on oil imports."

Scheuer, an experienced intelligence expert, doubts that the entire bin Laden family has severed ties with Osama: "I haven't seen anything in the last 10 years that's convinced me that would be the case." In his view, SBG still derives some of its profits from business dealings in the Islamic world that can be linked to the family's supposed "black sheep." "He's treated as a hero almost everywhere over there," says Scheuer.

[. . .]

Of course, former CIA agent Scheuer is well aware that the bin Ladens, as investors in and customers of the Carlyle Group, an investment company, had common business interests with the Bushs. In fact, until October 2003 George W.'s father and predecessor in the White House still worked as an "advisor" for Carlyle, which is also involved in the defense sector. Although Scheuer is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, he also believes that the US government was "unusually" accommodating to the bin Ladens. Does he regret leaving the CIA, and does he dream of returning? Scheuer, a father of four, says: "I liked my job. I wanted to protect the country against its enemies -- but not the president against his critics."

Part One.
Part Two.

Google bomb

Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Downing Street Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo Rycroft Memo George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush
George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush George W Bush Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war Iraq war

Downing Street Minutes

My notes are in [italic]. Emphases are mine.

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL -- UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew Rycroft

Date: 23 July 2002 [Note the date]

S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC [Joint Intelligence Committee] assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the U.S. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C [Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's foreign intelligence service] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. [Note again, they believed this in July of '02] Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. [This is the kicker] But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. [In July '02, they were already working on 'fixing the facts'] The NSC [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. [Which is why we're in the mess we're in now]

CDS [Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defense staff] said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad U.S. options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 U.S. troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. U.S. forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The U.S. saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary [Rumsfeld] said that the U.S. had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. [Remember again, this is July '02] No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in U.S. minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the U.S. congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. [So, when Powell went to the U.N., he knew he was shoveling shit] It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. [They knew what they had to do, they just had to make the case] If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS[Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defense staff] said that we did not know yet if the U.S. battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions. [I wondered for months why the generals went along so easlity. They didn't, they just had their arms twisted for a longer period of time until they caved] For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the U.S. would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, U.S. and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be U.S./UK differences. Despite U.S. resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. [That's the route they finally took] Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush. [So the Smirking Moron wouldn't fuck it up]

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of U.S. planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the U.S. military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

[Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide.]

"Mushroom clouds"

SEOUL — As North Korea accelerates the pace of its nuclear weapons program, the United States and its allies have limited options to prevent one of the world's poorest and most erratic nations from becoming a nuclear power.

[. . .]

I know I talk about this a lot, basically because the press has decided not to . . . until that little lunatic in North Korea does something to get their attention. I spent three years of my life in South Korea, not far from the DMZ. I love and respect the Korean people, and I look back on my time spent with them with fondess. It's an area rich in history and culture, and the last thing I want to see is this land become the blast point of the next regional conflict. They went through enough earlier this century.

[. . .]

The Bush administration appears to have ruled out any kind of preemptive strike on North Korea, which with its conventional artillery alone could inflict massive casualties on neighboring South Korea and the more than 30,000 U.S. troops stationed there. And with diplomacy failing, nonproliferation experts have begun to speak despairingly of the inevitability of a nuclear North Korea.

[. . .]

There is no denying Kim Jong Il is nuts. What would he do with nuclear weapon that could concievably reach the western U.S.? How many scores would he try to settle in the region? We know of his lust for the wealth of South Korea and his difficulties with the Japanese.

[. . .]

During a previous nuclear showdown, when Bill Clinton was president, and another tense period in 2003, policymakers stared down the path of military action and blanched. Although there is no doubt that the United States and its allies would prevail in any contest, military analysts believe that North Korea could kill hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea and perhaps Japan before it goes down in defeat.

[. . .]

The 1994 deal that Clinton struck was weighted in the North Koreans' favor, but lines of communication were open. We could talk to them and the U.N. was able to monitor their progress in the nuclear arena. That changed in 2000.

[. . .]

What little contact there is between the United States and North Korea has deteriorated into an unseemly exchange of insults. Shortly after Bush characterized Kim Jong Il as a "tyrant" during a news conference last week, the North Koreans denounced Bush as a "philistine" and a "hooligan."

But many diplomats think there is still more the administration can do to bring North Korea back into negotiations. For example, the White House has been criticized for refusing to conduct one-on-one talks with the North Koreans, insisting that all contacts remain within the multilateral framework.

[. . .]

With teenagers running the White House, this is what passes for diplomacy. Name calling. Yeesh. This isn't high school or college. You have a madman with a lust for power (of the most dangerous kind), you have to treat him gently until you can disarm him. This mess on the Korean Peninsula has been exacerbated by the doings of Bush's new U.N. Ambassador nominee, John Bolton (yes, him), who'd begun the name calling not long after arriving in the region.

[. . .]

The South Koreans and Chinese have indicated that they would like to see the United States put a more specific proposal on the table, laying out in detailed steps what economic and security incentives would be provided if North Korea dismantled its nuclear program.

The Americans "need to come up with positive reinforcement mechanisms rather than these negative signals that make the situation worse and worse," said Moon Chung In, a South Korean academic and foreign policy advisor to his government.

[. . .]

So, while Bush & Co. plays their silly little game in Iraq that's costing the lives of our children and squandering our wealth, Kim Jong Il plays another, more calculated one. He knows our forces are stretched so thin that any sort of response to him would be slow and anemic. By the time we get it together, it will be as it was in 1950, maybe worse. Instead of barely holding on to the southern tip of Korea, a swift attack from the North could net part or all of Japan. There are a lot of U.S. bases within reach of Kim's missiles already. The reality is that he could destroy a good part of our military assets in East Asia.

[. . .]

Within the last month, North Korea shut down its 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. Nuclear experts believe the decision was probably a prelude to removing fuel rods from the reactor to extract plutonium to make nuclear arms.

If that happened, according to a recent report by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., North Korea could have 11 nuclear bombs by next year.

[. . .]

What eleven targets would Jesus choose? What, you don't think he's on our side anymore, do ya?

Thanks to Pudentilla blogging at Skippy's for the link

Well, I don't know about this...

I like Jonathan Alter, and I see the wisdom in this piece in Newsweek, but I'm not sure I'm patient enough to want to see it through.

Why We Need DeLay to Stay
The midterms should be a referendum on DeLay's America. Stay on the right fringe or move to the center? Let the people decide.

By Jonathan Alter
Senior Editor and Columnist
Newsweek


May 2 issue - A couple of years ago, Tom DeLay was chomping on a cigar at a Washington restaurant with some lobbyists. The manager went over to tell him he couldn't smoke because the restaurant was located on property leased from the federal government, which bars smoking. "I am the federal government," DeLay replied, in words that will follow the onetime exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, like ants at a picnic.

The line reeks of the arrogance and self-importance that may bring DeLay low, but it also has the advantage of being true: all three branches of the federal government belong to Republicans, and the autocratic House majority leader is the purest representation of the breed. On every issue—ethics, the environment, guns, tax cuts, judges—he is a clarifying figure for anyone who might be confused about the true nature of today's GOP.

So assuming he dodges indictment, DeLay should stay in his post for 18 months, until the 2006 midterm elections. Even if his legendary gerrymandering has made it unlikely that the Democrats will regain control of Congress, at least the voters—who now, finally, have heard of this guy—would have a clearer decision about where the country should go. His potential successors are all just as conservative as DeLay, but they seem colorless and would thus fuzz up the choice. The midterms should be a referendum on DeLay's America. Stay on the right fringe or move toward the center? Let the people decide.

Some Democrats aren't buying. Sure, it would be nice to have "the Hammer" around as a bogeyman for direct-mail solicitations, they say, but he should step down. They claim that his death by a thousand cuts is, as Democratic Rep. Harold Ford puts it, "a big distraction from all that we are trying to do."

Actually, that's an argument for keeping DeLay around. We should want the 109th Congress "distracted" and kept from returning to normal business for as long as possible. Anything the Democrats are "trying to do" won't get done anyway. And what the Radical Republicans are trying to do is usually bad—from cutting taxes further amid monster deficits to immunizing polluters in the energy bill (which won't do a thing, as even proponents admit, to cut gas prices), to subjecting Social Security to the whims of the stock market. It was once conservatives who thought Congress should legislate less. Now this should be the Democratic mantra: Don't do anything. Just stand there!


This will be depicted as obstructionist by the same people who once preached against activist government, but it's the only effective response to the dictatorial way that DeLay's House does business. (Yes, I know the House Democrats could be high-handed during their long years of power, too, but that doesn't excuse the current behavior.) Democrats like Ford don't care to admit that they're utterly powerless; it makes it harder to get up every day and go to work. But their amendments are almost always rejected, and they are excluded from the conference committees that resolve House-Senate differences. So for House Democrats to be "constructive" by engaging in bipartisanship is, with a few exceptions, a sucker's game.

If DeLay goes down, his shamelessness will go with him, which will make it harder to see the GOP's true agenda. Take the assault on federal judges. DeLay first asserted that they must "answer for their behavior" in the Schiavo case. His "apology" consisted of adding: "We set up the courts. We can unseat the courts. We have the power of the purse." At a recent strategy session sponsored by Tony Perkins's Family Research Council and James Dobson's Focus on the Family, discussion focused on getting rid of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which the right wing deems too liberal. Perkins and Dobson reminded the group that they need not impeach judges, they can simply defund them, as DeLay recommends.

Sure, it's wrong when DeLay takes Scottish golf outings courtesy of Indian casinos or lets lobbyists write bills or turns the House ethics committee from a bipartisan panel into his own personal Laundromat, bent on cleaning his reputation. This is the same man who asked in 1995: "Are they [representatives] feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special-interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people have a right to know."

But this smelly hypocrisy—assuming it's not found illegal—merely offends the senses. DeLay's views on muscling the judiciary and ending the separation of church and state (which he believes is a fiction) offend the Constitution. That makes it too important to leave to the media and the rest of the Washington scandal machine to remedy. This job belongs to the voters, who can hammer the Hammer by siding against his many acolytes in Congress. Let's make 2006 a referendum on the right wing. For that, DeLay must stay.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com

Thinking gives me a headache

From my dear friend (and cousin-in-law) Encino Man:

It started out innocently enough.
I began to think at parties now and then -- to loosen up.
Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.
I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true.
Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.
That was when things began to sour at home.
One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life.
She spent that night at her mother's.
I began to think on the job.
I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.
I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka.
I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"
One day the boss called me in
He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."
This gave me a lot to think about.
I came home early after my conversation with the boss.
"Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."
"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"
"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"
"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.
She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.
"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.
I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche.
I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors...
They didn't open. The library was closed.
To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.
Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye.
"Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.
You probably recognize that line.
It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster.
Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.
I never miss a TA meeting.
At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's."
Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.
I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.
Life just seemed...easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.
I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.
Today, I registered to vote as a Republican...

Democrats must change everything

James Carville and Paul Begala are two of my favorite pundits, as those things go. They have written this Op-Ed in USA Today:

"Houston, we have a problem." With those words, spoken with a calm that masked the gravity of the situation, astronaut Jim Lovell informed NASA that Apollo 13 was running out of oxygen.
The skinny guys with skinny ties back in Houston, and the crew-cut crew in space, acted. They didn't argue. They didn't second-guess. They didn't blame each other. They acted. And most important, they didn't deny that they had a problem.

But today, too many leading Democratic strategists deny that the party we love has a problem. When you lose to an unpopular president with a soft economy and a disastrous occupation in Iraq — a man who lost all three debates and who, when he's trying to complete a sentence, is like a drunk man trying to cross an icy street — you most definitely have a problem.

Let's be clear what the problem is — and is not.

Some think the problem is that Democrats have become too liberal. They point to unpopular positions on partial-birth abortion and other social issues and say Democrats should return to the center.

Others say the problem is that the party has become too conservative. They point to Democrats who supported President Bush's tax cuts for the rich and the crippling deficits they caused, and say the party should return to its progressive, populist roots.

Both are right, but more broadly, both are wrong.

Sure, we'd like it if Democrats were seen as the party of faith, family and the flag. And we'd like it if Democrats would fight corporate interests more and take their special interest money less. But the biggest problem the Democrats face is not that they're seen as standing for too many liberal issues or standing for too many conservative positions. It's that Democrats aren't seen as standing for anything.

The fundamental question for the party out of power is always: What would you change?

Democrats' answer should be, "Everything." On every front, on every issue, Democrats should be the party of reform, change and a new direction.

• The economy. President Bush's weak-dollar, high-debt economic policies have placed our economic destiny in the hands of communist Chinese central bankers and Arab oil sheiks. Democrats should stand for fiscal responsibility, asking the wealthiest to pay their share of the debt — and reform, reform, reform. We should reform trade laws that encourage corporations to ship jobs overseas. We should reform the tax code and replace the current lobbyists' dream with a tax code that is simpler, fairer and more progressive. Above all, we should place middle-class jobs and middle-class values at the heart of our economic policy. Middle-class Americans are working hard and playing by the rules, but they are being ripped off at every turn. They need economic reform.

• Health care. While millions of Americans are debating whether they would want to prolong their life through extraordinary measures, the reality is many Americans will never have that option.

President Bush has proposed crippling cuts in Medicaid (a program that supported Terri Schiavo). The corrupt alliance between pharmaceutical lobbyists and the Republicans resulted in a prescription drug bill that costs twice what we were told it would — perhaps because the new law makes it a crime to negotiate for lower prices. If that law applied to businesses, every manager of every Wal-Mart would be in jail. Democrats should stand for health care reform.

• Foreign policy. Rather than reform our badly broken intelligence services, President Bush and the Republicans have engaged in political purges, rewarding those who were most wrong about the war in Iraq and punishing those few who sounded alarms.

Rather than reforming and modernizing our alliances, President Bush has alienated our friends and emboldened our enemies. Worst of all, our senior government officials cannot always be counted on to tell us the truth when American lives are at risk. It's time to reform our foreign policy.

• Political reform. When House Republicans choose as their leader Tom DeLay, who has been cited and sanctioned by the Ethics Committee more often than any other congressman, it's high time for reform.

When lobbyists are writing legislation, when gambling interests are paying for luxury junkets, when the Ethics Committee itself has been put out of business, it's time for reform. Democrats should stand for cracking down on lobbyists and cleaning up our politics.

Lord Acton said absolute power corrupts absolutely. The absolute power Republicans currently enjoy in Washington has corrupted our economy, our foreign policy, our health care system and our very democracy.

If Democrats can't take on that corruption with a bold and broad agenda of change and reform, then (to paraphrase the late senator Pat Moynihan) we'd better find another country to run in.

Right now it seems to me that the Dems are in a reactive, defensive mode. I think Howard Dean can change that to an active, aggressive program. Here's hopin'.

An American Hero

A true American hero passed away recently. He stood up to the government when they did wrong. From the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 1998, Fred Korematsu was a fragile reed of a man. But in the East Room of the White House, the septuagenarian stood up straight and tall as he heard President Clinton say, "Plessy, Brown, Parks ... to that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu."

Mr. Korematsu, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for courageously defying military orders calling for the World War II removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, died of respiratory failure Wednesday in San Rafael. He was 86.

Mr. Korematsu's death marks a milestone in the history of American civil liberties. By his simple act of defiance in 1942, for which he was arrested and convicted, the lifelong Bay Area resident became an icon of social justice, not just in his own Japanese American community, but beyond.

"Fred taught us that dissent is sometimes the most patriotic act you can undertake to preserve constitutional rights," said Dale Minami, a San Francisco attorney who helped overturn Mr. Korematsu's conviction. The reversal followed a 1983 federal court ruling that found the internment of 120, 000 people of Japanese ancestry to have been an action based on "unsubstantiated facts, distortions," and racism.

"Fred was a man of quiet bravery -- he wasn't bombastic -- but he really had a deep-seated conviction that the whole internment was a terrible blot on American history," said Peter Irons, a retired UC San Diego professor of political science who found secret Justice Department documents that reopened the Korematsu case.

Mr. Korematsu, born in Oakland in 1919, was a nisei, or second-generation Japanese American. On Dec. 7, 1941, Mr. Korematsu was a 22-year-old welder in San Leandro. Like all West Coast Japanese, the Korematsus were ordered in early 1942 to assembly centers and later incarcerated in camps. But Mr. Korematsu refused to go.

Planning to move to Nevada, he assumed another identity and even had plastic surgery, but was arrested in San Leandro and jailed. Aided by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Mr. Korematsu challenged the exclusion orders in 1942.

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction by a 6-3 vote in 1944, ruling that military necessity justified the orders. His was one of a handful of legal challenges by Japanese Americans to military orders. But it was Mr. Korematsu's case that became the most well-known -- and is studied today by every law student in America.

Viewed by many constitutional scholars as one of the high court's worst mistakes, the 1944 ruling in Korematsu vs. United States drew stinging dissent from Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote that the "Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination. ... The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon. ..."

Mr. Korematsu's conviction dogged him, making it hard to support his wife and two children. Years later, when Irons came to him with vital documents denying that Japanese Americans were a threat during the war, he reopened his case with the help of a pro-bono team of young, mostly Japanese American lawyers.

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel threw out the conviction and called the case a "constant caution that in times of war or declared military necessity, our institutions must be vigilant in protecting our constitutional guarantees."

Through it all, say those who knew him, Mr. Korematsu never gave up seeking his rights.

"Fred was an ordinary American with extraordinary courage," said Irons.

Mr. Korematsu is survived by his wife, Kathryn of San Leandro; daughter, Karen Korematsu-Haigh of San Rafael and son, Ken Korematsu of San Francisco.

A memorial service will be held on April 16 at 1:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 2619 Broadway at 27th Street, in Oakland.

Godspeed, Fred. I pray I show the guts you showed when my turn comes. So should we all.

The Finger

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Pro-Syrian Hizbollah guerrillas will keep their weapons despite U.S. calls to disarm and Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, the group's chief said on Wednesday.

[. . .]

"I'm holding on to the weapons of the resistance because I think the resistance ... is the best formula to protect Lebanon and to deter any Israeli aggression," [The group's leader, Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah said in a live interview with Hizbollah's al-Manar television.

[. . .]

They give Chimpy the finger. So what does he do?

[. . .]

Nasrallah's comments came as President Bush tried to clarify remarks in which he left the door open for Hizbollah to have a political role in Lebanon if it disarmed.

[. . .]

What did he call it? Oh yeah, 'resolve'. Didn't we hear that during the campaign? 'President Bush has resolve'. He will see this through'. Yeah, well, that's resolve. He calls for Hizbollah to disarm, they say 'fuck you, make us', and Dicknose has to back down. Know why? Because everybody except the 51% of us who believe the Repub propaganda, knows we're stretched so thinly that we'd have serious problems responding to another crisis. So now everybody feels they can drop their drawers and say 'kiss my ass, you moronic chimp'.

[. . .]

Nasrallah said: "We are ready to remain a terrorist group in the eyes of George Bush to the end of time but we are not ready to stop protecting our country, out people and their blood and their honor."

[. . .]

In New York-ese: 'Shut the fuck up and mind your own goddamn business. We don't give a fuck what you think of us and if you get in our way, we're gonna bust your ass. You come in my neighborhood, you're gonna leave in a bag.'

[. . .]

Bush repeated U.S. demands that Syria withdraw all troops and intelligence personnel from Lebanon to allow for free elections in May.

[. . .]

He can repeat and repeat; that only works in Jesusland. Like I always say, it's hard to fight someone who looks forward to meeting their maker. That's what they don't understand. The best way to fight terrorism is not to kill as many of them as you can, it's to give the people of the region hope. If they have no hope for a future, meeting Allah and the virgins ahead of schedule looks mighty appealing.

9/11

I just found this, something I'd forgotten about. Since we've been on about 9/11 lately, and the fact that the two-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War is coming up this week, I figured I'd post it as a reminder of why Bush has been able to walk all over the Constitution with impunity. His gift from Allah, so to speak. This was written by Mrs. F a couple days after the attack as an explanation to my German relatives.

14 September 2001

Hello there!

I wanted to tell you what has happened here, from my vantage point. This is not to scare you, but to let you know what I have been through and that I have made it out ok.

My office is directly across the street from the World Trade Center. As Birgit [my cousin] may have told you, my office faces the Trade Center, and the Towers are the only thing I truly see from there. If you have seen any of the local maps, they refer to the World Financial Center and the American Express and Merrill Lynch Buildings. My office was on the 44th floor of the Merrill Lynch Building.

I arrived at work at 06:40 hours and was preparing to leave the office at 09:15 with two co-workers to visit a client in New Jersey. We were to have left the building at 09:15 to get the car to drive there. At 08:45, the office was quiet as not everyone had arrived for the day. We heard, what I thought was the sonic boom of a military plane. Richie and I had heard the same sound on one of our cruises when a Coast Guard plane "buzzed" the ship. The next thing after the boom, the building shook. Since all of our windows faced the towers, someone began to cry out, "My God, the plane is going to hit the Tower". Everyone raced to the windows to open the remaining blinds and I was no exception. I watched, in horror as the tail end of the first plane disappeared into the North Tower. At the same time it was disappearing, pieces of the fuselage were falling out of the plane while a huge fireball was coming out of the opposite side. We all stood there for about 45 seconds in total disbelief, thinking this was not real and rather a stunt for a movie script. At this time, I still was unaware the plane was a commercial jet and not a military plane. We believed this was a "freak accident".

My Vice President (the big boss of the department) was of sound mind enough to call out for everyone to evacuate the office. I grabbed my things and ran out, following my co workers through the suite of our office space. We considered this an emergency and walked down the entire 44 floors of the building, only to reach street level, almost directly under the burning North Tower. It appeared to me that my company were the only ones on the stairs. We have over 225 people working for the company, and with everyone coming out at the same time, the exit area was getting crowded. We had some people who had heart conditions. We tried to help them as much as possible down the stairs and out of the building.

We kept moving outside, to allow everyone an area to exit the building. While walking outside, I started to see pieces of the burning building floating down, seeming like a feather, until it impacted the street, and exploded like fireballs on the pavement.

I passed two people, who had apparently been pedestrians on the street, who were struck by burning debris. They were burned so badly, their bones were exposed. They sat, just waiting for someone to help them, while they were obviously in pain, burned, almost beyond recognition.

After being on street level, not more than 2-3 minutes, I kept saying , "We shouldn't be here. We are too close to the area." Just after I said this, I heard the second sonic boom, and the second plane impacted the South Tower, and debris again began to rain down on us. At this time, I was certain we were under attack by terrorists. All of this transpired in just 18 minutes.

We ran through my office building towards the Hudson River, on the West side of "downtown" Manhattan. I kept my "wits" together enough to know we had to continue to get away, moving North of the area. People were in a panic and many of us knew people who worked in the towers. One of the girls who worked in my accounting department had a boyfriend who worked in the Tower, apparently on the floor that was struck first. She was paralyzed with horror.

In the midst of all the confusion, I was able to locate my two immediate bosses. We stayed together and continued to walk North and away from the area. We continued about 15-20 blocks on foot as there were no vehicles to be seen with the exception of emergency vehicles.

We soon saw a taxi cab, that was locked with the driver standing by and watching with horror of his own. We were able to convince him to drive us to Penn Station. We were trying to get on a train to get out of the City as soon as possible.

It took us a long time driving, but we made it to Penn Station by 9:40. I made my way inside and called Richie to tell him I was alive. It was now 0945. People were in a daze trying to figure out what was going on. No one that was in the Midtown area knew exactly what was happening, but they knew it was not good.

There was a train scheduled to leave Penn Station for my home at 10:15. My Manager and I were able to get on the train. We were packed into the train with no room, all hoping against hope to get out of the City.

At 10:30, an announcement was made that the train was cancelled; Penn Station was closed; and we would have to exit the train and get out of Penn Station, only to have to go out on the streets of New York City.

I was trapped in a City under attack, with no hopes of getting home in the immediate future.

My boss and I started walking away from Penn Station in case it was the next to be hit. We were also only two blocks away from the Empire State Building. We feared this may be the next target.

There was no traffic in the streets because the City had effectively been closed. It was surreal to walk in the streets of New York City with no sounds of cars, trucks, busses or overhead planes. People were wandering aimlessly, walking in the middle of the major streets of NYC, without knowing what to do or where to go.

We made our way to 42nd street, and watched, on the large exterior televisions as the Towers collapsed.

All businesses and stores had closed by this time; however; there had been people working on construction sites who had radios on. They allowed us to listen to the news. We walked a little further and stopped by a truck who was stopped with his door open allowing us to listen to a bit more of the news as we continued to walk on.

We attempted to find a hotel to stay in, however, there were none to be found, nor did I really want to think about spending the night in the City.

After wandering for hours, we were told that one of the bridges leading out of the City and towards home would be opened to pedestrians. This was on the East side of town, and "uptown" from where we were. We continued to walk towards the bridge among the masses of people just wandering. We were on a "mission" to get home and out of the City, no matter how far we had to walk.

After a while, we were now at 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue, almost on the East River, and at the midpoint of the island. The subways began working again and we were among the first to get on and get safely out of Manhattan. It took another few hours before I finally made it home at 16:30.

We have remained in the house for the past few days, glued to the television, trying to get as much news about what is happening as possible. The death toll is expected to rise to almost 10,000, if not more. Entire companies of 1500 people or more have been lost. We have no information whether my building, which is considered to be in "ground zero", will ever be able accessible again or not. Telephones are sporadic coming into and out of NY. We are awake now, Friday, since 05:30.

There have been several arrests overnight, where they believe there were three different groups, attempting to get on planes out of Kennedy airport and LaGuardia airport in NY, who were going to try to do more damage.

The World Trade Center was truly a world in itself. There were businesses from at least 15 different countries who had companies and people in the Towers. Japan had 31 companies, most of which were clients of my company. Deutsche Bank had offices there and 4 German nationals are confirmed dead with numerous others listed as currently missing.

What you see on television, if you have been watching, is nothing compared to having been there. It still seems like a bad dream, however, it is not. I have had a lot of pain in my legs from all of the stairs I walked down, and all of the additional walking, however, I sit here and say, "thank goodness I am here to feel the pain".

The people of New York and the surrounding states have pulled together for the rescue efforts. We will get past this and we will come back bigger and better than we were, once we have had the opportunity to grieve and heal.

I wanted you to know that I am ok. That is all for now.
We send our love to you all.

Karen & Richie

Now tell me why we've wasted 1500 young lives in Iraq? Tell me why Osama is still on the loose?

Keeping and bearing

I'm not one for firearms. I never felt the need to own one after I left the military. I don't hunt. Just never felt like shooting anything that didn't pose a threat to me, and I have a soft spot for animals. I don't condemn hunting, I got friends who do, religiously. They enjoy it, more power to 'em. I'll go target shooting with friends once in a while, just to assure myself I ain't lost it (qualified marksman consistently in the military, even got a ribbon, with oak leaf cluster and star device, for it), but I never felt the need to own a gun.

Until now.

When I see this bankruptcy bill being pushed through Congress, when I see all the things the Repubs are doing to stifle free speech, when I see all the hate being purveyed in God's name, I think it's time to build an armory.

If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have told you that things would never get that bad. Lately, I have the feeling they will. Whether the economy tanks and people (desperate and destitute) will want what I have, or whether jackbooted storm troopers march down the streets, I'm gonna be in a position to defend my rights, my family, and my property. At the least, take as many of 'em as I can down before they get to me.

It takes me aback that I feel this way lately, ever since the election. It seems our safety net (the press) has been coopted and the Bush administration, and the Repub Congress, can do as they please with impunity, without question. It feels like we're living in Bizarro World and everybody acts like nothing's wrong. Well there is something wrong, very wrong with this country.

I've come to the realization that I am once more willing to put my life on the line for this country. The country I was raised in. The country that generally respected human rights and protected the rights of Americans. I'm more than willing to fight, and give my life, for that country, whether it means fighting my 'brothers' in the streets, as we did 150 years ago. I am of the opinion lately that is what the Red-Blue divide will come to in the end.

So, beginning this weekend, I start collecting guns. Gonna start with a nice housecleaner. 12 gauge, pump action, riot-style shotgun. Next, something .30 caliber, so that I can hit some asshole a couple hundred yards off. Remember, I still got the touch. And then maybe something fully automatic and totally illegal, but there's a lotta nuts out there and I just might have to clear the street.

So here it is. You wingnuts might be able to pass any unConstitutional, unGodly, stupid fucking laws you want. You can dick with the Constitution. You can fuck with the vote. Go ahead, you got the power. But remember this.

This half-acre plot of land on Long Island that has my last name on the mailbox in front? This is, and always will be, the old America. My America. And the Constitution and Declaration of Independence will always be respected here, even if you Repubs have shit all over them. Do what you want with everyone else if they'll let ya, but don't you dare fuck with me. I'm really pissed.

I'm pissed because I haven't had this mindset since I left the military. Specifically since the day I hit the ground running in Grenada and had to dodge Cuban fire. I'm pissed that you hate-mongers got me back here, to this place in my mind that I've tried my damndest to forget about. You fucked up this time.

You see, deep down, under all the layers of acceptability I've piled on top, I love combat. I don't tell that to many people. My wife knows, because she had to deal with me when I'd wake up screaming in the middle of the night because of what I'd seen and done. She'll probably have to do that again if you guys fuck this nation to Hell and I'm pissed that you're gonna put her through it. Know why? 'Cause if you give me the reason, I will defend myself, my family, and my property, and I'll enjoy killing as many of you as I can before I go. Just ask that squad of Cuban infantry on Grenada, or the two North Korean snipers I chased into a tunnel under the DMZ, when I send you to the same Hell they're in. You're damn right I'm mad. I'm angry as Hell and soon I'm gonna be armed to the teeth. Go ahead, make my fucking day.

You have been warned. See you in Hell.

WTF?

I seem to be on a foreign policy thing today, so lets talk about Syria's announced pullback from Lebanon. It offers hope for a people under occupation for 30 years.

BEIRUT, March 5 -President Bashar al-Assad of Syria refused on Saturday to comply with President Bush's demand that he withdraw all of his country's troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon, telling the Syrian Parliament that he planned instead to order a gradual pullback to Lebanese territory near Syria's borders.

[. . .]

Bashir Assad, Syria's president, isn't the model for integrity. You know Syrian intelligence won't leave that quickly, even if the troops do. But this is a hopeful sign. So why is the White House taking such a hard line?

[. . .]

"Anything less - phased withdrawal, partial withdrawal, leaving the intelligence agents in place - is a violation of the resolution," one senior aide said. "How fair an election can Lebanon hold if the troops are there to intimidate voters, people running for election, or people now in office?" [my emphasis]

[. . .]

If we weren't being governed by a bunch of teenagers, a more supportive line could have been advanced. Maybe 'we welcome Syria's intentions to end the occupation of Lebanon and look forward to a speedy withdrawal'? Eh? Sounds a bit more . . . diplomatic, especially in light of this last week:

Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syria captured and handed over Saddam Hussein's half brother, a most-wanted leader in the Sunni-based insurgency, ending months of Syrian denials that it was harboring fugitives from the ousted Saddam regime. Iraq authorities said Damascus acted in a gesture of goodwill. Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, who shared a mother with Saddam, was nabbed along with 29 other fugitive members of the former dictator's Baath Party in Hasakah in northeastern Syria, 30 miles from the Iraqi border, the officials said on condition of anonymity. The U.S. military in Iraq had no immediate comment.

You know, if the idiots in Washington would realize that Assad sees the writing on the wall and throw him a little support with the troop withdrawal, it would go a long way in Palestine, maybe among some of the other Arab states, to convince folks that the Americans aren't just out to stake their claim on the region's oil and allow Israel to do as it pleases.

What we are hearing is saber-rattling consistent with what we heard in 2002 when Iraq was in the sights of the Bush administration. Are they trying to achieve 'regime change' in Syria? Are they willing to have another chaotic, failed state on their hands, another breeding ground for terrorists?

The Bush administration is misreading these whispers of democracy in the oppressive regimes in the Middle East as a referendum on its Iraq policy. You hear them saying that freedom is on the march in Palestine, and Eqypt, and Lebanon. It's not because of Bush's policy in Iraq. It's because Arafat died.

We're #49!

Unlike the Retard Right (© Gordon) who look at our position in the world through Bush-colored glasses, this is where we really stand in comparison to the rest of the world:

The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).

The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).

Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).

"The International Adult Literacy Survey...found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).

Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). No wonder they relocate elsewhere!

"The European Union leads the U.S. in...the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).

[. . .]

Link via the Mule at Blondie's.

The one that should really bug folks is this:

Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea hold 40 percent of our government debt. (That's why we talk nice to them.) "By helping keep mortgage rates from rising, China has come to play an enormous and little-noticed role in sustaining the American housing boom" (NYT, Dec. 4, 2004). Read that twice. We owe our housing boom to China, because they want us to keep buying all that stuff they manufacture.

So, next time you hear some Repub asshole going on and on about how we do things so much better in this country, point him to this list and ask him why the Bush administration hasn't done anything to correct the problem.

De Col' Wind Be Comin' Closah.....

Feel that cold breeze on the back of your neck? That's a draft. Philip Carter and Paul Glastris make a case for it in a Washington Monthly article. Agree or disagree, they make some good points. Go read. Pack a lunch, it's a long one.

The only effective solution to the manpower crunch is the one America has turned to again and again in its history: the draft. Not the mass combat mobilizations of World War II, nor the inequitable conscription of Vietnam—for just as threats change and war-fighting advances, so too must the draft. A modernized draft would demand that the privileged participate. It would give all who serve a choice over how they serve. And it would provide the military, on a “just in time” basis, large numbers of deployable ground troops, particularly the peacekeepers we'll need to meet the security challenges of the 21st century.

America has a choice. It can be the world's superpower, or it can maintain the current all-volunteer military, but it probably can't do both.

All this for a war that most planners consider to be a medium-sized conflict—nothing like what the United States faced in World War I, World War II, or the Cold War. And while threats of that magnitude aren't anywhere on the horizon, there are plenty of quite possible scenarios that could quickly overwhelm us—an implosion of the North Korean regime, a Chinese attack on Taiwan, worsening of the ethnic cleansing in the Sudan, or some unforeseen humanitarian nightmare. Already we have signaled to bad actors everywhere the limits of our power. Military threats might never have convinced the Iranians to give up their nuclear program. But it's more than a little troubling that ruling Iranian mullahs can publicly and credibly dismiss recent administration saber-rattling by pointing to the fact that our forces are pinned down in Iraq.

What we're increasingly learning from Iraq is that the all-volunteer force, as presently built, cannot do that—indeed, it was consciously designed to be incapable of such deployments. Today's force was built for precisely the kinds of wars that Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell envisioned in their doctrines: wars with explicit purposes, narrow parameters, and clear exit strategies. In other words, it was built for the kinds of wars the military prefers to fight, not necessarily the kinds of wars we have, as a nation, historically fought.

The evolution of this force owes much to Vietnam. After that war ended, the nation's senior generals devised a military structure called the “total force” concept to circumvent two of the great moral hazards they identified with Vietnam: the failure to mobilize the nation, with all of its strata and segments, for the war; and the reliance on young American conscripts, who were coerced by the state to kill or be killed.

Vietnam had been fought almost entirely by active-duty volunteers and conscripts. A great number of young men, including many from the nation's privileged classes, sought refuge in the reserves as a way out of duty in Vietnam. The total force concept entailed, first of all, the splitting of key war-fighting and support functions. Henceforth, active-duty troops would perform nearly all the traditional combat roles; reservists would provide most of the support functions, such as logistics and military policing. This ensured that future wars could not be fought without the heavy involvement of the reserves. Army Gen. Creighton Abrams and other leaders felt that this would be a check on the power of presidents to go to war (yeah, like that worked! -ed.) because mass reserve call-ups typically require a great deal of political capital.

In theory, one can always lure the next recruit, or retain the next soldier, by offering a marginally higher monetary incentive—but in reality, there are practical limits to such measures. The pool of people who might be convinced to join the Army is mainly comprised of healthy young people with high school degrees but no college plans. That pool is inherently limited, especially when the economy is heating up and there's a shooting war on. Last year, despite signing bonuses in the tens of thousands and other perks, military recruiters had to lower entry standards to meet their enlistment goals. The active force met its recruiting targets for 2004, but the reserves have found themselves increasingly struggling to bring enough soldiers in the door.

The problem is that under the all-volunteer system it's hard to fix the short-term problem (too few troops now) without creating long-term problems (too many troops later). And so, paying for the salaries and benefits and families of 50,000 or 500,000 extra soldiers on active duty over the course of their careers doesn't, from a military standpoint, make sense. Politically, it would put the senior military leadership in the position of convincing the American people to keep military budgets extremely high to pay for a huge standing army that isn't being used and might not be for years. It might be possible now to convince the public to add another 100,000 soldiers (annual cost: about $10 billion in personnel costs alone, not including equipment and training). But the generals rightly worry that this support will evaporate after Iraq stabilizes. Indeed, Americans have a long tradition dating back to the writing of Constitution, of refusing to support a large standing military unless the need is apparent. (The public paid for a much bigger all-volunteer military in the 1970s and 1980s, but only because of the obvious need to deter a massive Soviet army from threatening Europe; after the Berlin Wall fell, both political parties supported big cuts in troop strength). What we really need is the capability to rapidly mobilize and deploy a half million troops to project U.S. power abroad, and to be able to sustain them indefinitely while maintaining a reserve with which to simultaneously engage other enemies.

In practice, however, our republic has decided many times throughout its history that a draft was necessary to protect those basic liberties. Even if you disagreed with the decision to invasion of Iraq, or think the president's rhetoric is demagogic and his policies disastrous, it is hard to argue that Islamic terrorism isn't a threat to freedom and security, at home and abroad. Moreover, any American, liberal or conservative, ought to have moral qualms about basing our nation's security on an all-volunteer force drawn disproportionately, as ours is, from America's lower socioeconomic classes. And the cost of today's war is being borne by an extremely narrow slice of America. Camp Pendleton, Calif., home to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, is also home to approximately one-seventh of the U.S. fatalities from Iraq. In theory, our democracy will not fight unpopular wars because the people who must bear the casualties can impose their will on our elected leaders to end a war they do not support. But when such a small fraction of America shoulders the burden—and pays the cost —of America's wars, this democratic system breaks down.

A better solution would fix the weaknesses of the all-volunteer force without undermining its strengths. Here's how such a plan might work. Instead of a lottery, the federal government would impose a requirement that no four-year college or university be allowed to accept a student, male or female, unless and until that student had completed a 12-month to two-year term of service. Unlike an old-fashioned draft, this 21st-century service requirement would provide a vital element of personal choice. Students could choose to fulfill their obligations in any of three ways: in national service programs like AmeriCorps (tutoring disadvantaged children), in homeland security assignments (guarding ports), or in the military. Those who chose the latter could serve as military police officers, truck drivers, or other non-combat specialists requiring only modest levels of training. (It should be noted that the Army currently offers two-year enlistments for all of these jobs, as well as for the infantry.) They would be deployed as needed for peacekeeping or nation-building missions. They would serve for 12-months to two years, with modest follow-on reserve obligations.

The war in Iraq has shown us, and the world, many things: the bloody costs of inept leadership; the courage of the average American soldier; the hunger for democracy among some of the earth's most oppressed people. But perhaps more than anything, Iraq has shown that our military power has limits. As currently constituted, the U.S. military can win the wars, but it cannot win the peace, nor can it commit for the long term to the stability and security of a nation such as Iraq. Our enemies have learned this, and they will use that knowledge to their advantage in the next war to tie us down and bleed us until we lose the political will to fight.

If you think I might have left out a lot, well, I did. This is an excellent piece and you should read it and make up your own fine mind.

I have felt for years that our Nation needs some kind of National Service to re-acquaint young Americans with the old-fashioned notion that they are actually part of a process. It would help them grow up. They need something.

Most Americans are spoiled rotten, but the kids are salvageable. Whether they would choose to serve in the military, or dig a village well under a blazing sun, or give aid and comfort to an AIDS sufferer, it would make better people of them. They would realize that life ain't just extreme sports, hip-hop, and rave-ups and then get a big job and screw everybody else, but that some kind of civic involvement is what's necessary to stay tuned and connected to America.

If more people gave a shit about the reality of life in our country and the world, this administration would never haved succeeded in their coup d'etat. 'Nuff said.