Month: December 2006

A cartoon revealing the truth behind our meat industry.

This is probably close to what Bush will attempt:

First, we must commit publicly to provide $10 billion a year in economic support to the Iraqis over the next five years. In the military arena, it would be feasible to equip and increase the Iraqi armed forces on a crash basis over the next 24 months (but not the police or the Facilities Protection Service). The goal would be 250,000 troops, provided with the material and training necessary to maintain internal order.

Within the first 12 months we should draw down the U.S. military presence from 15 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), of 5,000 troops each, to 10. Within the next 12 months, Centcom forces should further draw down to seven BCTs and withdraw from urban areas to isolated U.S. operating bases — where we could continue to provide oversight and intervention when required to rescue our embedded U.S. training teams, protect the population from violence or save the legal government.

Finally, we have to design and empower a regional diplomatic peace dialogue in which the Iraqis can take the lead, engaging their regional neighbors as well as their own alienated and fractured internal population.

Here’s my prediction: it will be tried. And it won’t work.

The record speaks for itself. This president has enabled a KGB thug to dismantle what nascent democratic institutions there existed in that country. A reader makes a convincing case:

The lack of any coherent administration response to Russia’s backsliding on democracy may not have caused the extremely dangerous mess that we’re now faced with, but it certainly exacerbated it.  Over the past eight years, we have seen Russia’s nascent democratic institutions systematically dismantled by the Putin government, while those who seek to resist this trend find themselves threatened, assaulted and even killed.  Unfortunately, the thousands of brave democrats in Russia, whose work gives lie to the facile and condescending notion that the Russians are incapable of understanding democracy, cannot resist this well-organized, well-financed assault alone , any more than the Brezhnev-era dissidents were capable of bringing down the USSR on their own.  They must have financial and – critically – moral support from outside if their struggle is to have any chance of succeeding.

Yet the Bush administration’s reaction has run the gamut from silence to inaction; neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice has ever issued a strong statement denouncing, without qualification, the Putin administration’s actions, and our ambassadors in Moscow have been decidedly conciliatory in their public statements. (The British ambassador, on the other hand, was brave enough to read a statement defending democracy at a conference this past summer, for which transgression he has been harassed by a Kremlin-directed mob for the past five months.)  The Putin regime has been so emboldened by this silence as to attempt to assassinate a major politician, Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko, and as far as anyone can tell, is now doing hits in Western capitals using methods difficult to distinguish from nuclear terrorism.  Our government and others must start issuing clear, consistent and forceful denunciations of this kind of behavior, backed up with credible threats of sanctions, if possible. If not, the Kremlin will conclude, with good reason, that we are willing to tolerate this kind of behavior in exchange for access to petroleum and natural gas.

(Photo: Dmitri Astakhovitar/Tass/AP.)

A reader pointed me to this stunning passage in an ESPN.com story about the death of Pat Tillman:

[Lt. Col. Ralph] Kauzlarich, [formerly the Army officer who directed the first official inquiry,] now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family’s unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more ‚Äî that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans’ religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know…

[T]here [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, ‘OK, it was an unfortunate accident.’ And they let it go. So this is ‚Äî I don’t know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."

What has happened to the U.S. military under Bush? Are non-Christians now unwelcome?

(Family photo of Kevin and Pat Tillman, from Kevin Tillman. Kevin’s open letter about the war can be read here.)

This is a striking statement from Mike Weinstein in the Salon interview:

"I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "F**k you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff."

Another church was burned recently by a Christianist. If any of this were racially motivated, it would be headline news. But because it’s religiously motivated – like Eric Rudolph’s terrorism – it gets ignored. At the very least, the national media should look into these stories and see if they pan out and if there’s a pattern.

A reader adds:

Your equating the situation in the Middle East today with the Thirty Years War is a great analogy.  But you must be kidding with trying to push the blame for it on to the US, or the start of it as now.

If anything the opening shot of the "Middle-East 30 years’ war" was the collapse of the Shah of Iran. The stated goals of the imams of Iran established that were would me no peace between them and the US – much like Luther posting his bull on the door of the Cathedral set the 30 years war in motion. It really got going with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s. Since then it has been stewarded forward enthusiastically by the likes of Al Qaeda and Iran. During this time we have gone from stoking it (Iran-Iraq war) to trying to stop it (policy up until 9/11) to being thrown into the middle of it because of 9/11. We didn’t involve ourselves in their 30’s years war; they involved us in it by attacking us as part of it.

Take out 9/11 and the US goes back to a policy of trying to maintain the status quo in the Middle-East; the very status quo that Iran and al Queda were already working overtime to topple. Iran’s desire to be the regional hegemon and Al Qaeda’s desire to establish a Caliphate over the entire Islamic world are the real drivers of today’s middle-east instability. Unfortunately for them and everyone else, this increases stress on centuries old fault-lines in the region; Shia-Sunni, Arab-Persian, Arab-Turk, Arab-Kurd (noticing a pattern here?).

Unfortunately those stoking this don’t see that there is a much larger chance that it will all lead to a pointless 30 years war type decimation of the entire region and the destruction of both Al Qaeda and Iran, than to either of their desired results. They need look no further that what happened to the once high ideals of the Catholic League and Protestant Union in the historic 30 years war. Once these ideals were mixed with the ambitions of nations and fueled by the barbarity inherent in men who "know" they are doing God’s will, a terrible fate awaits.

My point is that we have every reason not to be in the very middle of this with 130,000 troops. Let the Sunnis fight the Shiites. Let the Arabs fight the Persians. We can play the conflict from a distance, but it would be fatal to be in the thick of it.

Update: Another reader adds:

Your reader who thinks that ‘Luther posting his bull on the door of the Cathedral set the 30 years war in motion’ should check his facts. The Thirty Years‚Äô War started in 1618. Luther by then had been dead for 72 years, having nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in late 1517, a full century before the Thirty Years War began.

For three decades every major European power duked it out in Germany, not on their own territories. Life became a living hell of bare survival, agriculture receded, and the dark forests grew back with wolf populations that in time of famine preyed on stray kids – it’s no coincidence that this is the era when the frightening stories set down in Grimm’s Fairy Tales were first told. By the time the war was done, half the population was exterminated, and the rest reduced to poverty and ignorance. 

In fairness to my reader, you could argue that the Reformation was the religious split that made the Thirty Years War possible. At least, that’s how I took his email. And yes, it was a nightmare. But it took that nightmare to establish the need for an alternative form for organizing politics other than religion. Maybe the Middle East needs to learn that lesson first hand. Maybe no one can teach it. And in many ways, it has already started. What is Iraq today but a stage for murderous religious passion?

It’s found a new and unlikely place to prosper: Australia.

A reader writes:

I have continued reading you over the last couple of years, even though I strongly disagreed with the overall direction you were heading. But I have to say, I agreed with every word of your "Bush on Iraq" post today. And in the wake of the hysterical reaction to the Baker report, I’m finally beginning to take a second look at my fellow travelers, and I’m not liking what I’m seeing.  Ultimately, reality cannot be denied.

A word on the reaction to Baker.  This is what really got me.  I mean, you can’t be more of a typical Republican/conservative than James Baker.  He jammed through the 1986 Tax Act under RR for God’s sake! And now he’s being written out of the movement?  This is a bridge too far for me.

The Massachusetts governor has been taking hit after hit from the Christianist right. Here’s the latest shot across the bow from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Their blogger, David Brody, has been bashing Romney for days now.

We haven’t had much sequined funk, so here’s Kool and the Gang. Big hair, Hammer clothes, weird eighteenth century wigs and drag queens. Classic.

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