Hey, a billion here, a billion there, who’s counting? Not the State Department, which admitted this week that it can’t say “specifically what it received” for the $1.2 billion it paid DynCorp, ostensibly to train the Iraqi police—other than that somebody got an Olympic-size swimming pool out of the deal.
When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George Bush photo op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The Iraq war has produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought.
If the CIA thought that executing the guerrilla would kill what he stood for, it mostly assuredly has been proved wrong. Witness the current state of politics in Latin America, not to mention the reverence this week that marked the 40th anniversary of his death.
How did it come to be that the ostensibly best-educated and most refined representatives of the United States in Iraq are guarded by gun-toting mercenaries who kill innocent civilians? More urgently, why did State Department employees and their bosses in Washington tolerate—and pay to conceal—the wanton murder conducted on their watch?
It’s not just Bushie loyalists and Republicans who are gunning for more money to be poured (out of taxpayers’ pockets) into the Iraq war chest. Take Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who is aiming to double Bush’s proposed $12 billion in funding for the rapid production of mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles—a proposition which, Scheer argues, is about much more than the security of U.S. troops.
The latest Blackwater USA scandal, in which privately contracted American security troops gunned down innocent bystanders in Baghdad, might cause the Iraqi government to finally give firms like Blackwater their marching orders—if only it could command the power to order these mercenary operations out of the country.
Of course Gen. David Petraeus predicts success in the Iraq war. What wonders couldn’t generals achieve with more troops and more time? The battle is always going well until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public.
It’s enough to make one a libertarian, Robert Scheer argues, as the federal budget is hijacked by a bloated military-industrial complex wallowing in post-9/11 greed. As the president smiles, the failures of this American experiment in imperialism become all the more costly and apparent.
President Bush lamented Alberto Gonzales’ resignation and insisted that the “good name” of the attorney general had been besmirched for partisan purposes. Good name? Robert Scheer reviews the highlights (or, rather, the low points) of Gonzales’ tenure and looks at the troubling legacy he leaves behind.
The recent parade of political tourists to Iraq, during which easily impressed pundits and members of Congress came to be dazzled by the wonders of the troop surge, probably ensures that this murderous adventure will continue well into the next presidency—even if the Democrats win.
What in the world was Sen. Hillary Clinton thinking when she attacked Sen. Barack Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in going after Osama bin Laden? And why aren’t her supporters more concerned about yet another egregious example of Clinton’s consistent backing for the mindless militarism that is dragging this nation to ruin?
During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists have rightly been condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to recall that this week is also the 62nd anniversary of a U.S. attack that deliberately took the lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is busy shopping a recently unveiled arms package, totaling a staggering $63 billion in aid and first-rate weaponry, to America’s Mideast “allies” like Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia—but, as Scheer notes, there’s a discrepancy between the Bush administration’s official reasons for this show of goodwill and the real motives behind the deal.
As President Bush’s poll numbers plummet to new lows and public support for Congress to end the war in Iraq continues to build, Robert Scheer wonders when Bush will finally turn on the neo-conservatives who betrayed his presidential legacy.
In 1795, James Madison wrote of war’s far-reaching and corrosive effect on public liberty. He could well have been warning us about our own King George, just the sort of imperial president that Madison and other founders of our nation feared most.
The marker of what will go down in history as “Bush’s folly” is that this idiot of a president invaded a country that had absolutely nothing to do with terrorist attacks on the United States or WMD threats to America while coddling the military junta in Pakistan, which was guilty on both counts.
What a difference 40 years makes. Robert Scheer takes a look at current events in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank from a historical perspective, tracing the dramatic developments among regional and religious factions since the end of the Six-Day War.
What would have happened if, by some twist of political fate, Sen. Joe Lieberman had assumed the U.S.‘s highest office instead of George W. Bush? Judging by his hawkish leanings of late, particularly vis-à-vis Iran, the man who ran alongside Al Gore in 2000 proves the point that not every (once) Democratic candidate would have been better than Bush.
Somehow, the Bush administration’s assertion that U.S. troops may remain in Iraq for decades to come went relatively unnoticed by Democratic hopefuls during the June 4 debate.
The picture released by the White House last week of Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, cradling their newborn grandson Samuel David Cheney represents an opportunity for future progress in human rights—if they choose to embrace it with as much care as they do baby Samuel.
If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wasn’t in enough trouble already, he now has to deal with the fallout from his disgraceful behavior in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in March of 2004, when Gonzales attempted to strong-arm Ashcroft into reauthorizing the domestic surveillance program implemented by the White House after 9/11—as Ashcroft lay ailing on his sickbed.
Relations between the U.S. and Iran are shifting as U.N. inspectors discover that Iran’s uranium enrichment program appears to be further along than previously believed. These new developments only underscore the increasing volatility in the very region the American invasion of Iraq was supposed to secure, and they put the Bush administration in a codependent relationship with Iran’s ruling regime.
It’s no wonder that an administration that celebrated and rewarded liars and opportunists would produce the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, who followed up the Iraq disaster with a scandal at the World Bank, and George Tenet, who held his tongue until the price was right. But how do they sleep at night?
The three short sentences at the beginning of Chapter 17 of former CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” tell it all: “The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face that was put on it.”
Ignoring the fact that we have a system of civilian control over the military, which is why he, the elected president, is designated the commander in chief, Bush hides behind the fiction that the officers in the field are calling the shots when in fact he has put them in an unwinnable situation and refuses to even consider a timetable for getting them out.
India May Hold the Whip Hand in Dubai Power Game
