During the Cold War, we used to say this was the typical of those godless
communists, when real wasn’t good, edit and propagandize.
Given what we have recently learned about presidential waivers to overturn
Constitutional checks and balances, domestic surveillance and cookies embedded
“unknowningly” on federal websites, someone’s suggestion for a New Year’s
resolution – Resist Fascism – doesn’t seem so outlandish these days. And it’s not just liberals who are
saying it. - kwc
Believe it or Not #1
Incredibly, despite
evidence to the contrary, Bush claims he never claimed
links between Saddam and 9/11: "There was no evidence that Saddam
Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11," Bush said. "I've never
said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq." But he added that he believed the 2
issues were related even in the absence of direct ties.
- In the PBS NewsHour interview Friday, 121605 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec05/bushinterview/index.html
Believe
it or Not #2: They weren’t just dusting the
furniture, they were Ashcrofting it. The WSJ published the story that 3 evangelical Christian
ministers snuck into a Senate hearing room to anoint and bless the chairs
before the Alito confirmation hearings.
This wasn’t a pro-Alito prayer, they said, but God was interested
because of the issues. They said
they did the same thing before the Roberts hearings last year…and it went very
well.
Shouldn’t
we ask that tribal elders to be allowed to burn sage and dance, possibly, and
ask Buddhist priests to burn incense and clang the bells, and shouldn’t there
be rabbis to pray? I’ll just stop here, lest I rave on the rest
of the day about the theological, constitutional and common sense objections I
have to these theocrats and the benign attitude people take towards them, just
because they aren’t carrying wearing uniforms, marching in step, carrying guns.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113649645107138940-Ku05eyOWs5xFbqD33aaAarliwqo_20060112.html?mod=blogs
and
on Day One of the Alito hearings, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) “gets naked” (a colloquial phrase) with Alito on the issue of abortions - no
coy, subtle legal talk pretending this is not about Roe v Wade for this
hardliner http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/01/09.html#a6643
Believe
it or Not 3: The Dept of Homeland Security
hired whom? “What's
wrong with this picture? Remember the KGB, the secret police of the old Soviet
Union? Well, the former director, General Yevgeni Primakov, has been hired by
the Department of Homeland Security. With our tax dollars, he is helping to
design a system of "internal passports." The United Soviet States of
America, as Al Martin calls it, is getting closer to reality. Travel documents
have become a new controlling device. Our international passports can now be
screened for personal information, and a frightening new document called an
internal passport threatens our liberty.
…There will be something new in these
international passports. Your passport will conceal an embedded chip that will
have vital data about you including unspecified personal information. These chips can be read from up to 33
feet away. Anyone can
scan your passport, so American travelers could become targets for pickpockets,
and thieves could access your personal information. Terrorists could even steal
your identity.
The current administration is
also about to try and convince the general public that a system of internal
passports is vital to our security. A proposed program called Secure Flight,
which is an offshoot of CAPPS II, may pose an even greater danger to our
privacy. The original CAPPS II was
designed with the help of Gen. Primakov and the former head of the Russian
Federal Security Service, Gen. Karpov. CAPPS II was defeated by Congress in
2004, but Secure Flight is the same thing with a different name.
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051230/OPINION/512300327/1006&theme
Believe
it or Not #4: Note that the “insurgents” have offered to deliver Zarqawi – if
the US meets its demands for a withdrawal timetable.
In
official US-speak, Sunni insurgents have been transformed from "anti-Iraqi
forces" to "nationalists". Now that they're respectable, the way
is open for direct negotiations rather than military confrontation. This sea
change, which could hasten the withdrawal of US troops, excludes, of course,
"al-Qaeda" and "terrorists".
US Embraces Iraqi Insurgents
By Gareth Porter,
Inter Press Service, Dec. 17, 2005
WASHINGTON - While US President George W Bush continued to claim a strategy for
"victory" in Iraq in recent speeches, his administration has quietly
renounced the goal of defeating the non-al-Qaeda, Sunni-armed organizations
there. The administration is evidently
preparing for serious negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, whom it has
started referring to as "nationalists", emphasizing their opposition
to al-Qaeda's objectives.
The new policy has thus
far gone unnoticed in the media, partly because it has only been articulated by
US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the spokesman for the US command in Baghdad.
The White House clearly recognizes that the shift could cause serious political
problems if and when it becomes widely understood. The Republican Party has
just unveiled a new television ad attacking Democratic Party chair Howard Dean
for suggesting that the war in Iraq cannot be won. Renouncing victory over the
Sunni insurgents therefore undercuts the president's political strategy of
portraying his policy as one of "staying the course" and attacking
the Democrats for "cutting and running".
Until recently, the
administration treated the indigenous Sunni insurgents as the main enemy in
Iraq, measuring
progress primarily in terms of the numbers of insurgents killed and captured,
and areas "cleared" of insurgent presence. Administration officials
portrayed Sunni insurgents as allies of al-Qaeda and referred to them as
"anti-Iraqi forces".
The hard line toward Sunni insurgents remained even after the administration
began last summer to put much greater emphasis on the political track of
attracting Sunnis into the new government. As recently as mid-November, briefings by the US command described operations in
Western Iraq as being against "insurgents" - not against al-Qaeda or
"terrorists".
But beginning in late
November, both the US command and the US Embassy began signaling a dramatic
change in Washington's attitude toward Sunni resistance organizations.
On November 24, the top US military spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, made a
point of emphasizing the command's understanding of the "capabilities, the
vulnerabilities and the intentions of each group of the insurgency - the
foreign fighters, the Iraqi rejectionists and the Saddamists". He referred to the administration's
"deliberate outreach" to the "rejectionists", which would
allow them to "become part of the solution and not part of the
problem".
That same week, Khalilzad announced in an ABC News interview that he was
prepared to open negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, but not with
"Saddamists" or foreign terrorists. And in an interview with Time
magazine, Khalilzad, referring specifically to Sunni insurgent groups, said:
"We want to deal with their legitimate concerns."
Khalilzad then combined
2 major indications of a new willingness to accommodate the Sunni insurgents in
the same sentence. "The fault line between al-Qaeda and the nationalists
seems to have increased," he told Time. Thus
the image of the insurgents had been transformed from "anti-Iraqi
forces" to "nationalists". The conflicting objectives of the
Sunni resistance groups and the al-Qaeda-connected terrorist network were now
played up rather than ignored, as in the past.
The clearest articulation of the change in policy to date, however, came in a
US command media briefing by Lynch on December 8. He was asked to what extent the insurgency was
"dominated or run by Ba'athists and rejectionists" and to what extent
by "Islamic fundamentalists".
His reply avoided the question of which was more important and instead emphasized the difference between US policy
toward the Sunni insurgents and its policy toward al-Qaeda terrorists. Lynch
said US operations "are focused on [Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi and his network".
Then he made a crucial distinction. "We've
made a conscious decision," he said, "to focus on defeating the terrorists and foreign
fighters and disrupting the capabilities of the rest of the insurgents."
So his audience wouldn't miss the distinction he was making, Lynch added that
"the primary way to disrupt the capability of the rejectionists is through
political engagement ..."
"Political engagement", as we now know from Khalilzad, means direct
negotiations with the leaders of the insurgency. Lynch's answer had been carefully
prepared ahead of time and reflected the new administration policy.
The new soft line
toward the Sunni insurgents is a belated administration response to the
conclusion of the US military commanders in Iraq last summer that the Sunni
insurgents could not be "defeated" and that there must be a political
settlement with them.
General George Casey, the commander of all multinational forces in Iraq,
declared in an interview in late June that the conflict "will ultimately
be settled by negotiation and inclusion in the political process. It will not
be settled on the battlefield."
Significantly, Casey did not distinguish between US and Iraqi forces in calling
for negotiations, thus differing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In
a news conference that same day, Rumsfeld said, "The coalition forces, the
foreign forces, are not going to repress the insurgency," implying that
Iraqi forces would be able to do so.
Casey also suggested that the "preliminary talks" that had occurred
between US officials and insurgents could lead to actual negotiations. That
idea was quickly squelched by the US Embassy, evidently on White House orders.
However, a policy debate over how to handle the Sunnis obviously continued
within the administration, with the US military leadership in Iraq and Khalilzad
pushing for real negotiations. It is now clear that the proponents of accommodation won
the debate.
This does not mean that the White House has decided to give in on a timetable
for troop withdrawal, which Bush just publicly rejected once again. As Seymour
Hersh wrote in the December 5 New Yorker magazine, a think tank source close to
Vice President Dick Cheney said the president still believed he could
"tough this one out".
And despite its new line on the insurgency, US military operations are in fact
still aimed largely at the Sunni insurgents rather than at al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, the administration's
abandonment of the goal of military defeat of the Sunni insurgents and
willingness to negotiate with them betrays its "victory" rhetoric.
Such negotiations would certainly have considerable impact on the domestic politics of the war. Such negotiations would become the new
focus of public views of Bush's handling of Iraq. That would in turn increase
the pressure on the White House to get the insurgent leaders to come to an
agreement. Meanwhile, the insurgents can be expected to insist that no
agreement is possible without a timetable for US military withdrawal.
The insurgents can also
increase the pressure on Bush by making
public their offer, reportedly made by
insurgent leaders to Arab League officials in Cairo last month, to deliver
al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Zarqawi, to the Iraqi authorities as part of a peace
agreement involving a US withdrawal timetable.
As more people in the US, including members of Congress, understand that the
Sunni resistance is not the enemy, but is the necessary ally in the elimination
of al-Qaeda's "terrorist haven" in Iraq, political support for
continued US military presence is likely to shrink even further. Why, it may be
asked, should US troops stay in Iraq to fight Sunni armed groups who are
willing and able to turn in the real enemy in Iraq?
Thus the softening of the administration's policy toward the insurgents could
set in motion a train of events that brings the US occupation to an end much
more quickly than now seems possible.
Gareth Porter is an independent historian
and foreign policy analyst. He is the author of The Third Option in
Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy in the
Fall issue of Middle East Policy.
(Inter Press Service)
