Category: Politics

I’m still trying to digest this news, so I ask you to stay with me for a minute while I try to sort it out myself.
The media reported yesterday that the administration has named nine senior Iraqi officials who it says would face a war crimes tribunal on charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
But we remember that this administration doesn’t recognize the International Court, and the world doesn’t recognize the administation’s authority for such trials. Details.
That’s not all. The White House originally planned to send the list to Baghdad with a delegation from the Arab League, but that trip was called off. If the people on the list left Iraq, turning the country over to the U.S., the idea was that the Iraqi people could escape our attack and their criminal leaders could escape prosecution.
The naiveite of such a plan is matched only by the cynicism of its authors. In exchange for U.S. control of the Middle East the administration was willing to overlook the prosecution of those it has repeatedly branded as criminals of the highest order. Looking at it in another way, the administration is saying that the senior Iraqi officials will be declared war criminals only if we have to declare war on Iraq. Huh?

Paul Krugman sees Bush as Captain Queeg. But unfortunately this isn’t fiction, and there’s more than one ship at risk.

Aboard the U.S.S. Caine, it was the business with the strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush’s quart of strawberries?
Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of epiphanies. There’s a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush’s policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn’t want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think — including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon — don’t just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America’s leadership has lost touch with reality.

A surprisingly mild-tongued Larry Kramer calls a plague a plague in the NYTimes today.

Why does no one have the courage to say loudly and unequivocally that 50 million people around the world are going to die in a matter of days or months or at the most a few years unless they are treated immediately with the life-saving drugs that are now available? I have arrived at this figure after conversations with many experts.
. . . .
When I first heard about what would become known as AIDS there were 41 cases of some strange occurrence. Almost 25 years later we have failed to mount a thoughtful, concerted effort to stop what is now this plague. We have failed to keep up any pressure. We have failed to outrage each other enough so that people in authority would have no choice but to do something.
For almost 25 years we had our chance to do something. Year after year, we blew it. AIDS tells us about the worst of America and the world. It tells us that people don’t care about others. It shows us over and over and over again that people can be allowed to die. It should break everyone’s heart. Why doesn’t it?

Via Electrolite, a serious look by Michael Lind at what the Bushites have done to global security.

The grand strategy of the Bush administration rests on three axioms: American global hegemony; preventive war; and the so-called “war on terror.” All three axioms are fallacies that inevitably produce counterproductive and misguided policies. What the great French diplomat Talleyrand said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien applies with equal force to Bush’s grand strategy: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.”

An alert from Adam Greenfield, via Kottke.org, that the U.S. may face a brain drain not unlike that which accompanied the Nazi consolidation of power in the 30’s. Ironically, 65 years ago, in spite of its own nativist immigration policies, it was the U.S. which was benefitting from repression.

America hasn’t had its Kristallnacht – yet – but even so the buzz around New Zealand in a few circles of my acquaintance is enough to put one in mind of the brain drain Germany bought itself in the mid- to late 1930’s. And as Florida might have it, if I were a smart politician just about anywhere on the planet – one interested in economic vitality and quality of life – I might be egging the Ashcrofts on. All those smart Americans will be looking to settle somewhere that supports and encourages them in who they are, and they’ll bring their truest assets, their creative minds, right along with ’em.

This is not a news story. It’s not even an interesting feature story. We all know this already and it’s definitely not entertaining. In fact, I’m convinced the only reason the White House and the NYTimes got together today on this one was to give me an excuse to post this item.

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge joined federal law enforcement officials today in warning that suicide bombings like those that have killed hundreds in Israel are inevitable in the United States and will be difficult to prevent.
His warning, in a television interview, came as Mr. Ridge and his department stepped up preparations to raise the nation’s terrorism alert level to “high risk” out of concern over the possibility of terrorist attacks linked to an invasion of Iraq.
In his interview with Fox News, Mr. Ridge said, “we have to prepare for the inevitability” of suicide bombings in the United States.

How can a war against Iraq be essential to American security, as the Bush crowd argues, if a war against Iraq will destroy American security? Is anyone in Washington thinking about this? Just ask yourself, whether you live in New York or, say, Tom Ridge’s home, Erie, Pennsylvania, do you have more to fear from Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” or the neighborhood suicide bomber?
On another note, let us all remember that, when the alert is raised to “orange” once again next week, a few days before a major national antiwar demonstration, as was done a few days before the February 15 rallies around the country, this will be only a coincidence.

U.N. resolution or not, this war violates international law. So argues Rahul Mahajan in an excerpt from a book on the U.S. war against Iraq.

The majority of the antiwar movement has made a mistake in emphasizing the unilateral nature of the war on Iraq and the need for United Nations approval, and we may well reap the consequences of that mistake.

Mahajan imagines the time may still come when the White House will have been able to “strong-arm and browbeat enough members of the Security Council to acquiesce” in its war, but there would still be no legitimacy for premeditated aggression.

It surely is unprecedented in world history that a country is under escalating attack; told repeatedly that it will be subjected to a full-scale war; required to disarm itself before that war; and then castigated by the “international community” for significant but partial compliance.

They’re in hiding in the middle of the Atlantic, because they know they wouldn’t be safe from the ridicule and fury of millions anywhere on the continent of Europe.

President Bush will travel to Portugal’s Azores islands, about 900 miles west of the European mainland, to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in a “final pursuit” of a U.N. resolution on disarming Iraq, the White House said on Friday.

Ted Rall argues that “supporting our troops while they’re fighting an immoral and illegal war is misguided and wrong.”

We find ourselves facing the paradox of the “good German” of the ’30s. We’re ruled by an evil, non-elected warlord who ignores both domestic opposition and international condemnation. We don’t want the soldiers fighting his unjustified wars of expansion to win–but we don’t want them to lose either.
. . . .
I want our troops to return home safely. I want them to live. Like a good German watching my countrymen march into Poland and Belgium and Luxembourg and France, I don’t want them to win and I don’t want them to lose.

For visuals, see, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS bring them home now

Most thinking folks know there really is no independent mainstream press left in the U.S.
Molly Ivins is more generous, but even she’s paid by the commercial media. While she thinks it could still profit from some soul-searching to see why it has completely failed in its role, her own outline of the extent of that failure is a clear indictment of its alliance with the establishment.

According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS, 42 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center, something that has never even been claimed by the Bush administration. According to a poll conducted by ABC, 55 percent believes Saddam Hussein gives direct support to al-Qaida, a claim that has been made by the administration but for which no evidence has ever been presented. President Bush has lately modified the claim to “al-Qaida-type” organizations. This is how well journalism has done its job in the months leading up to this war. A disgraceful performance.

These beliefs are not found in any numbers anywhere else in the world. Either Americans are uniquely stupid or we’re getting the wrong information.
And then there is Matt Taibbi in the New York Press. Taibbi uses the story of Bush’s recent staged showing in the East Room to show how the White House press corps “politely grabs its ankles” in Dubya’s awesome presence.

The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.
. . . .
Even Bush couldn’t ignore the absurdity of it all. In a remarkable exchange that somehow managed to avoid being commented upon in news accounts the next day, Bush chided CNN political correspondent John King when the latter overacted his part, too enthusiastically waving his hand when it apparently was, according to the script, his turn anyway.
KING: “Mr. President.”
BUSH: “We’ll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted…”
A ripple of nervous laughter shot through the East Room.
. . . .
Reporters argue that they have no choice. They’ll say they can’t protest or boycott the staged format, because they risk being stripped of their seat in the press pool. For the same reason, they say they can’t write anything too negative. They can’t write, for instance, “President Bush, looking like a demented retard on the eve of war…” That leaves them with the sole option of “working within the system” and, as they like to say, “trying to take our shots when we can.”

Like I said, the independent press really is as dead as a dodo.