3 a.m. PHONE CALLS HOME FROM WAR: IT'S NOT JUST POLITICS

Whenever a soldier dies in Iraq or anywhere else, a wave of uneasiness--fear, revulsion, guilt, sadness--ripples through the survivors. It could be felt on Monday, even as the fighting was still going on.
--"Iraq War Ends Silently for One American Soldier," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, June 29, 2006.

"I don't know if this war is worth the life of Terry Fisk, or 10 soldiers, or 2,500 soldiers like him," Colonel MacFarland told his forces. "What I do know is that he did not die alone. He was surrounded by friends.

"A Greek philosopher said that only the dead have seen the end of war," the colonel said. "Only Terry Fisk has seen the end of this war."
--ibid

"I know this has been a hard week. You guys lost three men this week."
"Yeah. I don't want to talk about any of that right now. I'm just worn out and stressed out and I just want to hear news from home."
--my son, calling at 3 a.m. his time, from the Anbar Province, Iraq.


When the phone rang at about six p.m. our time, I glanced at the caller ID and saw the familiar "AT&T Hits."

That's so strange. AT&T Hits. It sounds so happy, like a top-forty pop-music hit parade from the sixties. The big A.M. radio station where I grew up in Dallas--KLIF--published a list every week of the Top-40 and we'd avidly follow it to see which one of the British Invasion was beating out all comers that week.

I yanked up the phone and said hello but the response was dead air. I've learned to be patient, because the satellite phones the guys pass around from Marine to Marine in the unit is notoriously beat up and bunged up. They cut in and out and it's not unusual for our sons to have to call back six or eight times during one brief conversation.

Maybe there are plenty of troops in headquarters rear areas and in vast military bases like the ones our secretary of defense loves to visit--so sprawling that they've actually got fast-food restaurants on them and PX's. They have access to Internet cafes where they post blogs or catch a glimpse of their new babies back home through videoconferencing.

But for the Marine infantry, fighting bloody battles every damn day in the Anbar Province of Iraq, there are no bases, no PX's, no mess halls. They sleep in abandoned Iraqi houses and in the streets or in temporary posts snagged in war-riddled buildings or up on roofs or out in the desert. If they sleep at all.

A platoon will lug around a sat phone and pass it around when it is relatively quiet so the guys can check in at home and reassure their nerve-rattled families that, at least for right then in that breathless moment of time…they're okay.

I said hello again and waited again, and then said, "Dustin, I'm here honey. If you can hear me."

In response came the telltale death-rattle of the connection being cut, and I hung up immediately because if he can, he'll call back.

When the phone rang again I snatched it up and said, "Is it you?"

"Yeah," he said, and in that one instant, I knew something was terribly wrong because I'm his mama. Talk to me all you want about fatigue or overseas connections but I know.

I said, "It's 3 a.m. your time. Kinda late."

He said yeah, he just wanted to check in and let me know he was all right.

Dustin knew and I knew that his unit had lost three good Marines in three days.

I said, "I know it's been a real hard week. I don’t know if you knew any of the guys."

He said, "Yeah, I don’t want to talk about that right now. I just want to see how everybody's doing."

I dropped the subject immediately, because it is my job to do everything humanly and motherly possible in this universe to keep that boy going, to keep his spirits up, to make him laugh if I can, to reach through that telephone cord, reach across an ocean, reach across 6,000 miles and wrap my arms around him and hug him close and say, It's gonna be all right.

I said we were all fine, and this is what I would have said if we'd all been in the hospital in the ICU ward. I can only imagine the horrors my child has witnessed during the past few months. He does not need to be worrying about the health and safety of any of his loved ones back home.

Fortunately, I didn't have to lie this time like I did his last deployment to The Bad Place. I told him we were all doing well and told a couple of funny stories I'd saved for just this purpose, to prove my point and get him through the next miserable day in hell.

I told him he sounded exhausted, and he said, "I'm worn out and stressed out and I just want to get out of this place and come home."

I'm not going to give specifics on an Internet blog, but I will say he's been in a very bad place, and I will say that his unit is due to rotate home in the near future, but he still has several weeks where he must remain vigilant.

"I'm stressed-out too," I admitted (for the first time). "A friend of mine put it beautifully. She said, "The screws that hold me together are coming loose."

I laughed when I said it to keep the conversation light, and he said Yeah. He didn't laugh because he doesn't much any more, not now. I turned it into a joke and said, "If that makes you feel any better." He said, "It does, actually."

We talked of little things, everyday things, little sanities of home life that he hungers for, little touches of the real world and not the world of car bombs and IEDs and snipers and firefights and death and stench and heat and misery and homesickness.

I asked if he needed anything, if he'd gotten the care packages I'd sent recently. We talked of when we'd see one another again, and I knew the conversation was coming to a close because he has so little time, you see, because there are other miserable homesick Marines patiently waiting their turn.

And then I felt frantic and desperate and terrified because I don't know, I never know, if that is the last time I will ever hear his voice.

When you fear that you may not ever speak to your child again, you want to say just the right thing, and what is that?

How do you keep from being betrayed by the tears in your shaky voice? How do you be at least as brave as he is?

HOW?

His dad wasn't here, but I remembered things I had overheard him tell our son about the final days of combat. How it was easy to get distracted by thoughts of home and hearth, and get careless.

How you had to remain vigilant.

But his dad is a combat veteran and I am not. So I could not say it, but I could remind him of it just the same.

I said, "Of course, you know to remain vigilant. Please be very very careful honey."

"I will," he said.

And then I felt this urgency, this terrible urgency, to say, "Honey, you are never forgotten. Never ever for a single moment. You are in our thoughts and our prayers every moment of every day. We count the days until we can see you again. You aren't forgotten."

And he said, "Sometimes I forget myself."

"Please, please be careful," I said. "Hang in there. Just hang in there a little longer until you can be safe again."

We told each other how much we loved each other, and I fought valiantly to hide my tears, and when we said good-bye, I thought about how he refuses to hang up until I do. I've never said anything about it, but I've noticed it. Every conversation, no matter how brief. He waits for me to say good-bye.

And then you hang up and you sit alone in a silent house that once rang with his laughter and his noise, and your heart cracks open and there is nothing you can do but cry. Sob and sob because you don't have to be brave for him anymore.

When I'd gotten myself a bit under control, I called his dad and told him about the conversation. We agreed that something awful must have happened in the last few days, that he just called home for one brief moment of comfort, of hearing Mom's voice and news of home.

"I'm glad you were there for him," said my husband of 32 years.

The other night, I had a long and quite lovely conversation with the father of one of the young men in my son's unit. We'd met on a parent's forum. All I knew was that his child was in the same hell as mine, and that's all I needed to know.

But I was surprised to learn that he works in the field of psychology, and as a trained therapist, he said, "With all my training and all my education and all my experience, and all my kind well-meaning colleagues…I have absolutely no resources for coping with this."

We agreed that obsessive thoughts, insomnia, crying jags, and constant daily ongoing TERROR punctuated by spasms of panic and hysteria were NORMAL, actually.

Normal, that is, for the parent or loved one of a young man or woman in war.
Together, we fretted about how best to help them when they make those 3 a.m. phone calls; what's the best tone of voice; what to discuss and not to discuss; how best to be the most comforting and most supportive we can possibly be.

Like me, this particular gentleman did not want this particular war and does not share the politics of many of the most well-meaning "flag-wavers" as we call them--people who insist that we should support the war or it means we're not supporting the troops.

They don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Some of my readers accuse me of being filled with hatred or rage, but they don't get it and they don't get me.

When I see politicians use this war as a weapon of divisiveness in order to appeal to a narrow "base"--and I'm talking on both sides of the aisle--when I see politicians who have never dodged a bullet in their lives preen and preach in front of hoards of flags; when I see politicians who care much more about photo ops than about rolling up their sleeves and searching for the smartest solutions to this mess; when well-meaning patriotic souls accuse me of "undermining the troops"--souls who know nothing about the cards and letters and jokes and care packages and homemade cookies and phone calls and love to my son and others I know that I have sent countless times over there…and I look at the daily death toll mounting, and when, in my son's heavy voice, I hear the unimaginable weight of exhaustion and fear and the sheer stress of surviving when others didn't…

Well, all I can say is this.

Can you possibly understand the terror, all you who sit at home in your comfortable chairs and watch the evening news and shake your heads and go on the Internet and argue politics with me?

If you have not been there, if you have not spoken to your child and wondered if it is the last time you will ever hear his voice, then in matters of this war, shut up.

You are not qualified to speak.

OLD CUT AND RUN CASEY

Now, after criticizing Democratic lawmakers for trying to legislate a timeline for withdrawing American troops, skeptics say, the Bush administration seems to have its own private schedule, albeit one that can be adjusted as events unfold.

If executed, the plan could have considerable political significance. The first reductions would take place before this fall's Congressional elections, while even bigger cuts might come before the 2008 presidential election.
--"U.S. General in Iraq Outlines Troop Cuts," Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, June 25, 2006.

"The only people who have fought us and fought us against the timetable…are the Republicans of the United States Senate and in the Congress," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif)…

"The Casey plan looks an awful lot like what the Republicans spent the last week attacking. Will the partisan attack dogs now turn their venom and disinformation campaign on Gen. Casey?" said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass).

"It shouldn't be a political decision, but it is going to be with this administration," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich). "It's as clear as your face, which is mighty clear, that before this election, this November, there's going to be troop reductions in Iraq, and the president will then claim some kind of progress or victory."
--"Democrats Cite Report On Troop Cuts in Iraq," Michael Abramowitz and Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times, June 26, 2006.


Let me make several points perfectly clear at the outset. First, for those of you who RESPOND in the comment section before actually READING my posts, or who respond ANGRILY without reading it CAREFULLY…I never said that Republicans don't have children in this war. How stupid would that be? I'm MARRIED to a moderate Republican. All three of my nephews come from solidly Republican homes. Believe me, I know many Republicans whose kids are in this war.

I SAID that the Republican CONGRESS is only too happy to send OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN off to war because, to my knowledge, there is only ONE Republican Congressman who has a child about to deploy to Iraq.

And it is the CONGRESS and the WHITE HOUSE and all their little enablers who have been only too eager and willing to send other people's children into combat to fight, die, and lose limbs and minds.

The only member of the Bush administration to forcefully protest this war was the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who DID see combat, and knew intimately the terrible price of flinging troops into battle, and he was appalled that it was about to be done undermanned and underplanned.

Secondly, the title of this post is in no way meant to be a disrespectful inference on General George Casey, Bush's point man in Iraq. He is doing an impossible job and doing it to the best of his ability. I am quite convinced that it was not Gen. Casey or anyone on his staff who leaked his secret meeting with the White House to the press.

You'd have to ask the Leaker-in-Chief about that. Or Cheney or Rove, all of whom leak whenever it serves their purposes. So, while they were BERATING, MOCKING, VILIFYING, and CRUCIFYING any Democrat who wanted to discuss a reasonable timeframe for redeployments and troop drawdowns, they knew full well that the White House had a plan of its own that was pretty much the same.

Either way, they falsely framed the debate in such a way that to even discuss a phased drawdown with troop redeployment to Kuwait--as several different Democratic representatives and Senators have proposed--was to cut and run.

"Cut and run" is a nautical term. It refers to cutting anchor and fleeing from pursuers. In the mouths of Republicans, the term clearly implied cowardice.

But it was a false frame. As General Casey so wisely pointed out, a phased drawdown of exhausted and stretched-too-thin troops, requiring the Iraqis to defend their own country, is not an act of cowardice.

It's common sense.

But of course, we all know there is no room for common sense in the Republican Congress.

Casey's plan would reduce the total amount of American troops in Iraq to 50,000 to 75,000 by the end of 2007. A couple of brigades would be redeployed to places like Kuwait and remain on varying stages of alert in case a situation were to get out of control for the Iraqi forces--again, an idea already floated by Rep. John Murtha, a man who has been absolutely DEMONIZED in conservative circles.

But General Casey floats the idea…so now what? Mock and vilify him too? Or act as if it's a great idea as long as it serves their purposes?

Isn't it convenient, really, how the troop withdrawals are timed to coincide with the elections of '06 and '08?

We have seen this kind of monumental hypocrisy and EVIL manipulation of war for political purposes before. Richard Nixon, also a Republican, was elected in 1972 by promising to end the war in Vietnam. After all, his opponent, George McGovern, was running on an anti-war platform; the vote had just been granted to 18-year olds--(when it was pointed out that they were old enough to die for their country but not old enough to vote for the people who sent them to die)--anyway, there was a legion of young baby boomers campaigning hard for McGovern.

So Nixon promised he would end the war; thus undercutting his opponent (along with the Watergate break-in).

Oh yeah, he ended it all right. THREE YEARS LATER. But hey, he got re-elected anyway, and that's what counts in the land of Oz.

At the time, I thought that was the most heinous, malevolent act of a politician I had ever seen. How many thousands and thousands of boys died so Tricky Dick could hold onto power?

How many?

I never dreamed that in my lifetime I would see such a thing again, and I certainly did not imagine that my own child's life would be in the hands of such people, but here we are.

I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd. From the Bush-Rove perspective, General Casey's plan is not a serious strategic proposal. It's a straw in the political wind.

How many still have to die before we reach a consensus that we've overpaid for Mr. Bush's mad adventure? Will 5,000 American deaths be enough? Ten thousand?

Has the war been worth their sacrifice?
--"Playing Politics With Iraq," Bob Herbert, New York Times op-ed, June 26, 2006.

It's interesting to me that a newspaper columnist would raise that question about sacrifice. Just yesterday, my exhausted, dispirited son called me from Iraq at midnight his time.

He told me that someone he knew had lost an arm and a leg. HALF of that boy's body, GONE.

Dustin said that this deployment, the troops have no sense of accomplishment, no clear understanding of what they're doing there. He pointed out that in both the Marine Corps allegations of troop misconduct involving the deaths of civilians, those units had seen fierce combat in Fallujah and then both of them had re-deployed for a THIRD time to Iraq.

Worn out. Worn thin. Aged decades beyond their youth. My 27-year old son mentioned that, when he doesn't shave, his beard is growing in white.

And then he told me about the boy who lost half his body and now lay in critical condition. My son said, "I just don't believe it's worth the sacrifice anymore."

One of my readers said that I was going to ruin my health spewing hatred in my blog. I told him that what was ruining my health was sending my child out to risk his life over and over and over again so that this administration could use his patriotism and his service to his country for cheap political gain, for sound bites, for power.

We swore in this country that we would never let it happen again after Tricky Dick tricked himself out of office, and look what we have done? Fallen for the oldest con in the book: Either you get behind my war, or you hate the troops and you hate your country.

Nobody wants to be accused of not supporting the troops or not loving their country, so they reluctantly relinquish their doubts and put their trust in a cabal of cronies that never knew combat--never wanted to--but knew just how to get into office and stay there.

Nothing like a good war, eh?

But you know, there's something else that interests me and actually gives me a small glimmer of hope. On a morning news program, I heard that a recent poll said that 49 percent of the American people think that a phased drawdown and a timetable for withdrawal is needed in Iraq. That is up from 39 percent.

What I find most interesting about that statistic is that, this comes after a relentless and merciless week of Republican preening and posturing that any Democratic talk of such things was, as Cheney put it, a disaster.

He said that, knowing full well that Casey was working on a plan of his own for the White House.

So, they're sending out all their meanest attack dogs, and the Cult of Karl obediently mouths all the salient talking points so that they show "unity" with the White House, and they hammer those points over and over and over again on talk radio and C-Span and morning news programs and e-mail forwards, most of which get sent to my mailbox.

The Bush administration has learned, in other political campaigns, that it's the best way to hypnotise and mesmerize the American people. It's always worked before.

But you know what? At least half of the American people don't care any more and aren't listening. I hope that, especially now that Casey's plan has been made public, the patience of the American people will finally give out for an administration who has no problem playing politics with the lives--and deaths--of innocents.

We've had enough clownish debates on the Senate floor and elsewhere. We've had enough muscle-flexing in the White House and on Capitol Hill by guys who ran and hid when they were young and their country was at war. And it's time to stop using generals and their forces under fire in the field for cheap partisan political purposes.
--ibid

I couldn't have said it better myself, Mr. Herbert.

GO AHEAD REPUBLICAN CONGRESS; PAINT TARGETS ON THE TROOPS' BACKS; THEY'RE NOT YOUR CHILDREN

This week at a news conference, The Wall Street Journal's David Rogers, a Vietnam Veteran, challenged the House majority leader. "In Vietnam, they used to put us out in these fire support bases and hope we would get attacked. Is that what you're doing here?" he asked. "You are putting people in Iraq and hoping they get attacked so you can bring out the terrorists?" Has it come to this?
--"Becoming Terrorist Attractions," Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, June 23, 2006.

A sergeant on patrol…told a journalist, "You can have my job. It's easy. You just have to drive around all day and wait for somebody to bomb you."
--"Probing a Bloodbath," Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson, Newsweek, June 12, 2006

Reinstate the military draft and see how quickly the United States ends its war in Iraq.

Imagine if all our sons and daughters were at risk for deployment in the desert…If we feared our children would be next up to be gutted like fish, we might be less likely to shake our heads at crazy anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. If turning 18 meant your kid's boots on the ground, a resolution to pull troops out of the ground by a certain date might grab more than six votes in the US Senate.
--"A Military Draft Might Awaken Us," Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe, June 22, 2006.

The Republican talking-points, delivered to Congress from the White House in a thick 200-page document this past week, so they would all fall in line with Karl Rove's political plan to use the war as a weapon to shoot to kill Democrats who dare disagree, are crystal clear.

All you have to do is spend just a few minutes listening to the 30-second sound bites or spend a little time watching Sunday morning news programs, as I am doing right now.

Listen for some key words: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and cut and run, surrender, retreat, defeat.

The fact that the top general on the ground in Iraq, as we speak, is talking about almost the exact same phased withdrawal and redeployment as top Democrats--Does that mean General Casey wants to cut and run?--is irrelevant. The fact that 87 percent of the Iraqi people want the same thing is irrelevant. The fact that more than half the Iraqi people think it's okay to attack Americans is irrelevant. The fact that the Iraqi Prime Minister has put out a plan today offering amnesty for Iraqis killing Americans is irrelevant to Republicans.

Their message is clear as a bell, in fact, in case we don't get it, listen for the following sentence to be repeated constantly: We are fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.

Or something like, The reason we haven't had another 9/11 is because we are fighting the terrorists over there.

What I want to know is…WHO'S THIS WE?

I'll tell you who it is. It's my son and his buddies and my nephews and their buddies and the mothers, wives, husbands, family and friends of 130,000 troops that are being sent in harm's way to be, as Ellen Goodman calls them in the Boston Globe, terrorist attractions.

If you don't believe that, then ask them. We asked our son, and he said, "We go out and try to provoke them, draw them out into attacking us."

They do this because we are a civilized nation, and recent news headlines to the contrary, the point is that our boys and girls are trying their best not to kick down doors and kill innocent families. They are trying to draw out the bad guys so they can fight them openly in the streets rather than going into homes of women and children being used as shields by a craven and cowardly enemy.

They do this through three and four deployments away from their families, every single time running a greater and greater risk that their number will come up, their luck will run out, and that IED or mortar round or RPG or bullet will have their name on it and they will be sent home in a body bag or maimed for the rest of their lives.

And all this time, the Republican Bush-backing Congress has no moral compunction whatsoever in sending our sons and daughters over there again and again and again and telling them to stay the course, that their sacrifice is noble and that anybody who doesn't think so even if he is a decorated combat veteran, it does not matter, he is a coward.

This, from people who, by and large, never leave their air-conditioned offices for so much as a five-hour fly-by in the most dangerous country on this planet.

And they tell those of us who send our children over there again and again and again that we should be patient.

Patient.

Every single day my son puts on his digitalized cammies, his body armor that, his first deployment, was insufficient but that did not stop him from fighting bravely in Fallujah, the biggest urban battle since World War II. He heads out, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a humvee that, again, was not properly armored all the way up to 2005, when his last deployment ended.

He picks up his rifle and he heads out in bone-melting heat to serve his country and the political whims of his commander-in-chief. He goes out in armor that, three years after the war began, is finally sufficient.

Maybe. But the insurgents are getting more sophisticated, and their IED's more savage, so that now, rather than just maiming the guys and girls in the humvees, they're blowing them all into, as one sergeant put it, "nothing much but a spinal cord with flesh attached to it."

My son and his buddies goe out in 125-degree heat with 100 pounds on their backs, and their job is to get shot at or bombed. That is their job.

But that's okay, you flag-waving ribbon-tying patriotic Americans who believe the Republicans are right to send other people's children off to draw out terrorists who, before the Bush administration, didn't even exist in Iraq, send off other people's children to fight and die so you can swallow Karl Rove's talking-points mantra, and go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that they're fighting them over there so we don't have to have another 9/11 over here.

(Of course, the British are fighting them over there, and some Canadians are fighting them over there, but that hasn't stopped home-grown terrorists from blowing up buses and trains and planning other acts of terrorism...but that's irrelevant to the Repulicans. After all, they don't let the facts get in the way of politics, EVER.)

Then, armed and up-armored with Rove's talking points, those same good people who trust the Republicans and Bush to keep us safe with other people's children, can attack me, the mother of a Marine Corps fighting man, the aunt of a Marine Corps fighting man, and the aunt of two Army fighting men, all but one of whom have served or are serving in combat missions, so you can attack me as unpatriotic or of undermining the troops.

Go ahead, you cowards whose kids never once got shot at their whole lives. Give it your best shot.

Bush keeps saying we have to complete our mission. Of course, he never really says what that mission is.

Ellen Goodman does. What if the unacknowledged "mission" is to keep the terrorists "over there"?

But Joan Vennochi, puts it more bluntly, and she is right:

A key difference between Iraq and Vietnam is the country's ability to keep this war at a convenient distance. We can turn from the front-page headlines of war, death, and destruction to sports and celebrity gossip; a click of the remote, and the face of a young soldier, now dead, fades to "Friends" reruns or "America's Next Top Model." The volunteer army ensures that someone else's children are losing limbs and dying; someone else's children are pushed to alleged acts of violence against Iraqi detainees and civilians. Even when the news from Iraq is so brutal it forces momentary focus on the war, quick relief is promised.
--"A Military Draft Might Awaken Us," Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe, June 22, 2006.

By the way, it was one of those cut-and-run Democrats who actually proposed that we bring back the draft.

That's right. US Representative Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, introduced the Universal Service Act of 2006.

According to Vennochi's article, the act would require all people in the United States, including women, between the ages of 18 and 42, to perform a period of military service or period of civilian service in furtherance of national defense and homeland security. The proposal was referred to the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel.

Where of course, nothing will come of it, because the Republican-dominated rubber-stamp Congress has no interest in really making any kind of substantive difference in Iraq.

All they want to do is trump up fake debates in Congress for their hateful anti-Democrat sound bites, accuse Democrats like John Murtha, a decorated Marine combat veteran, of being a coward because he says our troops have done their job, that they are exhausted, and that the more times they are flung into battle again and again and again, the more likely they will snap and do the kinds of things that have been alleged in recent weeks.

Because believe me, they are doing it alone because the country does not care.

My son's first deployment, his friends back home called me frequently to see how he was doing. This deployment, even his own grandparents often forget where he is and what he is doing. Most of his friends have never called. Only one has even asked for his address.

They're busy. It's somebody else. And these are my son's personal friends and buddies.

It's just too damn easy to forget.

Joan Vennochi goes on to say something that is so powerful I'm going to put it into all-caps:

PRESIDENT BUSH MOBILIZES HIS BUBBLE TO MOVE FROM WASHINGTON TO BAGHDAD FOR A FEW HOURS, AND THE COUNTRY IS SUPPOSED TO SALUTE HIS BRAVERY? BRAVERY IS MANNING A TRAFFIC CHECKPOINT IN A HOSTILE TOWN NAMED YOUSSIFIYAH, WHERE SPECIALIST DAVID J. BABINEAU OF SPRINGFIELD WAS KILLED AND TUCKER AND MENCHACA WERE KIDNAPPED.

Kidnapped, then tortured, dragged behind pickup trucks, dismembered, beheaded, and dumped like garbage in the street, with booby traps surrounding their unrecognizable bodies, so their buddies trying to rescue them would die in horrible ways, too.

But that's okay.

We can breathe a sigh of relief.

After all, it was somebody else's children.

FEEL SAFER YET?

Washington is failing to make progress in the global war on terror and the next 9/11-style attack is not a question of if, but when. That is the scathing conclusion of a survey of 100 leading American foreign-policy analysts.

In its first "Terrorism Index," released yesterday, the influential journal Foreign Affairs found surprising consensus among bipartisan experts.

Some 86 percent of them said the world has grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush's claims that the U.S. is winning the war on terror…

The survey's participants included an ex-secretary of state and former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, along with prominent members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
--"War on Terror Called a Failure: Washington's Diplomatic Efforts Rated a 1.8 out of a 10," Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, June 15, 2006.

The book's ("The One Percent Doctrine," by Ronald Suskind) opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 memo titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
--"The Shadow of War, In a Surprising New Light," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.

"The Bush policy in Iraq has not made America safer, but has built a better terrorist."
--"Frameshop," Jeffrey Feldman, www.theframeshopisopen.com, June 20, 2006.


Remember back when Bush was running for re-election and we had all those national security color scares? The red and orange scares that scrambled municipal police departments all over the country in a frantic attempt to stop those ghastly terrorists from destroying us all?

Ever notice how we ALWAYS got a new color scare every time John Kerry had a bounce in the polls? The last serious color scare we got was the week following the Democratic presidential convention.

After Bush was re-elected, we never had another color scare, not even after London was bombed. Not even after Madrid was bombed. Not even after that dire Canadian plot was uncovered last week.

No more terrorist scares, once the Republicans were back in office.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? In spite of the terrible cost to municipal police departments in officer overtime and canceled vacations, those terrorist scares were used by the federal government for one thing and one thing only: campaign politics, Republican-style.

They had absolutely nothing to do with national security.

The Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, was rated for effectiveness at only 2.9 out of 10. Changes in the intelligence structure was assessed at "poor to fair," with one percent noting that reform "in most cases has produced new levels of bureaucracy in an already overly bureaucratic system."
--"War On Terror Called Failure," Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, June 15, 2006.

The thing is, the Republicans keep beating this tired old drum that it's the DEMOCRATS who are the enemy--not al Qaeda--and that if we DARE let the Democrats take care of national security, those little wimpy wusses, why, they'll just wring their hands and go into therapy. The Republicans, however, are STRONG and DECISIVE and by God, they will KEEP US SAFE.

They're keeping us safe right now, fighting the GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR in Iraq. If we weren't fighting those terrorists in Iraq, we'd be fighting them in our own front yards. (I have a conservative friend who actually told his six-year old daughter that very thing.)

Dick Cheney is keeping us safe--he's keeping us so safe that not even the president knows what he's up to.

(Ron Suskind, in his powerful new book, "The One Percent Doctrine" writes that) Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the CIA was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation…

Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush "plausible deniability" from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details.

Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes, "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush--much of it shrouded, as well, by classification--meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed….Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial…It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much."
--"Personality, Ideology, and Bush's Terror Wars," Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review of Ron Suskind's "One Percent Doctrine," June 20, 2006.

So, let me get this straight. The president's point of view could not be fogged up with the truth; that would get in the way of White House lies to sell the war or whatever other snake oil they had to peddle. Better to keep him in the dark so he could go in front of the television cameras and be sincere because, after all, he honestly had not seen anything to the contrary to what he was saying.

What a beautiful plan. It worked too, didn't it?

While Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were going around whipping up public fears, the president was busy soothing the nation that he, and he alone, held the secret key to keeping us safe.

In this way, he could sanction such things as scooping up suspected terrorists, flying them on secret airplanes under cover of darkness to eastern European countries who had no problem with torture, and get "intelligence" from them that could then be used to…whip up public fears so that…the president could soothe those fears.

Wow, though, at least we're safer, right? We don't have those awful terrorists running around crashing planes into buildings any more thanks to those harsh policies. You gotta do whatcha gotta do to keep us safe, right?

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al Qaeda's chief of operations…the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal fighter they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3--a boy, a young man, and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said," Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official. "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality"…

…That judgment was "echoed at the top of the CIA and was, of course, briefed to the president and vice-president," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction in the United States."
--"The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.

Like everything else coming out of this White House, this so-called "war on terror" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, illusion and magic, hypnotic media spells, sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Suspicion, not evidence, is the new formula for action. And no amount of evidence DIS-proving that suspicion, makes any difference in the dogged White House portrayal of paranoia as policy.

…an emerging portrait of the administration…eager to circumvent traditional processes of policy development and policy review, and determined to use experts (whether CIA, the Treasury Department or the military) not to help formulate policy but simply to sell predetermined initiatives to the American public.
--"Personality, Ideology, and Bush's Terror Wars," Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, June 20, 2006.

Mr. Suskind writes that the war on terror gave the president and vice president "vast creative prerogatives" to do what they want, when they want to, for whateve reason they decide" and to "create whatever reality was convenient." The potent wartime authority granted the White House in the wake of 9/11, he says, dovetailed with the admnistrations pre-9/11 desire to amp up executive power…
--ibid

But that approach constricted the mission of the intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book. Many of them came to believe, Suskind reports, that "their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it…At least a dozen former intelligence officials speak frankly in public here.
--"The Shadow War," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.

So, basically, 9/11 was the best thing to happen for George W. Bush. It gave a lackluster loser of a one-term president a chance to stand in the rubble with a megaphone and be the country's cheerleader. It gave him the chance to do anything he wanted to do, however he wanted to do it, under the guise of "national security." It enabled him to go to war in Iraq, which his henchmen had been itching to do since Daddy pulled out--war-us interruptus--so to speak. And it gave the puppetmasters something to use to whip up public fears into a Red Alert and ensure that they would stay in the White House because even unpopular presidents get to stay in office during a war.

So. They got their war. They got their Homeland Security. But have they actually made us SAFER?

"When you strip away the politics, the experts, almost to a person, are very worried about the administration," says Joe Cirincione, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, the Washington think-tank which co-sponsored the survey. "They think none of our front-line institutions is doing a good job and that Iraq has made the terror situation much worse."

Across the board, (the experts surveyed) rated Washington's diplomatic efforts as abysmal, with a median score of 1.8 out of 10.

More than two-thirds said the United Nations and other multilateral institutions must be strengthened. In the survey's accompanying report, Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said policy analysts have never been in such agreement.

"The reason is that it's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force."
--"War On Terror Called Failure," Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, June 15, 2006.

It's interesting to me that the administration now holds out Iraq as a teeming ant bed of swarming terrorists that should never be abandoned until we've killed them all…when, before we invaded Iraq, there weren't any terrorists there to speak of. Saddam didn't want to have anything to do with them. Most of the known al Qaeda operatives were Shi'ite Muslims--whom he hated--and they were religious extremists, which the secular Saddam did not trust. Furthermore, his ego could never tolerate the competition.

Instead, they had to content themselves with holing up in ramshackle little mud-hut training camps in Afghanistan. Had we poured all of the considerable treasure and might of the United States military into Afghanistan, we could have wiped most of them off the map, including Bin Laden.

But you've got to wonder…Did Bush REALLY want to get Bin Laden? After all, he makes a great boogie man in the "global war on terror." An enemy we can hate and fear…fear being the operative word. As long as he is at large, we can still fear him…and trust the Republicans to protect us from him.

Right?

Three months (after Bush was warned in person about the dangers of an al-Qaeda attack on the United States in August of 2001, which he ignored), with Bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief) brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Ladin cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."
--"The Shadow War," Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 20, 2006.

As long as the CIA cherry-picked "intelligence" that backed up the wildest White House paranoid pronouncements, all was well. But when they bucked what the White House wanted to hear, they were marginalized, ignored, and called "disloyal" in much the same way military commanders on the ground in Iraq have been ignored if they did not tell the Pentagon what it wanted to hear.

The great thing about that policy was that then, when things went terribly, horribly wrong, the CIA then made the perfect scape-goat, as the White House proceeded to blame any and all mistakes on "bad intelligence."

A Pentagon unit headed by Douglas Feith was set up as an alternative to the CIA to provide, in Mr. Suskind's words, "intelligence on demand" to both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the office of the vice president...

…He depicts the CIA director George Tenet as frequently being made by the White House "to take the fall" for his superiors, on matters including the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence to the disputed 16 words in the president's State of the Union address…At the same time, Mr. Suskind suggests that Mr. Tenet acted as a kind of White House enabler…in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Tenet felt "a mix of insecurity and gratitude" vis-à-vis George W. Bush, and that eager to please his boss, he repeatedly pushed CIA staff members to come up with evidence that might support the president's public statements.

In the days after 9/11 Mr. Bush defended the embattled CIA chief to angry congressmen, and at that point, Suskind writes: "George Tenet would do anything his president asked. Anything. And George W. Bush knew it."
--"Personality, Ideology, and Bush's Terror Wars," Michiko Takutani, New York Times, June 20, 2006.

When Jeffrey Feldman, over at the Frameshop, says that Bush policy has not only not made America safer, but it has built a better terrorist, he points out the obvious. Back when the al Qaeda extremists were going through their little training operations in the Afghan mountains, they were learning some skills, but they were, by and large, untested and untried. Most of them just got indoctrinated with hate-America propaganda and then went back home to tend their poppy fields or work in Daddy's tobacco shop.

But now, not only has the war in Iraq spread a frenzy of hatred of Americans like a poisonous stain all around the world, but jihadists from all over central Asia are pouring across the mostly open borders of Iraq, hooking up with al Qaeda cells there, and learning state-of-the art skills in explosives, weaponry, and guerilla warfare. They use those skills in real-time operations against American military and coalition and Iraqi forces, blowing up armored humvees and vulnerable schoolbuses alike, engaging American troops in firefights and urban warfare, sharpening their warfare skills and hatreds on the ground in Iraq…and then they are vanishing back across the borders from whence they came, disappearing from sight until suddenly, a bomb goes off in a Madrid train and kills more than 200 innocent people.

You can thank the puppet Bush and all his malevolent puppetmasters for providing that superb training at the blood sacrifice of our Army and Marine Corps troops who fight and die against a relentless and invisible foe every miserable day of their many multiple deployments to hell--undermanned and underplanned--those brave young true patriots whose love of country has been used and abused for a campaign slogan and a cheap 30-second sound bite on the evening news.

You can thank Bush for setting up a relentless media tug of war with terrorists, and doing it in a flawless mathematic equation: one photo-op trip to Baghdad and a take-that-al-Qaeda! handshake with the Iraqi prime minister = two 20-year old American Army privates, ambushed, kidnapped, tortured and beheaded just in time for the evening news less than a week later.

The sum total cancels out the equation.

You can thank Bush for alienating most of our closest European and Asian allies to such an extent that now that he's belatedly asking for their help in paying for this half-trillion dollar war (he didn't ask before because he didn't want to share the spoils of war booty he thought we'd get)--they're saying, Nope--You broke it, bubba, you buy it.

You can thank Bush and his buddies Rumsfeld and Cheney for stretching out our military so far and so thin that now, we can't handle serious threats from real enemies like Iran and North Korea and they know it.

You can thank Bush for using this bloody godawful hateful war as a political campaign issue, bludgeoning opponents with it, smearing decorated war veterans as unpatriotic for disagreeing with it, and wielding it like a rusty whipsaw--cleaving this country down the middle and turning our Congress into screamers paralyzed into inaction by their own frustration and rage over it--while his craven chickenhawk shadow-men like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney run around calling combat veterans "cowards."

But can you thank Bush that we have not, as yet, suffered another 9/11?

Not on your life.

WAR AS PHOTO OP

The President of the United States wanted the military to facilitate three types of news reports: of Iraqis celebrating the arrival of victorious American troops, of allied shipments of humanitarian supplies to the Iraqi population, and of the newly discovered arsenals of WMD. The White House seemed secure in its cause and confident of victory. Bush was convinced that grateful Iraqis and disclosed WMD would provide the White House with the ultimate photo op…Tommy Franks instructed that specially trained public affairs camera crews should be prepared to document discoveries for immediate release to the media. The administration was not only convinced that Iraq had WMD but was planning its discovery as a photo op.
--COBRA II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Pantheon Books, 2006.

Bush could have spoken with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki by secure videoconference from Camp David. Instead…it was powerful political theatre, choreographed by an experienced team that played up the drama and secrecy of the moment, and were rewarded with a day of relatively unfiltered cable news coverage. The trip…unfolded with the precision of a campaign event, complete with the image of the commander-in-chief addressing cheering American troops.
--"In Iraq Visit, Bush Seizes on a Step Forward," Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, June 14, 2006.

By now, Americans surely know the difference between a presidential publicity stunt and a true turning point in this ever-lengthening war.
--"Too Soon to Cheer in Baghdad," editorial, New York Times, June 14, 2006.

I'm not sure they do.

In order to truly assess the meaning of Bush's surprise visit to Iraq--such a surprise that even the Prime Minister was only told literally FIVE MINUTES before he was shaking hands in front of the ubiquitous cameras--one needs to look past all the glory of triumphant press conferences and dramatic B-roll footage and theatrical tales of reporters kept cloistered in hotels before being spirited away in the night to Air Force One with no idea where they were going.

Look past it…into the eyes of Prime Minister Maliki. There is where you will find truth.

In truth, he was caught in a terrible vise and given no time whatsoever to prepare remarks or even facial expressions before being shoved before the cameras and microphones with his hand caught firmly in the president's.

As usual, Bush's good intentions--and I'm even somewhat skeptical on that count but will give him the benefit of the doubt--stomps all over a more sensitive, nuanced, and well-studied appraisal of just what it means for him to steal the prime minister's thunder just two days after Maliki announced he had finally appointed ministers to hold the last three crucial government posts--interior (police), defense (army), and national security.

Had Bush's photo-op and campaign staff--(for he is always, always campaigning for something; in this case, the '06 mid-term elections in which his party's fortunes are tied directly to his own)--had they stopped to think for, oh, FIVE MINUTES that one of the reasons the previous puppet government in Iraq was so scorned by the majority of the Iraqi people is precisely BECAUSE it was an American hand-picked puppet government.

The elections in January of '05 that were so crucial to the future of Iraq were crucial BECAUSE the people elected were put in office by the Iraqi people.

The most important segment of Iraqi society that needed the most to trust this new government was the INSURGENCY, that group of hardened resistance fighters who are trying to kill Americans like my son.

They had to respect that this government was elected by the people of Iraq, and in time, would be able to assume the management of that government.

Granted, it was their own bickering and jostling that kept that same government frozen in impotency for more than a year, a critical year in which the Sunni-led insurgency's relentless attacks on the Iraqi populace of Shi'ite Muslims were answered by death-squad Shi'ite militias that infiltrated the security forces of that government and proceeded to murder as many Sunnis as possible, regardless of innocence.

Which is the working definition of a Civil War.

Finally, just a couple of months ago, that logjam was broken, and Prime Minister Maliki has moved forcefully to take back his country from chaos and confusion. An astute politician in his own right, he used the good news of the American killing of the bloodiest terrorist the Sunnis had ever produced--Abu Musab al-Zarqawi--to announce his choices to fill the final ministry positions.

Those positions had been in hot dispute for a couple of months now, with Sunnis and Shi'ites, sectarians and clergy, fighting for the right to run the police, army, and security forces of Iraq. Had it not been for his brilliant timing of the announcement--immediately following the news of the death of Zarqawi--they'd be fighting over those positions still and maybe for always.

Instead, the logjam broke, and the prime minister moved swiftly to order up thousands more Iraqi Army troops into the besieged city of Baghdad to restore order, promising, as he did so, to unify the police force into a national organization with identifiable badges and vehicles.

Maliki had the momentum going, the rhythm underway. He visited Basra, now one of the most violent cities in a southern province rich with oil wells, where Shi'ites are battling Shi'ites for control of those riches, and threatened strong action if they did not get their act together and cut it out.

He was decisive and strong--the things all people apparently like to see in their leaders.

But you know, it seems there was only one force on the face of this planet capable of throwing off Maliki's rhythm, of tripping him headlong, of stealing his thunder and casting everything he was doing into doubt right there in front of the TV cameras, and it was not a Sunni terrorist or a police death squad or an assassin or even a political opponent.

It was President George W. Bush.

What Bush did, when he literally swooped in out of nowhere and barged into the room followed by a phalanx of television cameras and tag-along reporters…was effectively CASTRATE Prime Minister Maliki.

He might as well have leaned over and attached the marionette strings himself, because from that moment on, Maliki will look like a Bush stooge to those in his government who are the most resistant to a unified Iraq--those insurgents who are trying to kill my son and 130,000 other sons and daughters who are fighting in Bush's photo op war.

"Thank you for having me," Bush replied as the two men shook hands and beamed for cameras…During brief and somewhat subdued remarks, the prime minister responded, "God willing, all of the suffering will be over, and all of the soldiers will be able to return to their countries with our gratitude for what they have offered."
--"In Baghdad, Bush Pledges Support to Iraqi Leader," Jonathan Finer and Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, June 14, 2006.

"I have come to not only look you in the eye; I have also come to tell you that when America gives its word, it will keep its word."

Presumably, Bush was saying Iraqis can trust his administration not to abandon them prematurely. But Iraqis have had to live with the chain of disasters traceable to an attitude Rumsfeld expressed when he responded to an ominous outbreak of postwar looting by saying glibly, "Stuff happens."
--"Bush's Baghdad Visit," editorial, Boston Globe, June 14, 2006.

Has no one else considered the utter IRONY of the president of the most powerful country in the world, who launched an unprovoked invasion into the country it has been occupying for almost four years, dropping out of the heavens, showing up unannounced with reporters and cameras in tow, and shoving the prime minister of said country in front of the television cameras five minutes later, saying, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME???

Did Maliki have any CHOICE?

At the time that Bush made his remark about looking Maliki in the eye, he was not looking into Maliki's eye, but into the eye of the television cameras. He glanced Maliki's way as he spoke, but he was eye to eye with his political constituency back home, not the prime minister.

Just so we don't doubt the REAL meaning for this trip, Karl Rove, the squirming snake of a political hack whose fist is always firmly up his boss's butt like Frank Oz and Miss Piggy--gave another flamethrower speech in which he claimed that, if Democrats had their way, Zarqawi would be let go, because Democrats are known for cutting and running.

Interesting. When you read COBRA II, the definitive study of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the respected ex-military authors write: As for the war itself, the plan projected that the major attack would take 45 days. Another 90 days was allocated for completing the destruction of Saddam's regime, meaning the war could last as long as 135 days. At that point, the United States would transition into reconstruction, according to CENTCOM officials.

In fact, Rummy was confident that the United States would be ready to begin a major troop drawdown in SEPTEMBER OF 2003, six months after the invasion. By fall, he assumed we'd only need 30,000 troops to hang around while Iraqi oil money rebuilt the country into a mini-U.S.

30,000 by September '03.

In other words…the administration was planning to…what? CUT AND RUN?

Is that what they're calling legitimate troop drawdowns these days?

If Bush is serious about finding the right policy balance for Iraq, he will order an end to petty and divisive political tricks. There are Republicans who want to withdraw now from Iraq and Democrats who are willing to stay until the worst outcomes have been prevented. The fate of Iraq is too important to America and the world to be determined by the dishonest slogans of politicians.
--"Bush's Baghdad Visit," editorial, Boston Globe, June 14, 2006.

Bush stayed, in all, about five hours--just enough time for rapid high-risk security transit to and from the airport in special forces helicopters, TWO photo ops for the television cameras with the hapless Maliki in tow, and one weepy photo op session in front of cheering troops and of course, the ubiquitous cameras.

I don't think there was a whole lot of time for the substantive policy discussions that Bush touted as his reason for visiting Iraq in the first place, but he did say, after leaving Maliki, that he had been told that the Iraqis were very concerned that the Americans would pull out too soon and "there'll be a vacuum."

Really? Is that what they said?

That's not what Maliki said when he had 30 seconds to give unprepared on-air remarks FIVE MINUTES after meeting the president. He said he hoped we could all go home soon.

I guess something just got lost in the translation.

The next day, hundreds of Iraqis loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shi'ite cleric with a militia 100,000 strong, who has fought American troops twice--filled the streets in anti-American demonstrations, claiming that Bush was an "unwelcome guest."

But that's okay. Just in case WE DON'T GET IT YET, Bush used the opportunity to mention September 11th REPEATEDLY in his remarks following the visit.

"These (9-11 widow) broads are millionaires…reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."
--remarks made by right-wing hag Ann Coulter on the TODAY show, to Matt Lauer

Coulter claims that because some of the 9-11 widows campaigned for John Kerry, that they are taking political advantage of their tragedy.

"Right after September the 11th, I knew some would forget the dangers we faced…I vowed that day, after September the 11th, to do everything I could to protect the American people…"
--remarks made by President Bush following his trip to Iraq, yet another of countless inferences that Iraq was directly tied to 9-11, which has been proven wrong over and over and over again.

I would also like to point out, if I could? That every single state of the union address, Bush has had a GRIEVING MOTHER OF A SOLDIER OR MARINE LOST IN IRAQ or an ACTIVE-DUTY AMPUTEE sitting in the audience to be shown on-camera as being in support of his policies.

Grief-arrazis, indeed.

The White House is turning to a strategy that proved successful in the elections of 2004, insisting Mr. Bush will stay the course while at the same time making Iraq a proxy for the broader national security debate.
--"In Iraq Visit, Bush Seizes on a Step Forward," Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, June 14, 2006.

Not content to settle for a dazzling photo-op display of wartime prowess, Bush called a rare press conference this morning so that he could drag out the media attention and news cycle for another day or two. In that press conference, Bush repeated AGAIN the administration's peevish contention that all Americans get to see is bad news from Iraq.

Apparently, there is no irony too small to be lost on this administration. All the media tells is bad news, and yet, that very media was herded onto Air Force One in the dark of night and hustled 6,000 miles away for a touch-and-go photo op in Baghdad and then back home again because, apparently, the security situation is too dire to risk letting anyone in the president's party stay overnight.

So far, more reporters and camera crews have died in Iraq trying to seek out good news stories than DURING THE ENTIRE VIETNAM WAR. Two major network correspondents are recovering from life-threatening wounds that killed soldiers who had been protecting them at the time.

But the mantra is repeated, and that same news media dutifully reports it.

Don’t get me wrong. I WANT Prime Minister Maliki and the fledgling government of a devastated Iraq to SUCCEED. I want my son's and his buddies' sacrifices to count toward something tangible that they can take increasing pride in through the years.

I want to be wrong. I really do.

But as long as this administration CONTINUES--after THREE YEARS and more than 20,000 deaths and injuries to Americans and countless other Iraqis--as long as they continue to regard this war as a POLITICAL PHOTO OP rather than a serious, sensitive, and delicate matter of diplomacy backed by strength, then I will not, I can not, support this president or his policies.

I'm not willing to gamble my son's blood on an election-campaign photo-op war.

I'm just very sorry that this president is.

YOU CAN KILL THE ARSONIST BUT THE FIRE BURNS ON

"Zarqawi may be gone, but the conflagration he set alight continues to burn," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist expert at the RAND Corporation in Washington. "That is the reality. He has already set in motion powerful forces that won't necessarily stop just because he's dead."
--"Hatred He Bred Is Sure to Survive Terrorist's Death," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, June 9, 2006

About, about in reel and rout
The death fires danced at night.
--"The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", Samuel Taylor Coleridge


When I first heard of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the number-one Most Wanted and bloodiest terrorist in Iraq, I was going to sit down and dash off my thoughts, but I decided to wait until this morning so that I could read the papers, watch the news, and gather some more definitive information on what this means for the United States--particularly our fighting men and women--and for Iraq.

But when I was finished printing up the articles pertaining to this charismatic thug and the reverberations his life and death have caused throughout the globe, there were almost 30 of them, and that was just from a limited amount of papers. The New York Times, alone, had something like a dozen, divided into categories: The Target, The Raid, Sectarianism, The Victims, and op-ed commentaries. Each one was dense and heavily researched, supplemented, as were those of the Washington Post, with reporting from special correspondents in Iraq.

What emerged from a full day's reading was a complicated picture so complex that I knew that, in order to cover the subject fully, I would have to divide it into parts:

Part I. The Arsonist: Zarqawi
Part II. Knockdown: the Fire Fighters
Part III. Scorched Earth: the Victims
Part IV. Smoldering Embers: Aftermath

What I want to do is try and separate myth--both theirs and ours--from fact. The bottom line is that it's not as good as the politicians and military spokespersons would have you think, but it's not as bad as their detractors say, either.

And nobody will really know, for sure, for many more months.

Part I: The Arsonist: Zarqawi

"He's been centrally elevated to such a position that he seemingly has a hand in everything," Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said in an interview before Zarqawi's death. "Certainly he's a real figure, but he's a myth-laden figure, and it's difficult to discern where the lines are."
--"Al-Zarqawi's Biography," Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, June 8, 2006.

"He was a monster."
--Stan Bigley, brother to Ken Bigley, British contractor who was beheaded by Zarqawi, quoted in, "Al-Queda Leader in Iraq Killed by U.S. Bombs," New York Times, June 9, 2006.

All…Then all afire with me…
Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.
--"The Tempest," Act I Scene ii, William Shakespeare


First of all, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not his real name.

He made it up, like so much of the rest of his life. His real name was Ahmed Fadhil Nazar al-Khalaylah. He grew up in Jordan, in the slums of an industrial city named Zarqa, 17 miles northeast of Amman. That's where he got his made-up name.

From the beginning, Zarqawi was a street thug, a high-school drop-out who frequently got into drunken brawls. When he was about 20, he went to Afghanistan where he fell in with Islamic radicals who were fighting the Soviets. When he got home, he got involved in a local group of extremists and subsequently wound up in a Jordanian prison. There, for the next seven years, he grew more and more radical. Within months after his release along with a general amnesty by King Abdullah in 1999, he was plotting to blow up American-owned hotels in Jordan during millennium celebrations. The plot was discovered and he fled to Pakistan, and from there, back to Afghanistan where he hooked up with al-Qaeda.

With financial backing from al-Qaeda, Zarqawi operated training camps that attracted other Jordanian militants. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan after 9-11, Zarqawi joined the Taliban.

But eventually, his ego and differing mission and style led to clashes with al-Qaeda. Over time, as he traveled around Europe and the Middle East, he developed great skill as an operative, a specialist in clandestine activities, according to Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, head of the Moroccan security service. "He can falsify documents, move around, has access to a variety of passports and has an amazing capacity to elude the authorities." ("Al-Zarqawi's Biography," Washington Post.)

In recent years, al-Zarqawi became more prominent, forming cells in Europe as well as numerous terrorist cells in Iraq. But his growth in fame was due to two reasons: one, that the U.S. government transformed him into a larger-than-life figure by exaggerating his capabilities and using him to personify the Iraqi resistance, and two, he enhanced his own legend by embracing savage tactics that have generated enormous publicity.

In fact, he was scolded in a letter sent to him by Bin Laden himself, who felt that beheading victims on-camera and bombing Muslim people would turn the tide of public opinion of the Arab "street" against Zarqawi, and by extension, al Qaeda as well. Zarqawi ignored the request, but he did stop broadcasting it when he beheaded people.

The problem with the bloody violence of Zarqawi's tactics is that it seemed to crack open a hornet's nest of semi-restraint among radicals, giving tacit permission to unleash on their home country a savagery that cannot now be put back into the box.

Even some supporters of the Sunni insurgency regret the violence:

"Zarqawi schooled many young people into adopting kidnapping, beheading and blackmail as part of the armory of holy war, and it's our sadness that there have been so many graduates from this school," said one who was interviewed for an article in the New York Times.

The death of Zarqawi was a great boost to the morale of not only American and Iraqi and British military serving in Iraq, but to the politicians who frequently use and abuse that service for good PR:

"Today Zarqawi was defeated," said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, appearing at a news conference with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. "This is a message to all those who use violence and killing and devastation to disrupt life in Iraq to rethink within themselves before it is too late."
--"Insurgent Leader al-Zarqawi Killed in Iraq," Ellen Knickmeyer and Jonathan Finer, Washington Post, June 8, 2006.

"Through his every action, he sought to defeat America and our coalition partners and turn Iraq into a safe haven from which al-Qaeda could wage war," said President Bush, "Now Zarqawi has met his end, and this violent man will never murder again."
--ibid

Al-Zarqawi's organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq, had recently recast itself as part of a coalition of at least seven insurgent groups, called the Mujahideen al-Shura Council, or the Council of Holy Warriors, headed by an Iraqi, Abdullah al-Baghdadi, which claimed responsibility for hundreds of attacks during the past three years, including some of the deadliest suicide bombings and gruesome beheadings of foreign hostages, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Recently, the focus of the groups' attacks shifted from American military targets to the targeting of civilians, most of them Shi'ites. In an audio statement just last week, al-Zarqawi actually called for the killing of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most revered Shi'ite cleric, and one with deep ties to thousands of Shi'ites in Iran.

Zarqawi's ambitions, apparently, went beyond killing Americans and fomenting civil war in Iraq. He also wanted to springboard a wider regional war in the Middle East between Shi'ites and Sunnis--more about that later--and his primary goal appears to have been to topple the monarchy in his native Jordan and attack Jewish targets in Israel and around the world.

"What has befallen us today will not affect our determination…We pledge to God to continue raising his way in the Land Between the Rivers, or die. (Mesopotamia means "the Land Between the Rivers.")…We pledge to Sheik Osama bin Laden, our emir, that he shall see from the Qaeda organization during the coming days longer breath, more strength, and further scourging of Americans…There is between us and them a lengthy war, and those who have blasphemed shall see who prevails. God is the victor."
--statement of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (Iraq), released following the acknowledged death of al-Zarqawi, issued in the name of Abdul Rahman, who has been cited as Zarqawi's deputy and possible successor.

Part II: Knockdown: the Fire Fighters

Citizen tip-offs, on-the-beat detective work, rapid exploitation of captured operatives, documents and intercepted signals facilitated by native Iraqi speakers, a Jordanian-run penetration of the Zarqawi tribe and the terrorist network.

If there is one really hopeful sign in the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it is in the involvement of normal Iraqis and the security services and militaries of Iraq and Jordan…

…and American and British "head hunters"…headquartered at a "black ops" special operation camp inside Balad Air Force Base, north of Baghdad. Known up until now as "Task Force 145," seven or eight of them have been killed so far in the hunt…That should tell us how difficult the fight has been and also the sacrifices others are making to fight a ruthless and anarchic foe."
--Washington Post blogger, William Arkin, in entries entitled, "Zarqawi's Death and Task Foce 145," and "The Non-American Angle of the Hunt for Zarqawi," June 8 and 9, 2006.

…the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire
Beyond the language of the living.
--"The Dry Salvages," T.S. Eliot (1941)

Al-Zarqawi was a wily and elusive foe for any who tried to track him down. Knowing how much the U.S. relied on high technology in its pursuit, he refrained from using cellphones, relying instead on handheld satellite phones, manufactured by a company called Thuraya, which were more difficult to track.

But in the end, it wasn't technology that betrayed al-Zarqawi. It was one of his own, a mid-level operative captured near the Iraqi border by Jordanian intelligence officers. An Iraqi government customs clearance officer, Ziad Khalaf al-Kerbouly, working in Rutbah, along the road from Amman to Baghdad, had used his position to help Zarqawi smuggle cash and materiel for the insurgency.

Al-Kerbouly told of a "spiritual advisor," Sheik Abd al-Rahman, who would be meeting with al-Zarqawi. Al-Rahman served as al-Zarqawi's liason to Muslim clerics across Iraq, gathering recruits, funding and popular support for the insurgency, and supported his attacks against Iraq's majority Shi'ite population.
(Source: "How U.S. Forces Found Iraq's Most-Wanted Man," Jonathan Finer, Washington Post, June 9, 2006.)

In addition to the human source, the U.S. and coalition allies tracked the "spiritual advisor" with the help of remotely piloted drone aircraft and "electronic signals intelligence," communications intercepts that allowed someone to track the location of such things as satellite phones.

When it was time to move, they called in the most highly-specialized military forces on the planet.

The "Delta" team charged with the hunt for high valued targets is currently called Task Force 145, though little is known about its composition or operations. Reliable reports have said that the TF is divided into four teams, three U.S. and one from the U.K. The teams have been occasionally augmented by Army rangers and paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division, and have been supported by special operations helicopter and combat units, as well as by fixed wing aircraft units operating in support of quick reaction targeting…

…Highly placed military sources have been saying for months that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) hunter-killer teams charged with going after the al Qaeda leader in Iraq have been successful. Many of Zarqawi's top lieutenants have been done in over the past few months, and the Defense Department now counts some 220 al Qaeda network soldiers in Iraq as having been killed or captured.
--"Zarqawi's Death and Task Force 145," William Arkin, Washington Post, June 8, 2006.

When the awaited meeting between Zarqawi and al-Rahman took place in an abandoned house outside the tiny village of Habbib, surrounded by groves of palm trees, commandoes from the antiterrorist unit moved into the area and surrounded the grove.

According to a resident of the village, a 40-year old taxi driver named Mohammed Ismael, "American soldiers began swarming into the town, seemingly coming out of nowhere, with some soldiers sliding down ropes dropped from Black Hawk helicopters…The entire village was seized," he said.

After engaging in a brief firefight with the insurgents located in the house, the commandoes called in an airstrike. Two Air Force F-16C fighter jets dropped two five-hundred pound bombs on the target, demolishing the house and killing five of the six people inside.

"The entire village was shaking beneath our feet," Mr. Ismael said.

Incredibly, witnesses claim that al-Zarqawi was found still clinging to life, his body intact. After being placed on a stretcher, he appeared to be trying to get up, but quickly succumbed to his wounds.

The hunter-killers cleaned up his face and photographed it for identification purposes.

"We had wiped off a lot of the blood and other debris because there was no need to portray it in any kind of dehumanizing his body," said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, spokesman for the American military in Baghdad.
--"How Surveillance and Betrayal Led to a Hunt's End," Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., New York Times, June 9, 2006.

Swiftly following the raid, intelligence gathered from computers and other documents in the house immediately led to, so far, some 17 targets in and around Baghdad that will lead to more raids in the days following--most of which have probably already taken place.

"On a scale of 1 to 10, the intelligence gathered was about an 8," said a senior intelligence official. "The next 36 to 48 hours will be very crucial in prosecuting other targets. Our goal now is to target as many Qaeda members as possible and keep them off-balance."
--"Al Qaeda Leader in Iraq Killed by U.S. Bombs," John F. Burns, New York Times, June 9, 2006.

Part III: Scorched Earth: the Victims

It was Mr. Zarqawi, in a letter obtained by American forces in early 2004, who first called on Sunni insurgents to turn their sights on the Shi'ites. A "sectarian war," Mr. Zarqawi wrote, was the only way Sunni insurgents could win in Iraq, by provoking a Shi'ite backlash and a rallying of the millions of Sunnis from outside the country.

Much of what Mr. Zarqawi wished has come true. "The bloodletting in mixed Sunni-Shi'ite cities like Baghdad is now unfolding so quickly that it appears to have a life of its own, with hundreds of burned and bullet-riddled bodies turning up each week in the city morgues. And the Sunni insurgency is so diffuse and so broadly based that it seems unlikely to be stopped by the death of its most visible leader.
--"Hatred He Bred Is Sure to Survive Terrorist's Death," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, June 9, 2006.

Death, violent death, and painful wounds
Upon his neighbors he inflicts and wastes,
By devastation, pillage, and the flames…
--Inferno, Canto XI, Dante Allegheri

In the first five months of this year alone, more than 6,000 bodies have been sent to the Baghdad morgue.

Among all the rivers of blood, Zarqawi's group is also believed to have been responsible for the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 23 people, a string of bombings on March 2, 2004 that killed more than 140 pilgrims during the Shi'ite festival of Ashura, the Internet-televised beheadings of several American civilians, so-called "martyrdom operations"--suicide bombings--and the destruction of the Al Askariya shrine in February that set off the wave of sectarian killings in Iraq that has not abated.

Using semiautonomous cells across the country, al-Zarkawi is also the instigator for some of the bloodiest battles and some of the most horrendous attacks on U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq since the beginning of the war.

"The bottom line is that the threat today is not so much from well-defined groups you can put in a pretty box or on a flow chart," said Matthew A. Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism official who works as an analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "That's the nature of things. There are connections and there are overlaps."
--"Al-Zarqawi's Biography," Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, June 8, 2006.

Part IV: Smoldering Embers: Aftermath

"There is no immediate alternative to Zarqawi," the senior Iraqi intelligence official said. "There will be a vacuum of leadership. His close circle, his organization, will not agree on one of them to succeed him. There is the prospect of division in this group."
--"Hatred He Bred Is Sure to Survive Terrorist's Death," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, June 9, 2006.

"This is the best way to undermine a terrorist group," said Mr. Hoffman of the RAND Corporation. "Information sows internal discord and disloyalty has a radiating effect in the organization. That could set in motion the unraveling of al Qaeda."
--ibid

"No one behind him had the kind of charisma and operational intellect that he brought to the table," said one military official familiar with the hunt for Zarqawi. "Our hope is no one can step in, and you end up with fragmentation and perhaps dissension among his followers."
--"After Zarqawi, No Clear Path in Weary Iraq," Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post, June 9, 2006.

What if the breath that
kindled those grim fires
Awakened, should blow them into
Sevenfold rage,
And plunge us into the flames?
--"Paradise Lost," Book II, Milton

There seem to be two schools of thought on the death of Zarqawi. One line of thinking is that his loss, combined with the fact that he was betrayed by one of his own and the intelligence gathered in the raid that shuts down other related cells, will lead to disarray in the ranks and eventual disintegration of the movement.

Maybe. Or maybe it's a bit of wishful thinking. Because there's another, flip-side to those hopes, and that is that not only will his death not make any discernable difference in the long run, but that it may, in fact, make things worse.

"The immediate aftermath of this will probably be an upsurge of violence," as Sunni insurgents hurry to show that Zarqawi's killing has not broken the resistance," said Michael Clarke, an expert on terrorism at the International Policy Institute of King's College London.

"In the medium term, in the next month or two, it will probably help to downgrade sectarianism…But the dynamics of sectarian violence is probably past the point of no return."
--"After Zarqawi, No Clear Path In Weary Iraq," Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post, June 9, 2006.

Some have pointed out that, in fact, we may have done Bin Laden a favor.

"The man was a burden on al Qaeda," said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al Arabi newspaper and a noted Palestinian observer of international militant groups.

"I believe personally that President Bush unintentionally gave al-Qaeda a huge reward in getting rid of Zarqawi…He was an unmanageable bully who forced himself as a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's founding leaders, are likely to try to put in place a leader "they have more operational control of"…according to a longtime participant in the U.S. military hunt for Zarqawi.

"To them, this day serves two purposes," the participant said. "They've got their martyr, and they can put one of their guys in who they've been grooming, who is not running around playing master and commander of the battlefield but is going with the party line, and that is the danger."
--ibid

Observers also held out the possibility that, since Bin Laden had objected to Zarqawi's targeting of Muslim civilians, that the insurgency might concentrate more on attacking U.S. and coalition forces.

"We're looking for an increase in insurgent activity as each wannabe-Zarqawi vies for status as the baddest boy on the block," an Army officer in Baqubah, near the scene of the lethal airstrike, said in an e-mail.

"We've been here so many times: the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein, the capture of Saddam, the elections, the transfer of sovereignty, the new government--all marked by euphoria, lots of talk of tipping points, lots of high fives and then dismay as Iraq continues to spiral into oblivion," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former intelligence officer still active in the Middle East.
--ibid

And then, of course, there is the unspoken "M" word: martyr.

"If it is just Zarqawi, it is largely a political and propaganda victory and could disappear as quickly as capturing Saddam or killing his sons," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You are going to turn him into a martyr to those who support his cause…That doesn't necessarily make it worse for the insurgency."
--ibid

Mr. Zarqawi's relationships with home-grown leaders of that insurgency and with top al Qaeda leaders around Osama bin Laden were, in fact, often troubled. The circumstances of his death, however, could well erase all recollection of those differences in order to enshrine him as a useful martyr. In that new role, his memory could continue to haunt Iraq for some time to come.
--"Death of a Terrorist," editorial, New York Times, June 9, 2006.


In the end, however, you can indeed kill the arsonist, but the fire burns on. Zarqawi tapped into a reservoir of tribal hatreds and revenge fantasies of deepest dark side of the Iraqi people, deliberately recruiting the poorest, most downtrodden and angriest young men in the country to act out those Medieval fantasies with the help of modern technology and the Internet, and when he did so, he unleashed the hounds of hell.

As Sabrina Tavernise wrote in the New York Times, "the thick new flow of bodies from assassinations by Sunni and Shi'ite militias would continue without him. Three years of violence has sown hate in many hearts.".

"Zarqawi is part of a story, and this story will not end when he is finished," said Dhia Majid, a university professor whose brother, a pediatrician, and his wife, a pharmacist, were shot dead in western Baghdad last summer.

"It's not Iraq. It's a slaughterhouse."
--"Zarqawi is Dead, but Weary Iraqis Fear the Violence Won't Subside," Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, June 9, 2006.

"The terrorists are here now, here among us," said Haifa Hassan, whose 12-year old son was tortured and killed several weeks ago after having been kidnapped as he walked home from school. "They are criminals. That is their work."
--ibid

In fact, there are dozens of other insurgent groups, such as the Ansar Al Sunna and the Islamic Army of Iraq, which have little or no relationship to al Qaeda at all. Some, in fact, are deadly rivals, and their work will continue unabated.

But not all the news is bad. For one thing, the more we chop off the hydra-heads of the nest of snakes, the more we are left with a chaotic, squirming body of amateurs not nearly as crafty as Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi.

As William Arkin points out on his Washington Post blog, "The more success that is scored against the battle hardened, the more U.S. (and Iraqi) special forces get to fight raw recruits and newcomers to the battle, amateur fighters who have proven to be not quite as well trained and easier to target."

Many have said that it, in the long run, it is going to be up to the Iraqi people to decide, Enough is Enough. And there have been promising signs.

The Americans wisely chose to hold off the announcement of Zarqawi's death until it could be announced, in a Parliamentary news conference, by the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

And when he did so, the Iraqi reporters burst into applause and cheers and spontaneous chanting of prayers from the Q'uran.

Riding that wave of good feeling, Maliki seized the moment to announce--at long last--his choices for the crucial posts of interior minister, defense minister, and national security minister--and called an immediate vote from his restive and rebellious parliament.

Caught up in the joy, they overwhelmingly approved--after literally months and months of squabbling and threats, thus opening up the logjam that has held the new government hostage since the elections in January of '05.

The new interior minister, who will be in charge of those "death squad" militias, is a Shi'ite, Jawad al-Bolani, and unlike his predecessor, he has no ties to the militias.

The new defense minister, who will handle the Iraqi Army, is Abdul-Oadier Muhammed Jasim, a Sunni who served as commander of Iraqi forces during the massive military operation in Fallujah, 2004.

And the new national security minister, a Shi'ite, is Sheerwan al-Waeli.

As William Arkin writes in his Washington Post blog, "We can't know today what the success will mean…There is no denying tha an Iraqi national military, government, and people are slowly moving in the direction of some normalcy and security. This is good news, because it is imperative that the United States leave Iraq and leave its security to its own people--and that can only happen when Baghdad has assumed enough responsibility to allow an exit."

In the long run, the wisest take on this whole mess was made by the grieving mother of the 12-year old boy murdered by Zarqawi's thugs:

"It's not about Zarqawi."


In my next entry, I will examine the global picture, the full repercussions all over the world of Zarqawi, his operation, and his death, and the political implications of those things here in the United States.

AN ERA OF NEAR MADNESS

"As the fraud is perpetuated all the various artifices and all the lies begin to convince the ringmaster himself that it's this own bizarre reality…As long as you can keep the perception going, it really isn't a fraud."


Recently, I was browsing an article in the New York Times that I really didn't think I wanted to read, because it dealt with subject matter that I don't usually write about--corporate piracy and the robber-barons who get away with it at a terrible cost to the serfs in their little fiefdoms--you and me.

Well, okay, I write about it SOMETIMES.

But as my daughter has accused…I do have an obsession with the war in Iraq, but as she kindly added, I have good reason. Still, in spite of all the distressing and disturbing news lately about the war, I do tend to sit up now and then when reading something I don't normally read and go, Huh.

The article in the May 26, 2006 Times was called, "In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," by Kurt Eichenwald.

And in the second paragraph, the lead line read, "The Enron Case will forever stand as the ultimate reflection of an era of near madness in finance, a time in the 1990's when self-certitude and spin became a substitute for financial analysis and coherent business models. Controls broke down and management deteriorated as arrogance overrode careful judgment, allowing senior executives to blithely push aside their critics…the case painted a broad and disturbing portrait of a corporate culture poisoned by hubris, leading ultimately to a recklessness that placed the business's survival at risk."

Click.

Just like that, everything seemed to fall into place for me about Bush-world and the current one-sided Republican insanity of our government.

Bush is the CEO, and the United States is Enron--or at least, the government part of it run by Bush the CEO and his aiders and abetters--the Republican rubber-stamp Congress.

The whole culture that pervades Washington, D.C. comes from that same corporate world as Enron. Every single Cabinet member and most of the heads of departments that Bush has appointed were once CEO's of companies--including Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.

And we all know what Dick Cheney used to do for a living, and what George Bush used to do back in Midland, Texas, before his Daddy put him in office, but more about that later.

Yeah, I might sound like a near-mad liberal, but bear with me and read the proof I present and then you decide. Way I see it, it's just too damn bad we can't fire the CEO of our own beleaguered country; at least, as long as the foxes are securely in charge of guarding the henhouse.

The first quote, about the ringmaster, came from the Academy-award nominated documentary: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. A stockbroker said it. (I was taking notes too fast to copy down his name.) He used to work for Merryl-Lynch, until he was caught telling his clients that Enron--the stock-market darling at the time--was not a good bet.

Just a few months later, Enron was bankrupt, taking down thousands of shareholders with it.