Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?

n the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president’s henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present. 

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft’s second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush’s first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration’s various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn’t allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush’s men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program’s authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey’s words, “to take advantage of a very sick man,” sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft’s sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and “literally ran” up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. “I’m not the attorney general,” Ashcroft told Bush’s men. “There”—he pointed weakly to Comey—”is the attorney general.” Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey’s presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—”without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can’t help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey’s testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him “to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The larger mystery remained intact, however. “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,” the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed “every 45 days” as part of planning to assess threats to “the continuity of our government.” 

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it’s no surprise that the president’s passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it’s a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention. 

(Continue reading: Radar Online)

Bush Diplomacy: Predator Planes Are Conducting Assassinations by Air

Attacks all over the planet by U.S. Predator planes suggest Bush thinks he has the “right” to kill civilians.

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a small town somewhere near the Southern California coast. You’re going about your daily life, trying to scrape by in hard times, when the missile hits. It might have come from the Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — its pilot at a base on the outskirts of Tehran — that has had the village in its sights for the last six hours or from the Russian sub stationed just off the coast. In either case, it’s devastating.

In Moscow and Tehran, officials announce that, in a joint action, they have launched the missile as part of a carefully coordinated “surgical” operation to take out a “known terrorist,” a long-term danger to their national security. A Kremlin spokesman offers the following statement:

“As we have repeatedly said, we will continue to pursue terrorist activities and their operations wherever we may find them. We share common goals with respect to fighting terrorism. We will continue to seek out, identify, capture and, if necessary, kill terrorists where they plan their activities, carry out their operations or seek safe harbor.”

A family in a ramshackle house just down the street from you — he’s a carpenter; she works at the local Dairy Queen — are killed along with their pets. Their son is seriously wounded, their home blown to smithereens. Neighbors passing by as the missile hits are also wounded.

As it happens, there are no terrorists in the vicinity. Outraged, you organize your neighbors and march angrily in protest through the town, shouting anti-Russian, anti-Iranian slogans. But, of course, there is nothing you can really do. Iran and Russia are far away, their weaponry powerful, your arms nonexistent. The state of California is incapable of protecting you. This is, in fact, at least the fourth time in recent months that a “terrorist” has been declared “taken out” from the air or by a ship-based cruise missile, when only innocent Californians have died.

As news of the “collateral damage” from the botched operation dribbles out, the Russian and Iranian media pay next to no attention. There are no outraged editorials. Official spokesmen see no need to comment further. No one is held responsible and no promises are made in either Tehran or Moscow that similar assassination strikes won’t be launched in the near future, based on “actionable intelligence,” possibly even on the same town. In fact, the next day, seeing UAVs once again soaring overhead, you load your pick-up and prepare to flee.

Swatting Flies in Somalia

Philip K. Dick meet George W. Bush. When it comes to such a thing happening in the United States, we are, of course, at the wildest frontiers of science fiction. The U.S. is a sovereign nation. We guard our air space and coastal waters jealously. Any country violating them for purposes of aggressive action, no less by launching a missile against an American town, would be committing an act of war and would certainly be treated accordingly.

If, somehow, such an event did occur, it would be denounced in Washington and on editorial pages across the country as a shocking contravention of international legal conventions and a crime of war unless, of course, we did it in a country where sovereignty has been declared meaningless.

In fact, an almost exact replica of the above fictional incident — at least the fourth of its kind in recent months — did indeed take place at the beginning of March in the embattled failed state of Somalia. (For that country’s most recent abysmal collapse, the Bush administration, via an invasion by Ethiopian proxy forces, can take significant credit.) One or two houses in Dobley, a Somali town, were hit, possibly by two submarine-launched Tomahawk Cruise missiles in what a U.S. official termed “a deliberate strike against a suspected bed-down of known terrorists.”

The missiles were evidently meant for Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an al-Qaedan suspect in the bloody bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He was, however, not in Dobley, despite the “actionable intelligence” on hand. Accounts of the dead and wounded in the town vary. One report claimed only wounded Somalis (and two dead cows); most spoke of anywhere from four to ten dead civilians. Local district Commissioner Ali Nur Ali Dherre told CNN that three women and three children had been killed and another 20 people wounded. While a “U.S. military official said the United States is still collecting post-strike information and is not yet able to confirm any casualties. He described [the] strike as ‘very deliberate’ and said forces tried to use caution to avoid hitting civilians.”

For the dead Somalis, not suprisingly, we have no names. In stories like this, the dead are regularly nobodies and, though the townspeople of Dobley did indeed march angrily in protest yelling anti-American slogans, just about no one noticed.

In our world, only the normal smattering of small news reports dealt with this modest sidebar in the President’s Global War on Terror (GWOT). On the GWOT scorecard — if you remember, for a long time George Bush kept “his own personal scorecard” of top terror suspects in a desk drawer in the Oval Office, crossing off al-Qaedan figures as U.S. forces took them down — this operation hardly registered. One terrorist missed, and not for the first time, possibly a few dead peasants in some god-forsaken land. Please, move on

In a recent Pentagon briefing for reporters featuring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen, who had just returned from a trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, 4,500 words of back-and-forth were interrupted by this question from a reporter:

“Secretary Gates, the strike on Somalia two days ago — did the missiles that were fired — did they strike their target? And was the target Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan? Do you have a report back from the field? And Admiral Mullen, what message did you give to President Musharraf, and why did you meet with him?”

Gates responded to the Somali part of the question in eight words: “You know we don’t talk about military operations.” He might have added: …unless they’re successful.

That was evidently all that the incident and its minor “collateral damage” deserved in such a global war. So Gates and Mullen moved on immediately. So many matters more important than a single “decapitation” strike that didn’t succeed to consider.

The Decapitation Strike as Global Policy

Minor as that Somali mis-strike might seem, this is not, in fact, a small matter. Think of that strike and the many like it around the world over these last years as reflections of George Bush’s post-9/11 update of globalization. After all, the most basic principle of his Global War on Terror has been the erasure of global boundaries and whatever international agreements about war-making might go with them.

Across the Islamic world, in particular, boundaries simply no longer matter. In fact, in such regions no aspect of sovereignty can now constrain a U.S. president from acting as he pleases in pursuit of whatever he may personally define as American interests.

“Assassinations by air” are, writes David Case in Mother Jones magazine, “a relatively new tactic in warfare.” By the beginning of 2006, however, U.S. Predator drones “bearing Hellfire missiles — the preferred weapon in decapitation [strikes] — had already hit ‘terrorist suspects overseas’ at least 19 times since 9/11.” Such strikes and other similar operations by air, land, and sea have been a crucial follow-on to the Bush administration’s proclamations, immediately after 9/11, that there would be no “safe havens” for terrorists on the planet, nor safety for those countries which housed them, inadvertently or otherwise. Within days of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, Bush administration officials were already identifying up to 60 countries-cum-targets.

This aspect of the Bush Doctrine, of what the President likes to call staying “on the offensive,” when mixed with a couple of decades of “advances” in air warfare, including the development of sophisticated, missile-armed drones, “smart bombs,” “precision-guided munitions,” and the like, has resulted in a lethal globalizing brew of assassination and destruction. It recognizes neither boundaries, nor sovereignty across much of the planet. With all its “actionable” possibilities, it will surely be with us long after George W. Bush has left office.

Of course, those few nameless dead or wounded Somali civilians — swatted like so many flies and forgotten as quickly as flies would be — don’t faintly match up against the “dozens” of Iraqi civilian deaths that, according to Human Rights Watch, were caused by 50 decapitation strikes launched against the top officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime back in March 2003. (Not a single official was harmed.) Nor do they quite make it into the company of the “Afghan elders” being taken to President Hamid Karzai’s inauguration back in 2001, who were mistaken “for a Taliban group” and bombed, with 20 killed; nor the 30 or more guests at an Afghan wedding party back in 2002 blown away by 2,000-pound bombs after celebratory gunfire was evidently mistaken for an attack (no apologies offered); nor that wedding party in the Western desert of Iraq near the Syrian border wiped out in 2004 with 42 deaths, including 27 in one extended family, 14 children in all. They were, of course, taken for terrorists. (As U.S. Major General James Mathis put the matter in offering an explanation: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”) And these are just a few prominent cases, not including the civilians killed in periodic Predator and other strikes in Pakistani border areas, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere whom no fuss is ever made about — not here, anyway.

After all, there’s always going to be “collateral damage” when you keep your eye — and your 2,000-pound bomb or Hellfire missile — focused on the prize.

The “Right” to Kill Civilians

Remember back in the 1990s, when the glories of an economically borderless world were being limned? Just after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration proudly declared us to be in a far darker world without borders (except, of course, when it came to our own). In this new world, whether we knew it or not, whether we cared or not, we granted our highest officials — specifically our military and intelligence services — the full powers of prosecutor, defense counsel, judge, jury, and executioner, as well as the right to report on such events only to the extent, and as, they wished. This was the sort of power that monotheistic religions normally granted to an all-powerful god, that kingdoms generally left to absolute rulers, and that dictators have always tried to take for themselves (though just, of course, in the domains under their control).

Our domain, it seems, is now much of the globe, when it comes to the bloody work of assassinating individuals via bombs or missiles that, however precise, surgical, and smart, are weapons meant to kill en masse and largely without discrimination.

There are still limits of sorts on such actions. These put bluntly — though no one is likely to say this — are the limits imposed, in part, by racism, by gradations, however unspoken, in the global value given to a human life.

The Bush administration has, so far, only been willing to carry out “decapitation” strikes in countries where human life is, by implication, of less or little value. It has yet to carry one out in London or Hamburg or Tokyo or Moscow or the Chinese countryside, even though “terrorist suspects” abound everywhere, even (as with the Anthrax attacks of 2001) in our own country. On the other hand, given the impetus of this kind of globalization, who knows when such a strike might come. After all, the CIA has already carried out clearly illegal, sovereignty-violating “extraordinary rendition” operations (kidnappings of terror suspects) on the streets of European cities.

In this country, we still theoretically venerate the sovereign self (“the individual”) and that self’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Despite George Bush’s “Freedom Agenda,” however, the sovereignty, not to say the life, liberty, and happiness of other peoples, individually or collectively, have not really been much on our minds these last years. Our freedom of action, our safety, has been the only freedom, the only “security,” to which we have attached much global value. And don’t for a second think that, when the “actionable intelligence” comes in to John McCain’s, Hillary Clinton’s, or Barack Obama’s Oval Office, those Predators won’t be soaring or those cruise missiles leaving subs lurking off some coast — and that innocent civilians elsewhere won’t continue to die.

In places like Somalia, we deliver death, and every now and then an American bomb or missile actually obliterates a terrorist suspect. Then we celebrate. The rest of time, it’s hardly even news. When the deeper principle behind such global strikes is mentioned in our papers, in some passing paragraph, it’s done — as in a recent Washington Post article about a Predator strike, piloted from Nevada, that killed a suspected “senior al-Qaeda commander” in Pakistan — in this polite way: “Independent actions by U.S. military forces on another country’s sovereign territory are always controversial” (Imagine the language that the Washington Post would use, if that had been a Pakistani drone strike in Utah.)

This version of globalization is already so much the norm of our world that few here even blink an eye when it’s reported, or consider it even slightly strange. It’s already an American right. In the meantime, other people, who obviously don’t rise to the level of our humanity, regularly die.

And here’s the thing: In our world, there is a chasm that can never be breached between, say, a Sunni extremist clothed in a suicide vest who walks into a market in Baghdad with the barbaric intent of killing as many Shiite civilians as possible, and an air or missile attack, done in the name of American “security” and aimed at a “known terrorist,” that just happens to — repeatedly — kill innocent civilians. And yet, what if you know before you launch your attack, as American planners certainly must, that the odds are innocents (and probably no one else) will die?

Not so long ago in the United States, presidentially sanctioned assassinations abroad were illegal. But that was then, this is so now. Nonetheless, it’s a fact that the “right” to missile, bomb, shell, “decapitate,” or assassinate those we declare to be our enemies, without regard to borders or sovereignty, is based on nothing more than the power to do it. This is simply the “right” of force (and of technology). If the tables were turned, any American would recognize such acts for the barbarism they represent.

And yet, late last week, like clockwork, the Associated Press brought us the latest notice: “In Afghanistan, a spokesman for the American-led coalition said troops had used ‘precision-guided munitions’ to strike a compound about a mile inside Pakistan…” This operation was, as they all are, said to be based on “reliable intelligence”; in this case, “senior” Taliban commanders were said to be in residence.

As it happened, according to the Pakistani military and the AP reporter who made it to Tangrai, a village of about forty houses, the residence hit was that of “Noor Khan, a greengrocer who said the house was his family home.” The AP reporter added that “only one of its four walls was standing amid a tangle of mud bricks, bedding and cooking pots.” And Noor Khan, who was quoted saying, “We are innocent, we have nothing to do with such things,” claimed that six of his relatives, four women and two boys, had been killed. (The Pakistani military, on investigating, reported that two women and two children had died.)

This was but the latest minor decapitation strike, and — we can be sure of this — not the last. Philip K. Dick move over. We’re already in your future.

[Note: Let me strongly recommend David Case's article, "The U.S. Military's Assassination Problem," in the March/April issue of Mother Jones magazine, quoted in the above piece. A well researched, thoughtful, and rare discussion of what we know about the Bush administration's global assassination campaign from the air, it is an accomplishment. I have relied on it in writing this essay.]

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

//alternet//

Fishing for a Way to Change the World

Bush thought his father lacked a grand doctrine. His greatest failures have come from trying to craft one.

There’s some support for the dynastic reading that George W. Bush intended to invade Iraq from the outset of his presidency to avenge his father. “After all, this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time,” Bush declared at a political fund-raiser in Houston in September 2002. Considerable doubt has since arisen around the incident Bush was referring to, a supposed plot by Saddam to blow up the former president with a car bomb on a visit to Kuwait in 1993. But there’s little doubt that Bush himself believed what intelligence officials told the family after that incident: that Saddam planned to murder not just George W.’s father, but the other family members visiting Kuwait with him: his mother, Barbara, his wife, Laura, and his two youngest brothers, Neil and Marvin. The incident cast a long shadow in the family. According to family intimates, the Bushes felt they were at risk so long as Saddam remained in power.

Yet of the top-level players in the administration, only Paul Wolfowitz directly advocated military action against Iraq before September 11. From the collective perspective of Bush’s foreign-policy team, Iraq fell into the category of big problems that weren’t urgent. His people were instinctually critical of Clinton’s proportionate responses to Saddam’s provocations and felt they might have to act more decisively at some point in the future. But the same category of problem also included North Korea and Pakistan’s nuclear programs, Russia’s growing authoritarianism, and China’s belligerence toward Taiwan. There were no preparations or significant planning for war in Iraq until September 2002 and no point-of-no-return buildup until January 2003.

In other words, George W. Bush did not arrive in the White House determined to invade Iraq. So why did he ultimately decide to do it? Bush’s struggle to vindicate his family and outdo his father predisposed him toward completing a job his dad left unfinished. But it was his broader attempt to develop a foreign policy different from his father’s that led him into his biggest mistake. Act One of the Bush Tragedy is the son’s struggle to be like his dad until the age of forty. Act Two is his growing success over the next fifteen years as he learned to be different. The botched search for a doctrine to clarify world affairs and the president’s progressive descent into messianism constitute the conclusive third act.

Bush Doctrine 1.0 was Unipolar Realism (3/7/99–9/10/01). Driven more by the refutation of Clinton’s liberal internationalism than of 41’s diplomatic realism, it challenged his father’s worldview only obliquely. Bush steered clear of his father’s men, former Secretary of State James Baker and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, but was advised by Colin Powell and Scowcroft’s protégée Condoleezza Rice, who was likewise grounded in classic “balance of power” realism.

He was a realist with a different list of things to do, a harder shell, and less use for the “smiles and scowls of diplomacy.” In his first eight months he showed how much less. Bush declared his intention to abrogate the ABM Treaty and move ahead with developing missile defense. Where his father was a Sinophile, the son saw a growing military threat. He talked tough when the Chinese forced down a U.S. military plane violating their airspace and held its crew hostage. He spoke ambiguously about whether he supported continuing the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” with respect to Taiwan. He repudiated the Kyoto Accords on global warming. He spurned Yasir Arafat and stood by Ariel Sharon in Israel. He broke off negotiations with North Korea.

Unipolar realism survived its initial encounters with reality, but not with September 11. By the end of that day, the president had a new approach. Bush Doctrine 2.0 was With Us or Against Us (9/11/01–5/31/02). The new doctrine didn’t represent a repudiation of the first one so much as an elaboration of it to deal with the previously neglected problem of terrorism. It provided the justification for not just pursuing Al Qaeda, but for deposing the Taliban, its host in Afghanistan. If Rice first came up with the “no distinction” idea, it was [Vice President Dick] Cheney who first started calling it the “Bush Doctrine” in public. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: “We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts.”

But by the time Cheney spoke those words, a second wave of terrorism had already exposed the inadequacy of Doctrine 2.0. The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a larger impact than is generally appreciated—one in many ways bigger than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.

At that point, nearly everyone involved in national security assumed there would be another wave of terrorist attacks. The daily intelligence summary substantiated this panic; “chatter” was at record levels. In an effort to understand the potential threat, Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby ordered up a briefing on a war game, known as “Dark Winter,” which modeled a smallpox outbreak in an American city in much the way “continuity of government” exercises Cheney had participated in during the 1980s simulated nuclear catastrophe.

According to a source close to Bush, Cheney swiftly reported back to the Oval Office with a sobering message: the United States was essentially defenseless against the most likely form of assault, a biological attack. “I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses,” Bush’s first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told me in the summer of 2007. “Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and need to prepare for it.”

Then on October 4 the worst fears inside the White House were realized. Bush choked up as he thanked government workers in a morning speech at the State Department. Ari Fleischer reports that he had “never before and never since seen the president look as tired and as troubled as he did that morning.” When they returned to the White House, Bush called Fleischer into his office and explained the reason: he had just learned that a Florida man had been stricken with anthrax. Bush feared it was the dreaded second wave.

Another anthrax letter, never recovered (or at least never disclosed), was apparently sent to the White House. On October 22, anthrax was found on an automated slitter used to open letters at a Secret Service facility in an undisclosed location some miles away. This meant the White House was a target of biological terrorism. “I think the seminal event of the Bush administration was the anthrax attacks,” someone close to the president told me. “It was the thing that changed everything. It was the hard stare into the abyss.”

Cheney and Libby began spending time at the Health and Human Services department, which was leading the confused response to the anthrax attacks and making preparations for the possibility of something much worse. The greatest fear of officials there was an attack involving smallpox. The smallpox virus killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century. It was still taking 2 million lives a year as late as 1967, when the World Health Organization began the massive campaign that wiped out the disease a decade later. After smallpox was eradicated in 1977, only the United States and Russia were permitted to retain research samples of the virus, under closely monitored, secure conditions. But an intelligence review ordered by Cheney determined that Iraq, North Korea, and Russia were all likely to possess undeclared stocks.

Cheney and Libby believed that Iraq’s potential to produce a smallpox weapon necessitated universal vaccination of the general population, something that hadn’t happened in the United States since 1972. On the other side of the argument was Donald Henderson, the heroic epidemiologist who led the WHO smallpox eradication program and later became Bush 41’s science adviser. After the anthrax attacks, HHS brought Henderson in as a consultant to help develop emergency plans.

When I visited him at his office at the Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore, Henderson recounted a surprise, unpublicized visit he paid to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with Cheney and Libby on July 18, 2002. Henderson flew down with them on Air Force Two and spent most of the trip explaining to the vice president and his chief of staff why he and other epidemiologists thought a massive vaccination program would be a terrible idea. Even medical professionals were horrified when they saw the range of normal reactions to a vaccination: grotesque scabs, lesions, and pustules. Henderson showed me a pamphlet that HHS distributed to hospitals to document the abnormal reactions: blackened limbs, uncontrolled swelling, and a reaction called progressive vaccinia, in which sores cover the body from head to toe.

Worse than the panic these reactions would cause would be the predictable casualties. According to Henderson, adverse reactions to the vaccine were estimated to kill between one and two out of every million people inoculated. The question of legal liability would be a nightmare. Henderson said that Cheney and Libby didn’t seem to disagree with his arguments, which he reviewed with them on the return flight. “I thought, Thank God they’ve finally gotten the message. Finally we’ve been able to get it through to them that this just does not make sense,” Henderson said.

When he reached his home in Baltimore two hours later, Henderson’s wife was waiting with an urgent message to call the office. “They were going to have a press release the next morning announcing that they were going to vaccinate the entire country immediately,” Henderson said. “I couldn’t believe it.” But after girding for battle and taking a 5:00 a.m. train to HHS the next morning, Henderson was relieved to be told that the vaccination plan was off after all. Bush had overruled Cheney. Bush eventually announced a compromise: mandatory vaccination of 500,000 military personnel, and voluntary vaccination for the same number of health-care workers or “first responders.” But by the time the vaccine was ready for use, in early 2004, the panic was over. Saddam didn’t have a smallpox weapon after all. Bush was vaccinated at the White House, but decided that members of his family and the White House staff didn’t need to run the risk. Cheney himself chose not to be vaccinated.

Those who believe the vice president operates in bad faith—that he concocted evidence of Iraqi WMD to justify a war—should consider his stance on universal smallpox vaccination. By most estimates, even a safe vaccine would have killed a few hundred Americans and made thousands seriously ill. Cheney’s readiness to sacrifice hundreds of civilian lives may make him sound like Dr. Strangelove. But if the idea was mad, it was sincerely mad, testifying to how seriously he took the possibility that Saddam had biological weapons and might use them, or give them to terrorists to use, against the United States.

Cheney accepted without reservations that Saddam was a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Libby and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had long been interested in their friend Laurie Mylroie’s unified field theory of terrorism. Mylroie argued that Saddam was behind every major terrorist attack against Americans in the 1990s, including the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Mylroie’s book “Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America” was published by the American Enterprise Institute, where she was a fellow. On the back cover are glowing blurbs from Libby, Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Cheney followed these men into the tortured pathways of Mylroie’s conspiracy theory, including her seizing on reports that the 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague.

In another administration, there would have been various checks on this kind of collective delusion. A Kennedy, a Nixon, a Clinton, and a George H. W. Bush all would have considered evidence to some degree. But once Bush’s mind was made up that Saddam was building biological and nuclear weapons, it closed to alternative explanations. He thought picking through evidence was beneath him. In 43’s White House, as his communications director Dan Bartlett put it in an anonymous background briefing, “The President of the United States is not a fact checker.” If the Director of the CIA told him the case for Saddam’s WMD was a “slam dunk,” that was all Bush needed to hear.

The problem with the earlier idea of With Us or Against Us was that it didn’t promulgate any strategy for protecting the United States in an age of biotechnology, miniaturization, nonstate actors, and porous borders. To make the country more secure, we’d have to find a way of cutting off these threats at the root, not just by taking on hosts, but by disabling known and potential WMD proliferators. This was Bush Doctrine 3.0, Preemption (6/1/02–11/5/03). Where Doctrine 2.0 justified the war in Afghanistan, which was harboring Al Qaeda, Doctrine 3.0 would provide a basis for invading Iraq, which might assist Al Qaeda in the future.

The neoconservatives had a different motivation for going to war with Iraq. They were less focused on preventing what Saddam might do to the United States than on what getting rid of him could do for the United States. The neocons thought pulling the plug on his toxic regime would transform the sick political culture of the Arab Middle East.

Many neocons believed that turning secularized Iraq into a third pro-Western democracy in the region would cause other authoritarian regimes to topple. As it liberalized, the Middle East would cease to provide a breeding ground for terrorism. Arabs would also come to accept the presence of Israel, something the mostly Jewish neoconservatives cared about especially. Wolfowitz has often been described as the “architect” of war in Iraq. The war could have used an architect—someone responsible for planning what would happen during the occupation. In reality, he was more like the war’s theologian, coming up with a variety of theorems, arguments, and justifications for his abiding faith that the political nature of the Arab world could be transformed from without.

Wolfowitz and his protégé Scooter Libby, the other most influential neoconservative inside the administration, were driven by a particular notion about how to transform the sick political culture of the Middle East. The big thinker behind their theory was the Arab scholar Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus at Princeton. The originator of the phrase “the clash of civilizations,” Lewis believed Muslims had been engaged in a “cosmic struggle for world domination” since the time of Muhammad. Centuries of defeat, subjugation, and misrule, to which the United States contributed by supporting corrupt and incompetent dictators, prepared the way for Islamist terrorism. Cheney met Lewis when he was Secretary of Defense, and the two became friends. After September 11, he became interested in Lewis’s argument about what had gone wrong in the Arab world.

Over a series of lunches at the vice president’s residence in 2002, Lewis laid out his case for using American military power to change the regime in Iraq. Years of “anxious propitiation” had left the Muslim world convinced of our weakness. Force was what Arabs respected. A conclusive show of strength could catalyze a change in the opposite direction. The neoconservatives have a weakness for historical analogies—and for one analogy in particular. “Anxious propitiation” was a fancy name for appeasement, compromising with an enemy that needed confronting. In this analogy, Saddam was Hitler, who grew in strength as the West postponed challenging him. Or, if not Nazi Germany, Iraq was a Soviet-style totalitarian state, vulnerable to a combination of American moral and military pressure.

By mid-2002, Cheney had become a down-the-line ally of the neoconservatives. But that does not mean he had turned into some sort of democratic idealist. He never cited Bernard Lewis’s theory in any of his public advocacy for the war. For the congenitally pessimistic vice president, transforming the political culture of the Middle East can’t have been more than a castle in the sky, a long-shot best-case scenario. But the vice president surely recognized that the grandiosity of the neocon vision of a new Arab world would resonate with the president. For Bush, boldness had a constant allure. Remaking the Middle East via Iraq was just the kind of game-changing idea he went for.

After the invasion, as the WMD mirage melted away, Bush’s retrospective case for the war shifted, and his theory of foreign policy along with it. Bush Doctrine 4.0 became Democracy in the Middle East (11/6/03–1/19/05). Bush’s November 6, 2003, speech at the National Endowment for Democracy framed a new theory of international relations around the way he now hoped to justify his war. The United States, he announced, “has adopted a new policy,” which he described as “a forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East.” Bush argued that excusing and accommodating tyranny over the previous sixty years hadn’t made Americans safe “because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.” Stability was one of Scowcroft’s watchwords. Bush called liberty “the design of nature” and “the direction of history.”

Here finally was the grand vision Bush had been looking for. Democratizing the Arab world was a clear, moral goal, the ambitious work of a consequential presidency. Like compassionate conservatism, it was a form of social evangelism, a mission inspired by faith but secular in application. Bush’s new formulation had the added advantage of extending the term of evaluation. If we were witnessing what Rice called “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” the first report card wouldn’t be in for some time.

But Bush’s stirring words underscored the difficulty with his ever-changing foreign policy. The problem wasn’t that he wanted to spread democracy and human rights—a goal that in other contexts unites liberal hawks and doves with many conservatives—but his relentless ebb into abstraction, incompetent execution, and glaring inconsistency. Had he been someone capable of acknowledging error, Bush’s misjudgment in invading Iraq might have been mitigated by skillful improvisation. How might such a person have reacted? He would have told his Secretary of Defense that the spectacle of looters stripping government buildings down to their concrete skeletons wasn’t the kind of untidy freedom the United States could tolerate. As the Pentagon failed to create viable structures, he might have shifted control to the State Department and devolved power to the United Nations, instead of trying to fend it off.

He could have acknowledged the emergence of an insurgency, and adopted a different strategy to combat it before 2007. He should have blocked, reversed, or at least understood the significance of Paul Bremer’s two first and most disastrous orders, to disband the Iraqi army and bar those with Ba’ath Party connections from serving in the government. (Bush later told author Robert Draper that disbanding the army wasn’t his policy, and that he wasn’t sure why it had happened.) He would have fired Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib, if not sooner. He would have taken steps to dismantle the echo chamber around him, instead of adding layers of insulation. None of that would have ensured a better outcome, but it surely would have diminished the harm from his original mistake.

Why couldn’t Bush respond in a more supple fashion, even after his reelection? Partly, his inability to adjust reflects his limitations as an executive. Despite his MBA training, Bush emphasizes leadership and decision-making to the exclusion of administration and management. He delegates manfully, but doesn’t solicit feedback, evaluate results, or hold people accountable, except in extraordinary circumstances. Unlike his father, he isn’t comfortable entertaining inconclusive debate. Bush sees reconsidering decisions or openly changing course as evidence of weak leadership. This stubbornness was born of a success that came from not giving in to his parents’ doubts about him and not listening to their advice.

At a temperamental level, the president has almost no ability to accept blame or learn from mistakes. Disagreement, whether from critics or allies, sounds like his mother’s nagging and his father’s disappointment. Thus criticism has the opposite of its intended effect on him. Disapproval hardens Bush’s conviction that he must be right and reinforces his refusal to surrender. Believing he earned his position in life through willpower, he feels he shouldn’t have to ask anyone for permission. This obstinacy has been evident in his personnel practices as well as policy choices. The more the media demanded Bush yield up a head—CIA Director George Tenet, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—the longer that person was likely to be staying around.

Bush’s inflexibility is rooted in the old family drama. It reflects not just a personality forged in opposition to his father, but an idea of leadership developed in conscious contrast to him. Where George H. W. Bush weighed options, W. sizes you up and decides. Where 41 saw shades of gray, 43 finds moral clarity. “The son prides himself on being the guy who cuts through it all, who is decisive, not wishy-washy,” Brent Scowcroft told me in November 2007. “The subtleties, partly because of his inexperience, don’t seem to matter as much. His father, with the background he has, knows that at best you’re operating forty-nine/fifty-one—and you’d better be sure that the fifty-one is on your side and not the forty-nine.”

Bush makes a point of saying, whenever it comes up, that he doesn’t get advice from his father about the conduct of the war. Judging from his father’s roundabout efforts to influence him, this seems likely to be true. In his book, “Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy,” Andrew Cockburn reports a visit 43 paid to Kennebunkport during the summer of 2004. His father gave him a memo that Scowcroft had asked him to pass along about Iraq. The president glanced at it before throwing it aside, telling his dad, “I’m sick and tired of getting papers from Brent Scowcroft telling me what to do, and I never want to see another one again.” With that, 43 stalked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

The collapse of his preemption justification for the war (terrorism + WMD = intolerable threat) sent Bush not into any reexamination of his decision, but toward grander and grander justification. Shortly before the election in 2004, Bush’s friend and former Texas Rangers partner Tom Bernstein gave him the galley proofs of “The Case for Democracy” by the former Soviet refusenik and right-wing Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. Sharansky’s book portrays Bush in a heroic light, comparing the war against terrorism to the struggle against the Nazis and the Soviets. Sharansky draws a contrast to Bush’s father’s “notorious” Chicken Kiev speech in 1991 telling the Ukrainians to avoid “suicidal nationalism,” which he calls “an unmitigated disaster.”

Sharanskyism, the exfoliated version of the Freedom Agenda, became Bush Doctrine 5.0, Freedom Everywhere (1/20/05– 11/7/06). Bush unveiled his newest foreign policy in his second inaugural address, which announced the goal of abolishing oppression on planet Earth: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Democracy is God’s gift to humanity, Bush declared, and the United States would help extend its blessings.

It is hard to believe that anyone other than Bush and his speechwriters, who seemed increasingly to be making his foreign policy, thought about the issue of democracy promotion in such shallow, utopian terms. Though his inaugural address sounded religious, there is no theological basis for democracy as God’s chosen system of government. The Old Testament favors monarchy, the New Testament, a kind of socialism. It was as if Bush now simply identified his democratic crusade with the will of God.

Bush Doctrine 5.0 flopped in practice faster than any of its predecessors. Within a year, no one in the administration other than Rice wanted to talk about the Freedom Agenda. This idea did the impossible: it caused Dick Cheney and the State Department bureaucracy to agree about something, namely that the president’s policy was a pipe dream. The dissonance between Bush’s message and his cavalier attitude toward civil liberties discredited him as a moral messenger. While pressing for divinely ordained liberty in the Middle East, Bush was still taking Dick Cheney’s advice on keeping Guantánamo open, allowing torture, and listening in on phone conversations by American citizens. Thus did Bush’s universal call for democracy not only become an exercise in futility but in many places actually proved counterproductive. From Russia to Venezuela, associating democratic opponents with Bush’s foreign policy became a pretext for taking rights away. In Iran, the Nobel Peace Prize– winning human-rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi complained that Bush’s advocacy was setting her cause back. Thus did the fifth Bush Doctrine recede into what the president called, in a phrase from his second inaugural, the “work of generations.”

Bush’s final foreign policy (11/8/06 to date) was the absence of any functioning doctrine at all. After the Republican loss of both houses of Congress, his administration cobbled together an enfeebled hybrid based on the collapse of the previous five: a retreat from unipolarity, a moratorium on the application of preemption (though bombing Iran remained under discussion), and a tacit consensus to regard the Freedom Agenda as presidential hot air. Bush and his speechwriters have not acknowledged his final doctrine’s demise. He has said that he will make democracy promotion his major post-presidential project, and that he intends to set up a freedom institute as part of the presidential library to be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The final irony of Bush’s foreign-policy crackup was the way it vindicated his father’s choices. Not “finishing the job” and taking ownership of Iraq in 1991 now looked like an act of wisdom. Not making a triumphal speech when the Berlin Wall came down appeared as shrewd management of a dicey situation, which advanced the practical cause of freedom more than a provocative speech would have. Appreciating the value of stability sounded like maturity. Avoiding needlessly bellicose rhetoric seemed like common sense. As the historian Timothy Naftali writes in his generally admiring 2007 biography of George H. W. Bush, “As the younger Bush’s own presidency limped to an end, many missed the elder Bush’s realism, his diplomacy, his political modesty, and, yes, even his prudence.” The more the son’s faults glared, the more his father’s reputation grew.

via//Newsweek

World leaders in secret talks to create ‘New World Order’

 Gordon Brown has begun secret talks with other world leaders on far-reaching reform of the United Nations Security Council as part of a drive to create a “new world order” and “global society”.

The Prime Minister is drawing up plans to expand the number of permanent members in a move that will provoke fears that the veto enjoyed by Britain could be diluted eventually. The United States, France, Russia and China also have a veto but the number of members could be doubled to include India, Germany, Japan, Brazil and one or two African nations.

Mr Brown has discussed a shake-up of a structure created in 1945 to reflect the world’s new challenges and power bases during his four-day trip to China and India. Last night, British sources revealed “intense discussions” on UN reform were under way and Mr Brown raised it whenever he met another world leader.

The Prime Minister believes the UN is punching below its weight. In 2003, it failed to agree on a fresh resolution giving explicit approval for military action in Iraq. George Bush then acted unilaterally, winning the support of Tony Blair.

UN reform is highly sensitive and Britain will not yet publish formal proposals for fear of uniting opponents against them. Mr Brown is trying to build a consensus for change first.

His aides are adamant that the British veto will not be negotiated away. One option is for the nations who join not to have a veto, at least initially. In a speech in Delhi today, the Prime Minister will say: “I support India’s bid for a permanent place – with others – on an expanded UN Security Council.” However, he is not backing Pakistan’s demand for a seat if India wins one.

Mr Brown will unveil a proposal for the UN to spend £100m a year on setting up a “rapid reaction force” to stop “failed states” sliding back into chaos after a peace deal has been reached. Civilians such as police, administrators, judges and lawyers would work alongside military peace-keepers. “There is limited value in military action to end fighting if law and order does not follow,” he will say. “So we must do more to ensure rapid reconstruction on the ground once conflicts are over – and combine traditional humanitarian aid and peace-keeping with stabilisation, recovery and development.”

He will call for the World Bank to lead the fight against climate change as well as poverty in the developing world, and argue that the International Monetary Fund should prevent crises like the credit crunch rather than just resolve them.

Arriving in Delhi yesterday, Mr Brown said he wanted a “partnership of equals” between Britain and India as he called for closer trade links and co-operation against terrorism. He announced £825m of aid over the next three years – £500m of which will be spent on health and education.

Mr Brown is to bring back honorary knighthoods and other awards for cricketers from Commonwealth countries. He said: “Cricket is one of the great things that bind the Commonwealth together. It used to be that great cricketers from the Commonwealth would be recognised by the British nation I would like to see some of the great players in the modern era honoured.”

Read Andrew Grice atindependent.co.uk/todayinpolitics

Security Council membership

The UN Security Council’s membership has remained virtually unchanged since it first met in 1946.

Great Britain, the United States, the then Soviet Union, China and France were designated permanent members of the UN’s most powerful body.

Initially, six other countries were elected to serve two-year spells on the council – in 1946 they were Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, the Netherlands and Poland.

The number of elected members, who are chosen to cover all parts of the globe, was increased to 10 in 1965. They are currently Belgium, Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Croatia, Indonesia, Italy, Libya, Panama, South Africa and Vietnam.

Decisions made by the council require nine “yes” votes out of 15. Each permanent member has a veto over resolutions.

The issue of UN reform has long been on the agenda. One suggestion is that permanent membership could be expanded to 10 with India, Japan, Germany, Brazil and South Africa taking places. Any reform requires 128 nations, two-thirds, to support it in the assembly.

via//Independent, The

Declaring Forever War

Giuliani has surrounded himself with advisors who think the Bush Doctrine didn’t go nearly far enough.

by Michael C. Desch

Like most Americans, I knew little about Rudolph Giuliani, save that he had been the very successful mayor of New York City catapulted to iconic status for his cool-headed demeanor after the Sept. 11 attacks. I was curious about where he stood as a presidential candidate, so in April 2007, I joined nearly 3,000 other Texas A&M faculty and students to hear him speak.

After saying some nice things about his host, President George H.W. Bush, Rudy launched into a stemwinder about the “war on Islamic fundamentalist terrorism” that basically repudiated everything the former president stood for in his foreign policy. Moreover, in the space of 40 minutes, Giuliani never once mentioned Osama bin Laden, the man who masterminded the attack on his city.

I was so appalled by the mayor’s simplistic message that terrorists were attacking us because they “oppose our freedom and … want to impose their ideology on us” that I ignored protocol and challenged him during the Q&A. To the accompaniment of hisses from the rabidly pro-Rudy students, I reminded the mayor that Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere in the Middle East have taken our side against al-Qaeda at various times. Like the students, Hizzonor was not amused, and I got five minutes of unvarnished Rudy chiding me for just not getting it.

To the cheers of the partisan crowd, Giuliani argued that my “failure to see the connection between Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups [was] a recipe for disaster.” In his view, the campaign of radical Islamic terrorism began back in the 1960s and 1970s and included things like the Black September attack upon Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. He ridiculed my call to disaggregate the terrorist threat, saying it ignored the fact that Yasir Arafat, whom, he lamented, we helped win the Nobel Prize, was responsible for “slaughtering 29 Americans” over the years. I learned later that Giuliani was so annoyed by my hectoring that he complained about it at the reception after the talk. He was reportedly shocked to learn that I was not some lefty professor but a member of the faculty at the Bush School.

After this disheartening experience, I decided to look more closely at what Giuliani was saying about foreign policy and who was advising him. What I found alarmed me: Rudy’s performance here was no aberration. Those who thought George W. Bush was too timid in the conduct of his foreign policy will find a champion in Rudy.

The Giuliani campaign was slow to articulate a detailed foreign policy. Through the summer of 2007, it was content to offer platitudes among the mayor’s “Twelve Commitments” such as, “I will keep America on the offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.” But by the fall, the candidate published a major piece in Foreign Affairs that outlined his agenda. Explicitly rejecting realism, he instead sounded the tocsin: “Civilization itself, and the international system, had come under attack by a ruthless and radical Islamist enemy.” Giuliani warned, “the terrorists’ war on us was encouraged by unrealistic and inconsistent actions taken in response to terrorist attacks in the past. A realistic peace can only be achieved through strength.”

Had I been more attentive over the years, I might have been less surprised by the mayor’s hard-line neoconservative stance. I had forgotten that while U.S. attorney in New York, Giuliani tried to close the PLO’s New York office. As mayor, he made headlines in 1995, when he had Arafat ejected from a concert at Lincoln Center. In a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition this fall, Rudy pointed to this incident as emblematic of his leadership style: “I didn’t hesitate, like Hillary Clinton hesitates to answer questions on what she’s going to do about Iran. I didn’t seek to negotiate with him, like Barack Obama would do or says he’d do with these people. I didn’t call for a team of lawyers to help me. … I just made a decision. See, I lead. That’s what [being a] leader is about.”

To the extent that a mayor of New York has a foreign policy, it needs to be loudly supportive of Israel. In a speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, Giuliani struck the “Israel’s war is our war” note by claiming that the war on terror began in Munich in 1972. His September 2007 proposal to expand NATO to include Israel is part and parcel of this approach. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Giuliani is “the clear favorite of the party’s top Jewish activists.”

Giuliani holds up his résumé as mayor to buttress his claim that he is ready to be president. “I know from personal experience,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs.” Alas, his New York record is not so reassuring. Recall such pre-9/11 missteps as his decision to locate the city’s counterterrorism center in the World Trade Center, which had already been the target of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack in 1993; his failure to integrate the fire and police communications systems; his penchant for surrounding himself with sketchy characters like Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Giuliani would later recommend to train Iraqi security forces and as secretary of the department of homeland security. He dropped out of the blue-ribbon Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group because it cut into his paid speechmaking. Giuliani apparently thinks his years in Gracie Mansion sufficed to school him in high politics.

In one sense, his campaign is a big tent: it has by some estimates between 60 and 70 advisors. Some—British Soviet expert Robert Conquest and Reagan campaign defense advisor William Van Cleave—are clearly window-dressing. The core of senior advisors includes former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer (Middle East), Stephen Rosen (defense), S. Enders Wimbush (diplomacy), Peter Berkowitz (statecraft, human rights, and freedom), Kim Holmes (foreign policy), and perhaps Daniel Pipes. Giuliani’s chief foreign-policy advisor is retired diplomat and Yale instructor Charles Hill. In the face of controversy about how many neoconservatives were playing prominent roles, Podhoretz bragged to the New York Observer,“Giuliani doesn’t think that this is a liability.”

Podhoretz is the person whose presence has done the most to set in concrete the notion that Team Rudy is all neocon all the time. Famous for arguing that we are in the midst of “World War IV,” Podhoretz is scathing in his criticism of those he suspects of not waging the war with enough vigor. He even charges that many senior military officers show insufficient stomach for the fight, singling out former CENTCOM commander John Abizaid and his successor, Adm. William Fallon. Podhoretz is also an assiduous peddler of the new neocon myth that the antiwar camp stabbed President Bush in the back.

And he doesn’t stop at Iraq: Podhoretz constantly beats the drum for bombing Iran to halt its nascent nuclear program. Air Marshal Podhoretz assured The Telegraph that the air campaign “would take five minutes.” His optimism that attacking Iran would be another cakewalk combines with pessimism about the prospects of multilateral sanctions preventing Iran from getting the bomb. “Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of the Jews back then,” Podhoretz sneers, “the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.”

There are areas where Podhoretz is out of synch with the rest of the Giuliani team. One is his steadfast commitment to the Bush administration’s efforts to spread democracy in the Middle East, which he applies equally to American enemies like Iran and Syria and friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Other Giuliani advisors are more restrained about democracy promotion. Another point of departure is Podhoretz’s long-standing critique of the Clinton administration for treating terrorism as simply a “crime problem,” a charge somewhat discordant with the mayor’s claim that his successful campaign against crime in New York City justifies electing him global sheriff.

The biggest problem Podhoretz poses for the Giuliani campaign is that he has some particularly far-fetched beliefs that even in these fevered times most Americans do not share. As Ian Buruma noted in a recent review of World War IV, Podhoretz “expresses a weird longing for the state of war, for the clarity it brings, and for the chance to divide one’s fellow citizens, or indeed the whole world, neatly into friends and foes, comrades and traitors, warriors and appeasers, those who are with us and those who are against.”

Another neocon stalwart in Rudy’s camp is Martin Kramer, a long-time think-tanker in Israel and the United States, who specializes in exposing the “biases” in academic studies of the Middle East. These wrong-headed ideas need to be challenged, in Kramer’s view, because they undermine U.S. policy. Among them, the faulty notion of “Arabists” in academia and government that the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict is somehow related to America’s problems in the Middle East. In Kramer’s view, the U.S. should stand firmly with Israel because only then will the Arabs respect us. In 2001, he told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) that the United States’ key problem in the region is “its perceived lack of resolve; its quickness to forgive, or at least forget; its penchant for creating categorical boxes, like the state sponsors of terrorism list, and then ignoring them altogether. This is perceived as weakness, and when you are perceived as weak in the Middle East, you become a tempting target and the vultures begin to circle.” Kramer’s lack of confidence that America will show the necessary mettle persuades him that Podhoretz is too sanguine about our chances in World War IV.

Kramer is representative of the Giuliani team’s more cautious view of nation building. Challenging the Bush administration’s faith in democracy as a panacea for our problems in the Middle East, he reminded a WINEP audience in 2002, “from the vantage point of Israel, things look precisely the opposite. Israel has five immediate neighbors: Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority. Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are ruled without even a pretense of democracy. … And witness: Islamist movements are no great threat to order in any of these three autocratic states.” Conversely, he observed, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority both have some measure of “pluralism” and are rife with Islamicism. Like most other members of the Giuliani varsity foreign-policy team, Kramer takes a more Jeane Kirpatrick-type line on democracy promotion than neocons in the Bush administration did.

Giuliani’s senior defense advisor is my old colleague from Harvard’s Olin Institute of Strategic Studies, Stephen Peter Rosen. He qualifies as a movement neocon, having signed many of the Project for a New American Century’s ukases, such as the Sept. 21, 2001 letter arguing, “even if the evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” and the April 3, 2002 letter baldly declaring, “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.” Not surprisingly, given his experience on the National Security Council during the early years of the Reagan military build-up, Rosen supports increased defense spending and the expansion of our ground forces. He is also an unabashed advocate of American primacy, arguing in a recent piece in The National Interest, “successful imperial governance must focus on maintaining and increasing, if possible, the initial advantage in the ability to generate military power.”

But Rosen’s view of international politics goes beyond renascent Reagan-era hawkishness and embraces a social Darwinistic framework for understanding hegemonic America’s challenges. Rejecting Bush’s pre-9/11 argument that America needed a “humble foreign policy,” Rosen wrote:

Humility is always a virtue, but the dominant male atop any social hierarchy, human or otherwise, never managed to rule simply by being nice. Human evolutionary history has produced a species that both creates hierarchies and harbors the desire among subordinates to challenge its dominant member. Those challenges never disappear. The dominant member can never do everything that subordinates desire, and so it is blamed for what it does not do as much as for what it does.

Giuliani’s senior team has another Harvard connection through Peter Berkowitz, a former political theory professor in the Government Department who now holds a joint appointment at George Mason Law School and Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Berkowitz is extremely critical of academia, issuing jeremiads like the one that appeared in April 2005 in the Washington Post charging that many Middle East studies programs are in thrall to the “poisonous political proposition that Israel is the root source of all the ills that beset the Muslim world.” In a summer 2007 piece in Policy Review, he dismissed academia as “unaccountable to outside authority, largely sheltered from opposing points of view, given to seeing themselves as a saving remnant both unappreciated by the broader public and besieged by an evil government, professors at our leading universities have created an intellectual environment that has undermined the conditions that foster free and unbiased exploration of the great issues of the day.” To be sure, academia has its biases, but these are counterbalanced by other intellectual forces in society. If Berkowitz and other neoconservatives had their way, they would impose their own orthodoxy on campus, thereby removing a check on themselves.

S. Enders Wimbush, a former Radio Liberty director and currently a Hudson Institute senior fellow, apparently aspires to be President Giuliani’s Karen Hughes. One of his major strategic planks is to establish a “Radio Free Iran” to undermine the mullocracy. He epitomizes the ambivalence about Iran among the Giuliani crowd: on the one hand, they envision a major role for the captive Iranian masses yearning for freedom; on the other, they treat Iran as a monolith. In January 2007, for example, Wimbush despaired that Iran is undeterrable because the regime is willing to “‘martyr’ the entire Iranian nation, and it has even expressed the desirability of doing so in a way to accelerate the inevitable, apocalyptic collision between Islam and the West that will result in Islam’s final worldwide triumph.” Like Berkowitz, Wimbush complains that American universities are not doing their part by producing graduates with the skills necessary to wage the global war on terror, so he is an advocate of the philanthropic community using its resources to prompt reform.

Kim Holmes, a defense analyst for the Heritage Foundation, recently served as assistant secretary of state for international organization in the second Bush administration. Like most of the rest of the team, he is cautious about depending too much on democracy promotion, arguing in an August 2006 lecture: “We must distinguish between elections and democracy, and between populism and freedom. Frankly, there may be times when supporting overseas elections may not be advisable. And not every populist movement desires liberty. Even despots and terrorists can get elected in some circumstances. We have only to look at Belarus or the Palestinian elections.” Holmes still maintains that we went to war in Iraq exclusively to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction and to disrupt his links with al-Qaeda. He blames most of our troubles today in Iraq on Iran, arguing that the Islamic Republic is “acting as if it’s on a roll.” Holmes is also critical of European politicians he thinks are insufficiently supportive of the United States. The strangest example was his March 2007 broadside against the British Conservative Party, which he suggested was going wobbly.

Daniel Pipes is the crazy uncle of the Giuliani campaign. In some places he is listed as a senior advisor, but the chair of the senior advisory team went to great lengths to minimize his influence. This is not surprising because even among this group, Pipes stands out as an extremist. His day job is as director of The Middle East Forum, a think tank that focuses on U.S. interests in the Middle East and includes Campus Watch, a group that monitors Middle Eastern studies on campus for evidence of anti-Israel bias. He gave this over-the-top assessment of the situation to the New York Sun in December 2006: “Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.” Pipes’s appointment to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace by President Bush sparked controversy because, among other things, he urged Congress to pass legislation to establish a board to monitor federally funded area studies programs in universities for anti-American sentiments.

That alarmism also colors his view of Israel’s security situation: in an October 2007 article in the Jerusalem Post, Pipes portrayed the Jewish state as besieged from all sides: “Count the ways Israel is under siege: from Iranians building a nuclear bomb, Syrians stockpiling chemical weapons, Egyptians and Saudis developing serious conventional forces, Hezbullah attacking from Lebanon, Fatah from the West Bank, Hamas from Gaza, and Israel’s Muslim citizens becoming politically restive and more violent.” No one denies that Israel faces a challenging security environment, but few serious analysts would endorse this apocalyptic view. In the New York Sun, he dismissed the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s conclusion that many of our problems in Iraq are linked to the unresolved Israel-Palestine conflict as the product of “small minds.”

Pipes’s uncompromisingly pro-Israel line has at times gotten him into trouble. For example, he was a major supporter of From Time Immemorial author Joan Peters’s discredited thesis that the Arabs had no claim to Palestine because most of them did not arrive there until shortly before 1948. Pipes, like neoconservative hawk Laurie Mylroie, has also flip-flopped wildly on how to treat Saddam Hussein. Both advocated closer ties with Saddam when he was fighting Iran in the 1980s. After that war ended, both suddenly discovered his horrendous human-rights record and support of Palestinian terrorism. But nothing better demonstrates how far out of the post-Annapolis mainstream Pipes is than his association with extremist groups, such as Jerusalem Summit, which oppose the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and advocates that Palestinians settle in other Arab countries.

Finally, Giuliani enlisted former Foreign Service officer Charles Hill to chair his senior advisory team. Many reports imply that Hill, a previously rather obscure figure, was chosen to counter the widespread perception that Giuliani’s team was a wholly owned neoconservative subsidiary. In an October 2007 interview in the New York Sun, Hill expressed dismay about a recent New York Times piece because “the subtext seems to be war crazy neocons have captured the campaign and that is a distortion.” Hill countered, “this is a non-ideological approach that we take. … It is a center right group of people with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.”

Hill describes himself as an “Edmund Burke conservative,” but as one former Yale International Security Studies Fellow explained to me, “There’s not much if any daylight between Charlie and the neocons, except on the degree to which is Charlie is more of a multilateralist than them. … I suppose the only difference is that Charlie is more like Cheney, who dovetails with the neocons on most issues of the last 6.5 years, rather than strictly being a neocon. And like Cheney, I think 9/11 had a massive effect on Charlie. You can’t underestimate just how much it galvanized him.”

A brief review of Hill’s career reveals how he has moved steadily closer to the neocon camp. As his former Yale student Molly Worthen recounts in her treacly biography, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost, Hill began his Foreign Service career in Switzerland. While he was watching the young Red Guards in the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution from across the bamboo curtain in Hong Kong, Hill realized the double-edged nature of youth: he appreciated their dynamism, but feared their disregard for established order. This lesson was reinforced during a sabbatical he took at Harvard in 1970, where he experienced American youth rebellion firsthand. Worthen reports that Hill flirted with the antiwar movement, writing articles in the campus newspaper and even contributing a chapter to a book edited by Noam Chomsky. But after his next assignment in Vietnam, which he initially resisted, Hill came to believe that the antiwar movement had undercut the American effort just as it was beginning to succeed.

Hill’s assignment to the Israel desk at Foggy Bottom and then to the embassy in Tel Aviv edged him closer to the neoconservative camp. According to Worthen, Hill “was very informed by his experience in Israel and has deep, deep sympathy for the Israelis, not based on their political situation, but a very existential empathy for their national philosophy and their culture, which he perceives as honest and manly, really standing for something that is good and true about the human race.” Hill found the Israelis he met to be “intrepid,” in contrast to the effete Americans he encountered in Cambridge. During his posting in Israel, Hill was introduced to Menachem Begin and was so taken that he asked the Likud prime minister for an autographed picture. Later, when he was Secretary of State George Shultz’s executive assistant, Hill would develop a close relationship with Israel’s United Nations representative Benyamin Netanyahu.

Hill’s government service ended abruptly with Schultz’s departure during the transition to the first Bush administration. While Bush and Reagan’s personal relations were cordial, a fact historian Douglas Brinkley tells me is amply evident in Reagan’s soon to be published diaries, there was little love lost among lower-level officials in the two administrations. Hill went with Schultz to the Hoover Institution for a year, but was forced to resign from the Foreign Service after it became clear that he had concealed evidence of Schultz’s extensive knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal from federal agents. Hill moved to New Haven and commuted for a time to New York while he worked for UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali. With Boutros Ghali’s retirement, Hill began to teach in 1997 in Yale’s Freshman Directed Studies in the Humanities program.

It was there that he met historians Paul Kennedy and John Lewis Gaddis and came to play a role in the development of Yale’s Studies in Grand Strategy program. From the beginning, the program was a lightning rod for controversy. Some Yalies objected to its elitism—the former ISS fellow says the program “very much views itself as elite and cultivates that reputation”—others to its right-of-center political orientation (probably unfair to Kennedy, though he has of late started signing Project for a New American Century manifestos), still others to its pretentiousness. On this last count, Worthen admits, “sometimes it can seem like students in the grand strategy course are laboring under the delusion that they will be appointed secretary of state or find themselves nominated to the Supreme Court just a few months after they graduate.” Another former fellow described how Kennedy and Gaddis convened an “emergency dinner” of the grand-strategy faculty and ISS fellows after 9/11 and had the transcript of the evening’s discussions sealed in Yale’s archives for posterity. Worthen’s biography of Hill itself grew out of a paper she wrote for Gaddis, which is the sort of self-referential assignment that one would only get in a program that thought so well of itself.

But the most frequent criticism of the program involves Hill’s pedagogical approach. Worthen observes, “Hill’s teaching style dazzles and offends in the same way that religious indoctrination does.” His demeanor in the classroom, along with its extracurricular manifestations, turned Worthen from an acolyte who scrawled “Charles Hill is God” in her freshman notebook into a skeptical biographer, who confessed that “each time I packed up my notebook and left his office, I could not help feeling a bit brainwashed.” Worthen fretted, “something about Professor Hill made us wildly anxious to prove ourselves, evidently to the point of self ruin.” She recounts how Hill encouraged one undergraduate to enlist in the Marines and another to forego a lucrative corporate job for a U.S. government post in Kuwait, much to her parents’ chagrin.

What do we know of Hill’s own foreign-policy agenda? In an interview broadcast over a conservative website called Captain’s Quarters in July 2007, Hill focused on three issues. First, he argued that the American Diplomatic Corps was badly in need of reform because of a “lack of professional dedication came into the Foreign Service.” He explained that this problem was “related to the 1968 generation of young people coming into the Service and essentially not wanting to put loyalty to the President or American foreign policy first. They were putting their own employee rights first, as if they were unionized workers.” Hill promised that Rudy will “get rid of the people not on the team” and suggested the mayor will do for the Foreign Service what he did to the New York Police Department.

Second, Hill argued that a Giuliani administration would give high priority to combating anti-Americanism. This is urgent, in his view, because many of our problems in the Middle East are the result of the “propaganda pumped out by Arab regimes” rather than any specific U.S. policies.

Finally, Hill offered what he considered a more nuanced and effective policy for promoting human rights and democracy than the Bush administration’s. Under Giuliani, the emphasis would be on supporting dissidents “bravely resisting tyranny” rather than on reforming friendly governments. Hill further promised to focus on the more limited goal of spreading “decent government.” He explained to The American Spectator that the United States “has to stand for democracy. We can’t turn away from that, but we have to do it in a way that’s realistic and Rudy Giuliani has talked about the realistic piece.”

Otherwise, Hill is squarely in the neoconservative camp. He maintains, “If we pull out of Iraq now, it’s just going to break the dam and there will be flood waters of chaos and murder across the region.” He evidently buys into Podhoretz’s World War IV mindset, writing in The Yale Israel Journal, “if the Islamists can defeat the Middle Eastern states that seek reform and work with the international system, we will be faced with another world war.” It’s as if Hill believes radical Islamic terrorists constitute a greater danger to the United States than the Soviet Union did.

In State of Denial—the third installment of his Bush at War trilogy—Bob Woodward recounted a conversation between then-Texas governor George W. Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar bin-Sultan before the 2000 election in which the candidate confessed, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about foreign policy.” To fill that empty vessel, the Bush campaign assembled a diverse group of advisors—“the Vulcans”—who represented a broad range of opinion within the Republican Party, from neoconservatives (Paul Wolfowitz) to traditional hawks (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) to realists (Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice). That Bush eventually threw his lot in with the neoconservatives is a function of the dramatic events of 9/11 combined with the weaknesses of his other advisors. But at least this was not a foregone conclusion.

Rudolph Giuliani, in contrast, is no empty vessel. He knows exactly where he stands. His spokesman told the New York Observer: “Mayor Giuliani has a range of advisors to provide him information on foreign policy issues and at the end of the day Mayor Giuliani’s viewpoints regarding foreign policy are his own.” Hill confirmed to Captain’s Quarters that Giuliani has a “really fully formed foreign policy approach, a comprehensive vision. … not something where he needs to turn to somebody and say ‘what do I do, or what do I think about this?’ He already has it in mind.”

Unfortunately, he is of one mind with some of the most unrepentant, unreconstructed neoconservatives around. Podhoretz told the New York Observer that “as far as I can tell, there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it.” If anyone thinks that neoconservativism is on the outs after the debacle in Iraq, they need look no further than the Republican frontrunner’s brain-trust.

To be sure, neoconservatives do not all think alike on every issue, as evidenced by the Giuliani team’s skepticism about social engineering. But the continuities far outnumber the divergences. Even allegedly non-neocon members of the team like Charles Hill turn out, upon closer inspection, to be solidly of the familiar persuasion.

Some hope that all of this is just posturing to secure the Republican nomination, which will be delivered by a base troubled by Giuliani’s multiple marriages, occasional cross-dressing, and support for abortion, civil unions, and immigrants’ rights. A post on Matthew Yglesias’s Atlantic Monthly blog offered a theory: “Giuliani is stocking up on these stock characters not for real advice—he’s not that insane—but rather to get out a sort of dogwhistle message to the true rightwing nuts, who are willing to forgive a guy anything if he will only pledge to nuke significant parts of the Middle East.” Yglesias himself is not so sure: he thinks Rudy is “bat-s – - t insane.”

Giuliani’s tendency to conflate all terrorist groups—whether Islamist or not and whether they attack the United States or just allies like Israel—led Fred Kaplan of Slate to dub him the “anti-statesman.” Sending him and his team to the White House might actually ignite World War IV.
_______________________________________

Michael C. Desch is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-making at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.

via//American Conservative

‘We Have to Keep Pressing Hard Against an Attack on Iran’

We’ve got to keep pressing hard against an attack on Iran: The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.

Rhetoric flowing out of the White House indicates the Bush administration is planning a military attack on Iran. Officials in Saudi Arabia, a close Bush ally, think the handwriting is on the wall. “George Bush’s tone makes us think he has decided what he is going to do,” according to Rihab Massoud, Prince Bandar ben Sultan’s right-hand man. Saudi Social Affairs Minister Abdel Mohsen Hakas told Le Figaro, “We are getting closer and closer to a confrontation.”

As Bush and Cheney try to whip us into a frenzy about the dangers Iran poses, their argument comes up short. They say Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says there is “no evidence” of this. They say Iran is sending deadly weapons into Iraq to kill U.S. troops, but those devices can be manufactured in any Iraqi machine shop. Now the New York Times reports most of the foreign fighters in Iraq come, not from Iran, but from two Bush allies — Saudi Arabia and Libya. An estimated 90 percent of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. And senior U.S. military officials believe the financial support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia comes primarily from Saudi Arabia.

Yet the Bush/Cheney polemics about Iran continue to escalate. In light of the lack of evidence Iran is actually developing nukes, Bush equated Iranian “knowledge” to make nuclear weapons with World War III. “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III,” he said recently, “it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” This substantially lowers the bar for a U.S. attack on Iran.

A few days after Bush warned of World War III, Cheney called Iran “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” adding, “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences … We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” These threats are eerily reminiscent of his rants in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In an unprecedented move, the Bush administration labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. It appears the administration applied that label in an effort to trigger language in the 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. That authorization says, “The President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

Like Bush’s invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran would violate international and U.S. law. The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council. Iran, which has not attacked any country for 2,000 years, hasn’t threatened to invade the United States or Israel. Rather than protecting Israel, U.S. or Israeli military force against Iran will endanger Israel, which would invariably suffer a retaliatory attack.

In making its case against Iran, the administration points to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s alleged comment that Israel should be wiped off the map. But this is an erroneous translation of what he said. According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who said the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole said this “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” Journalist Diana Johnstone points out the quote is not aimed at the Israeli people, but at the Zionist “regime” occupying Jerusalem. “Coming from a Muslim religious leader,” Johnstone wrote, “this opinion is doubtless based on objection to Jewish monopoly of a city considered holy by all three of the Abramic monotheisms.”

It seems significant that support for Ahmadinejad may be waning among the real power brokers in Iran, particularly the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Jomhouri Eslami daily in Iran, which has close ties to Khamenei, has denounced Ahmadinejad’s characterization of those opposed to his nuclear program as traitors.

If the United States attacks Iran, the results would be catastrophic. Three Europeans, including former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Yehuda Atai, a member of the Israeli Committee for a Middle East without Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in Libération, “We are being warned about it from all sides: The United States is at the brink of war, ready to bombard Iran. The only thing lacking is the presidential order.” Drawing parallels with the U.S. war in Iraq, they caution, “An attack against Iran, whatever its targets, its methods and its initial scope, will significantly aggravate the situation, achieving similar results, without even talking about the disastrous impact on the global economy.” They add, “It would be still worse if the insane idea of using tactical nuclear weapons — which exist — to prevent Iran from building, in spite of its denials, the nuclear weapons that recent IAEA inspections have found no trace of, were implemented.”

The threats against Iran appear to be politically motivated. Journalist Seymour Hersh’s extensive research has convinced him that Bush/Cheney will invade Iran. They likely think embroiling us in Iran will ensure a GOP victory in 2008. It will certainly make it harder for the next President to withdraw from Iraq once we are mired in Iran.

If Hillary Clinton becomes that next President, she will likely continue Bush’s foreign policy. Clinton, who favors leaving a large contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq, says nothing about disbanding the huge U.S. military bases there. Clinton is also rattling the sabers in Iran’s direction. She voted to urge Bush to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and she, too, misquotes Ahmadinejad about Israel.

As we go to the polls in the coming months, it is imperative we scrutinize the candidates’ positions on Iraq and Iran. The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the President of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.” Her columns are archived at marjoriecohn.com.

Source: AlterNet

The Mega-Bunker of Baghdad

The new American Embassy in Baghdad will be the largest, least welcoming, and most lavish embassy in the world: a $600 million massively fortified compound with 619 blast-resistant apartments and a food court fit for a shopping mall. Unfortunately, like other similarly constructed U.S. Embassies, it may already be obsolete.

by William Langewiesche November 2007

When the new American Embassy in Baghdad entered the planning stage, more than three years ago, U.S. officials inside the Green Zone were still insisting that great progress was being made in the construction of a new Iraq. I remember a surreal press conference in which a U.S. spokesman named Dan Senor, full of governmental conceits, described the marvelous developments he personally had observed during a recent sortie (under heavy escort) into the city. His idea now was to set the press straight on realities outside the Green Zone gates. Senor was well groomed and precocious, fresh into the world, and he had acquired a taste for appearing on TV. The assembled reporters were by contrast a disheveled and unwashed lot, but they included serious people of deep experience, many of whom lived fully exposed to Iraq, and knew that society there was unraveling fast. Some realized already that the war had been lost, though such were the attitudes of the citizenry back home that they could not yet even imply this in print.

Now they listened to Senor as they increasingly did, setting aside their professional skepticism for attitudes closer to fascination and wonder. Senor’s view of Baghdad was so disconnected from the streets that, at least in front of this audience, it would have made for impossibly poor propaganda. Rather, he seemed truly convinced of what he said, which in turn could be explained only as the product of extreme isolation. Progress in the construction of a new Iraq? Industry had stalled, electricity and water were failing, sewage was flooding the streets, the universities were shuttered, the insurgency was expanding, sectarianism was on the rise, and gunfire and explosions now marked the days as well as the nights. Month by month, Baghdad was crumbling back into the earth. Senor apparently had taken heart that shops remained open, selling vegetables, fruits, and household goods. Had he ventured out at night he would have seen that some sidewalk cafés remained crowded as well. But almost the only construction evident in the city was of the Green Zone defenses themselves—erected in a quest for safety at the cost of official interactions with Iraq. Senor went home, married a Washington insider, and became a commentator on Fox News. Eventually he set himself up in the business of “crisis communications,” as if even he finally realized that Iraq had gone horribly wrong.

Inside the Green Zone the talk of progress slowed and then died. The first of the nominal Iraqi governments arrived and joined the Americans in their oasis. The rest of Baghdad became the fearsome “Red Zone,” and completely off limits to American officials, although reporters and other unaffiliated Westerners continued to live and work there. Meanwhile, through institutional momentum and without regard to the fundamental mission—the reason for being there in the first place—the Green Zone defenses kept growing, surrounding the residents with ever more layers of checkpoints and blast walls, and forcing American officials to withdraw into their highly defended quarters at the Republican Palace, whereupon even the Green Zone became for them a forbidden land.

That was the process that has led, now, to this—the construction of an extravagant new fortress into which a thousand American officials and their many camp followers are fleeing. The compound, which will be completed by late fall, is the largest and most expensive embassy in the world, a walled expanse the size of Vatican City, containing 21 reinforced buildings on a 104-acre site along the Tigris River, enclosed within an extension of the Green Zone which stretches toward the airport road. The new embassy cost $600 million to build, and is expected to cost another $1.2 billion a year to run—a high price even by the profligate standards of the war in Iraq. The design is the work of an architectural firm in Kansas City named Berger Devine Yaeger, which angered the State Department last May by posting its plans and drawings on the Internet, and then responding to criticism with the suggestion that Google Earth offers better views. Google Earth offers precise distance measurements and geographic coordinates too.

But the location of the compound is well known in Baghdad anyway, where for several years it has been marked by large construction cranes and all-night work lights easily visible from the embattled neighborhoods across the river. It is reasonable to assume that insurgents will soon sit in the privacy of rooms overlooking the site, and use cell phones or radios to adjust the rocket and mortar fire of their companions. Meanwhile, however, they seem to have held off, lobbing most of their ordnance elsewhere into the Green Zone, as if reluctant to slow the completion of such an enticing target.

The construction has proceeded within budget and on time. For the State Department, this is a matter of pride. The prime contractor is First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting, which for security reasons was not allowed to employ Iraqi laborers, and instead imported more than a thousand workers from such countries as Bangladesh and Nepal. The importation of Third World laborers is a standard practice in Iraq, where the huge problem of local unemployment is trumped by American fears of the local population, and where it is not unusual, for instance, to find U.S. troops being served in chow halls by Sri Lankans wearing white shirts and bow ties. First Kuwaiti has been accused of holding its workers in captivity by keeping their passports in a safe, as if otherwise they could have blithely exited the Green Zone, caught a ride to the airport, passed through the successive airport checkpoints, overcome the urgent crowds at the airline counters, purchased a ticket, bribed the police to ignore the country’s myriad exit requirements (including a recent H.I.V. test), and hopped a flight for Dubai. Whatever the specific allegations, which First Kuwaiti denies, in the larger context of Iraq the accusation is absurd. It is Iraq that holds people captive. Indeed, the U.S government itself is a prisoner, and all the more tightly held because it engineered the prison where it resides. The Green Zone was built by the inmates themselves. The new embassy results from their desire to get their confinement just right.

Details remain secret, but the essentials are known. The perimeter walls stand at least nine feet high and are made of reinforced concrete strong enough to deflect the blast from mortars, rockets, and car bombs that might detonate outside. Presumably the walls are watched over by fortified towers and are set back from a perimeter wire by swaths of prohibited free-fire zones. There are five defensible entrance gates, most of which remain closed. There is also a special emergency gate, meant to handle contingencies such as the collapse of the Green Zone or an American rout. Inside the compound, or very near, there is a helipad to serve the ambassador and other top officials as they shuttle around on important business. Implicit in the construction of such a helipad is the hope in the worst case of avoiding the sort of panicked public rooftop departure that marked the American defeat in Vietnam. Never let it be said that the State Department does not learn from history.

For the most part, however, the new embassy is not about leaving Iraq, but about staying on—for whatever reason, under whatever circumstances, at whatever cost. As a result the compound is largely self-sustaining, and contains its own power generators, water wells, drinking-water treatment plant, sewage plant, fire station, irrigation system, Internet uplink, secure intranet, telephone center (Virginia area code), cell-phone network (New York area code), mail service, fuel depot, food and supply warehouses, vehicle-repair garage, and workshops. At the core stands the embassy itself, a massive exercise in the New American Bunker style, with recessed slits for windows, a filtered and pressurized air-conditioning system against chemical or biological attack, and sufficient office space for hundreds of staff. Both the ambassador and deputy ambassador have been awarded fortified residences grand enough to allow for elegant diplomatic receptions even with the possibility of mortar rounds dropping in from above.

As for the rest of the embassy staff, most of the government employees are moving into 619 blast-resistant apartments, where they will enjoy a new level of privacy that, among its greatest effects, may ease some of the sexual tension that has afflicted Green Zone life. Fine—as a general rule the world would be a better place if American officials concentrated more of their energies on making love. But unfortunately even within the Baghdad embassy, with its romance-inducing isolation, a sexual solution is too much to expect. Instead, the residents fight their frustrations with simulations of home—elements of America in the heart of Baghdad that seem to have been imported from Orange County or the Virginia suburbs. The new embassy has tennis courts, a landscaped swimming pool, a pool house, and a bomb-resistant recreation center with a well-equipped gym. It has a department store with bargain prices, where residents (with appropriate credentials) can spend some of their supplemental hazardous-duty and hardship pay. It has a community center, a beauty salon, a movie theater, and an American Club, where alcohol is served. And it has a food court where third-country workers (themselves ultra-thin) dish up a wealth of choices to please every palate. The food is free. Take-out snacks, fresh fruit and vegetables, sushi rolls, and low-calorie specials. Sandwiches, salads, and hamburgers. American comfort food, and theme cuisines from around the world, though rarely if ever from the Middle East. Ice cream and apple pie. All of it is delivered by armed convoys up the deadly roads from Kuwait. Dread ripples through the embassy’s population when, for instance, the yogurt supply runs low. Back home in Washington the State Department is confronting the issue of post-traumatic stress after people return.

America didn’t use to be like this. Traditionally it was so indifferent to setting up embassies that after its first 134 years of existence, in 1910, it owned diplomatic properties in only five countries abroad—Morocco, Turkey, Siam, China, and Japan. The United States did not have an income tax at that time. Perhaps as a result, American envoys on public expense occupied rented quarters to keep the costs down. In 1913 the first national income tax was imposed, at rates between 1 and 7 percent, with room for growth in the future. Congress gradually relaxed its squeeze on the State Department’s budget. Then the United States won World War II. It emerged into the 1950s as a self-convinced power, locked in a struggle against the Soviet Union.

This was the era of the great diplomatic expansion, when no country was deemed too small or unimportant to merit American attention. The United States embarked on a huge embassy-construction program. The Soviets did, too. The Soviet Embassies were heavy neoclassical things, thousand-year temples built of stone and meant to impress people with the permanence of an insecure state. The new U.S. facilities by contrast were showcases for modernist design, airy structures drawn up in steel and glass, full of light, and accessible to the streets. They were meant to represent a country that is generous, open, and progressive, and to some degree they succeeded—for instance by simultaneously offering access to libraries that were largely uncensored, dispensing visas and money, and arranging for cultural exchanges. A fundamental purpose for these structures at that time remained firmly in mind.

But no matter how sunny they seemed, the U.S. Embassies also embodied darker sides that lay within the very optimism they portrayed—America’s excess of certainty, its interventionist urge, its fresh-faced, clear-eyed capacity for killing. These traits have long been apparent to the world, though by definition less to Americans themselves. It would be illuminating to know how many local interventions—overt and covert, large and small—have been directed from behind U.S. Embassy walls. The count must run to the thousands. An early response was delivered on March 30, 1965, when a Vietcong car bomb destroyed the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, killing 22 people and injuring 186. Referring recently to the attack, the former diplomat Charles Hill wrote, “The political shock was that an absolutely fundamental principle of international order—the mutually agreed upon inviolability of diplomats and their missions operating in host countries—was violated.” A shock is similar to a surprise. Did it not come to mind that for years the same embassy had been violating Vietnam? Hill is now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and at Yale. Explaining more recent troubles at U.S. Embassies abroad, he wrote, “What the average American tourist needs to know is that the American government is not responsible for these difficulties. It is the rise of terrorist movements, which have set themselves monstrously against the basic foundations of international order, law and established diplomatic practice.”

Hill is 71. He was a mission coordinator at the embassy in Saigon, and rose to become the State Department’s chief of staff. After decades of service, he seems to equate international order with the schematics of diplomatic design. His “average American tourist” is young, female, and perhaps less grateful than he believes. U.S. Embassies are not pristine diplomatic oases, but full-blown governmental hives, heavy with C.I.A. operatives, and representative of a country that however much it is admired is also despised. The point is not that the C.I.A. should be excluded from hallowed ground, or that U.S. interventions are necessarily counterproductive, but that diplomatic immunity is a flimsy conceit naturally just ignored, especially by guerrillas who expect no special status for themselves and are willing to die in a fight. So it was in Saigon, where a new, fortified embassy was built, and during the suicidal Tet offensive of 1968 nearly overrun.

The violations of diplomatic immunity spread as elsewhere in the world U.S. Embassies and their staffs began to come under attack. High-ranking envoys were assassinated by terrorists in Guatemala City in 1968, Khartoum in 1973, Nicosia in 1974, Beirut in 1976, and Kabul in 1979. Also in 1979 came the hostage-taking at the embassy in Tehran, when the host government itself participated in the violation—though in angry reference to America’s earlier installation of an unpopular Shah. In April 1983 it was Beirut again: a van loaded with explosives detonated under the embassy portico, collapsing the front half of the building and killing 63 people. Seventeen of the dead were Americans, of whom eight worked for the C.I.A. The embassy was moved to a more secure location, where nonetheless another truck bomb was exploded, in September 1984, with the loss of 22 lives. These were not isolated events. During the 10 years following the loss of Saigon, in 1975, there had been by some estimates nearly 240 attacks or attempted attacks against U.S. diplomats and their facilities worldwide. On October 23, 1983, also in Beirut, terrorists carried out the huge truck-bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks, killing 242 American servicemen in an explosion said to be the largest non-nuclear bomb blast in history. One could argue the merits of American foreign policy in the long run, but in the immediate it seemed that something had to be done.

The State Department set up a panel to study the question of security. It was chaired by a retired admiral named Bobby Inman, who had headed the National Security Agency and been second-in-command at the C.I.A. Ask a security question and you’ll get a security answer: in June 1985 the panel issued a report that called predictably for the wholesale and radical fortification of roughly half of the 262 U.S. diplomatic facilities overseas. Modest security improvements were already being made, with the shatterproofing of windows and the sealing of doors, as well as the installation of steel fences, potted-plant vehicle barricades, surveillance cameras, and checkpoints in embassy lobbies. Inman’s report went much further, recommending the relocation of embassies and consulates into high-walled compounds, to be built like bunker complexes in remote areas on the outskirts of towns. Equally significant, the report called for the creation of a new bureaucracy, a Diplomatic Security Service to be given responsibility for the safety of overseas personnel.

The program was approved and funded by Congress, but it got off to a slow start and had trouble gathering speed. No one joins the foreign service wanting to hunker down in bunkers overseas. The first Inman compound was completed in Mogadishu in 1989, only to be evacuated by helicopter in 1991 as angry gunmen came over the walls and slaughtered the abandoned Somali staff and their families. A half-dozen other compounds were built to better effect—at enormous cost to American taxpayers—but by the late 1990s construction was proceeding at the rate of merely one compound a year. Eager to open new facilities in the former Soviet states, the State Department began putting as much effort into avoiding the Inman standards as into complying with them.

On August 7, 1998, however, al-Qaeda drivers bombed the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 301 people and wounding about 5,000 more. Both embassies were enlightened center-city designs, and neither had been significantly fortified. Twelve Americans lay dead, as did 39 of the U.S. government’s African employees. In frustration, the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan, and back home in Washington engaged another retired admiral, William Crowe, to look into embassy defenses. In 1999, Crowe issued a scathing report, criticizing “the collective failure of the U.S. government” (read Foggy Bottom), and insisting again on the standards that had been set by Inman 14 years earlier. He demanded that safety now be placed before other concerns—whether architectural or diplomatic. The logic was clear, but the message was about means over mission. A chastised State Department vowed to take security seriously this time. When Colin Powell seized the reins in 2001, he gutted and renamed the agency’s facilities office (now called Overseas Buildings Operations, or O.B.O.), and in early 2001 brought in a retired Army Corps of Engineers major general named Charles Williams to accelerate and discipline an ambitious $14 billion construction program. The main goal was to build 140 fortified compounds within 10 years. Soon afterward came the attacks of September 11, adding further urgency to the plans.

Williams is a steely but gracious man, with an affinity for elegant suits. Though he retired from the military in 1989, he still likes to be called The General. Sometimes, The Director. He has lots of medals and awards. Beneath his good manners he is obviously very proud. Among his many achievements, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross piloting combat helicopters in Vietnam, and in the early 1990s survived an even more dangerous stint running New York City’s public-school construction program. He is an African-American and the chairman of the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church. He has been inducted into the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame. He is also considered to be one of the most effective executives in the State Department today, praised in Congress for the production-line efficiency he has brought to embassy construction.

The key lies in offering a single standardized model, the New Embassy Compound, or nec, which is centered around a building with an atrium, and is available in three sizes—small, medium, and large. There are variations in the configurations, depending on the sites and needs, but most of the variations are superficial and amount to differences in the footprints, landscaping, and color schemes. Architectural critics deplore the uniformity, as if the State Department should still be showcasing brave new work—though such ideas, if ever legitimate, are now hopelessly obsolete. necs cost between $35 million and $100 million apiece. By current government standards that means they are cheap. Williams has finished 50 so far, and is churning out 14 more each year.

These embassies are the artifacts of fear. They are located away from city centers, wrapped in perimeter walls, set back from the streets, and guarded by Marines. On average they encompass 10 acres. Their reception areas are isolated frontline structures where the security checks are done. These armored chambers are designed not just to repel mobs, as in the past, but to contain individual killers and the blast from their bombs. Visitors who pass muster may be let through, but only to proceed directly to their destinations under escort, and while displaying a badge warning that the escort is required. That badge is the chain with which visitors are leashed. It can be broken by trips to the bathrooms, which however temporarily may provide some relief. The bathrooms are strangely graffiti-free, and contain no hint of the in-house commentary a visitor might wish to see. Metaphorically, the same is true of all the interiors, with their immaculate atriums and conference rooms, their artificial light, their pristine blastproof hallways hung with pre-approved art. The occupants sit at their desks hooked up to computers. They display pictures of their families on foreign holidays: skiing in the Alps last year, or swimming in Bali, or standing outside an African lodge. These are the perks of an overseas job. Meanwhile, the embassy clocks show the passage of time, spinning twice around with every duty day gone by. Is it night yet? The windows are heavy-paned slivers set high in the walls. Is it hot outside, is it cold? The natural air is filtered and conditioned before it is allowed in. People who opt for the uncertainties of the streets may get a better sense for various realities—but so what? Crowe criticized the State Department for not doing enough. The new embassies comply fully with Inman’s standards.

Williams is unnecessarily defensive about this. He is offended by criticism of his necs as diplomatic bunkers, and as quite the wrong signal to send overseas. In response he points out, correctly, that these are not the brutish fortifications they might have been, and that efforts have gone into reducing the obviousness of their defenses. But then he goes as far as to call the compounds inviting—which by definition they cannot be. It would be better to answer squarely to the criticism, were he in a position to be frank. These embassies are indeed bunkers. They are politely landscaped, minimally intrusive bunkers, placed as far from view as is practical, and dependent as much on discreet technology as on sheer mass—but they are bunkers nonetheless. Those that do not contain official housing (and most do not) increasingly are linked to residential enclaves which themselves are fortified and guarded. And no, this is not how the State Department would choose to conduct itself in an ideal world.

But, again, let’s be frank. The necs may be artifacts of fear, but it is an exaggeration to suggest that they teach the world that America is hostile or afraid—as if the locals were so simpleminded that they did not understand the reason for the diplomats’ defenses, or were not already forming independent opinions from close observations of the United States. Those observations are rooted in trade and financial ties, immigration, tourism, television and music, the Internet, and news reports of the superpower’s policies and wars—the whole organic mass of globalization that, by the way, has rendered obsolete the role of embassies in providing information of almost any kind. Indeed, the depth and sophistication of foreign views help to explain the fact that ordinary Americans are generally well accepted even where the U.S. government is despised. In any case, Williams’s mandate is not to ponder the fundamentals of a changing world order. His task is practical and narrowly defined. For whatever reasons, the United States has come to the stage where it maintains 12,000 foreign-service officers at diplomatic posts abroad. There is no question that these people are targets, and no evidence that reforms in foreign policy will make them safe enough in the near future. As long as the United States insists on their presence, the State Department has no choice but to protect them. The new fortifications are not a perfect solution, particularly since there will always be the next softer target—whether American or allied. In 2003, for instance, after the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul relocated to a bunker 45 minutes from its old center-city location, Islamist terrorists bombed its former neighbors, the British Consulate and the London-based HSBC bank, apparently because they decided that the American defenses were too tough. Thirty-two people died, including Britain’s consul general, Roger Short. Nonetheless and however sadly, since no American officials were among the dead, within the closed realms of the U.S. government the shift to the new consulate had succeeded. So yes, Williams is right to be proud of his work. When he is done, the State Department should add to his collection of medals.

But his clients in the embassies are in trouble. Their need for protection has limited their views at the very time when globalization has diminished their roles. Security is their requirement and their curse. I first noticed the predicament years ago, in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. This was in 1994, nearly a decade after the Inman report, and four years before al-Qaeda’s attacks on Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Sudan at the time was controlled by a revolutionary Islamist regime, upon whose invitation Osama bin Laden had arrived. Perhaps 50 al-Qaeda foot soldiers were staying in my hotel, a run-down establishment where they lived several to a room, squatting late into the night in murmured conversation, without bothering to close the door. We made a wary peace, and over burners on their floors sometimes shared tea. I did not hide my curiosity. These were bearded men dressed in emulation of Muhammad, hardened jihadists who had fought in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Some spoke about their beliefs and their pasts; I did not ask about their plans.

I was in Khartoum for about a month, talking to Islamist revolutionaries and theoreticians, and between appointments walking for hours through the streets. There were hardly any non-Sudanese in sight, though occasionally I saw foreign-aid workers drive by in air-conditioned Land Cruisers, with antennas swaying on the roofs. The city was poor. The days were hot. Twice I was detained for being a spy and easily talked my way free. I never felt threatened. One day I walked to the American Embassy, hoping for special insights into the revolutionary scene.

It was one of the old embassies with improvised defenses, standing directly on a street near the city center, and vulnerable to attack. It was visibly sleepy. Inside, a good-humored Marine told me he had pulled the short straw. I met with a foreign-service officer tasked with monitoring political affairs. He was a pleasant man with detailed knowledge of Sudan’s formal government but, as it turned out, very little feel for the revolution there. He did not pretend otherwise, and was surprised that I was able to stay in the city without a driver or guards. He had questions that needed to be answered—who really were these Islamists, what was their relationship with the military, how antagonistic were they to American interests, how solid was their popular base, and why had all the jihadists come to town? He was not getting good answers from Sudanese officials, or from the various schemers who showed up at the embassy seeking deals. I could not help him, either. I suggested that he walk around, make friends, hang out in the city at night. He smiled at my naïveté. Khartoum was a hardship post, where the diplomats lived restricted to the embassy and residences, and moved through the city in convoys of armored cars. The original purpose of being there had not been forgotten, but a security plan was in place, and it overwhelmed other concerns.

So too, now, with the construction of the necs and the launching of the flagship, the mega-bunker of Baghdad. A dynamic is in play, a process paradox, in which the means rise to dominance as the ends recede from view. The United States has worldwide interests, and needs the tools to pursue them, but in a wild and wired 21st century the static diplomatic embassy, a product of the distant past, is no longer of much use. To the government this does not seem to matter. Inman’s new bureaucracy, the Diplomatic Security section, has blossomed into an enormous enterprise, employing more than 34,000 people worldwide and engaging thousands of private contractors—all of whom also require security. Its senior representatives sit at hundreds of diplomatic facilities, identifying real security risks and imposing new restrictions which few ambassadors would dare to overrule. Safety comes first, and it is increasingly difficult to achieve. In Baghdad the mortar fire is growing more accurate and intense. After 30 mortar shells hit the Green Zone one afternoon last July, an American diplomat reported that his colleagues were growing angry about being “recklessly exposed to danger”—as if the war should have come with warning labels.

At least the swimming pool has been placed off limits. Embassy staff are required to wear flak jackets and helmets when walking between buildings, or when occupying those that have not been fortified. On the rare occasion when they want to venture a short distance across the Green Zone to talk to Iraqi officials, they generally have to travel in armored S.U.V.’s, often protected by private security details. The ambassador, Ryan Crocker, is distributing a range of new protective gear, and is scattering the landscape with 151 concrete “duck and cover” shelters. Not to be outdone, a Senate report has recommended the installation of a teleconferencing system to “improve interaction” with Iraqis who may be in buildings only a few hundred yards away. So, O.K., the new embassy is not perfect yet, but by State Department standards it’s getting there.

What on earth is going on? We have built a fortified America in the middle of a hostile city, peopled it with a thousand officials from every agency of government, and provided them with a budget to hire thousands of contractors to take up the slack. Half of this collective is involved in self-defense. The other half is so isolated from Iraq that, when it is not dispensing funds into the Iraqi ether, it is engaged in nothing more productive than sustaining itself. The isolation is necessary for safety, but again, the process paradox is at play—and not just in Iraq. Faced with the failure of an obsolete idea—the necessity of traditional embassies and all the elaboration they entail—we have not stood back to remember their purpose, but have plunged ahead with closely focused concentration to build them bigger and stronger. One day soon they may reach a state of perfection: impregnable and pointless.

Some months ago I got a call from a friend of mine, a U.S. Army general, with long experience in Iraq. He asked me my impression of the situation on the ground, and specifically of the chances that the surge of troops into Baghdad might succeed. I was pessimistic. I said, “Ten times zero is still zero. The patrols don’t connect with the streets.” I might as well have been speaking of embassies too. He seemed to agree, but rather than surrendering to despair, he proposed a first step in the form of a riddle.

“What do you do when you’re digging yourself into a hole?”

I said, “You tell me.”

He said, “You stop digging.”

William Langewiesche is Vanity Fair’s international correspondent.

Source: Vanity Fair

Pentagon Buries Special Request in Defense Bill. Many Fear Bush Seeks to Drop 30,000 lb. MOAB on Iranian Facility

During yesterday’s Special Report, FOX News aired two segments that indicate the the Bush administration has basically crossed a psychological line and is now actively working towards dropping a 30,000 lb. bunker buster bomb on the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. Natanz is a short distance from Kashan a town that has a population of somewhere around 50,000 people. In the first segment Brit Hume rehashed the news that the Bush administration had just taken the unprecedented step of declaring the military force of a sovereign nation to be a terrorist organization. As many on the left (and some on the right) predicted when the Lieberman amendment was recently passed by the Senate, Bush now has the authority he needs to unilaterally attack Iran without Congressional approval. The Democratic leadership is still asleep at the wheel! With videos.

Despite the vigorous opposition of Sen, Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Walter Jones (R-NC) and Ron Paul (R-TX), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has chosen to believe the White House, saying “The President has assured me that his approach to Iran is going to be just that, with robust diplomacy and sanctions. I don’t see these sanctions as a predicate for more aggressive action.”

Pelosi obviously still believes that the country is being run by sane people. It is not. It is being run by abject failures with enormous egos who will take us all down in flames rather than admit they made one of the most colossal blunders in history.

Economic sanctions against Iran – which do not have and will not get the approval of Russia, China and most of our European allies – are merely a pretext, a trumped-up reason to allow George Bush to pull the trigger on Iran – or to give the green light to Israel to do his dirty work.

Never discussed on FOX News is the buried story that, as of last week, Iran is no longer accepting dollars in payment for its oil. This is one of many factors contributing to the downward spiral in the value of the American currency. This coming November the report of the IAEA is due regarding the alleged Syrian “nuclear facility” that Israel blew up on September 6, 2007. If that report shows conclusively that Israel bombed an empty building, it will knock out one of the linchpins for the Bush hypothesis that Iran is working with Syria and others to secretly acquire nuclear weapons.

Please contact Speak of the House Pelosi and let her know that the President cannot be believed on this (or any other) subject. Congress must act quickly and decisively to rein in the out-of-control foreign policy of Bush and Cheney.

If the United States bombs Iran (and the panelists on FOX News’ Special Report certainly believe this is what Bush is planning), many people will die. Some of those will be workers trapped miles under desert sands, but many others will be the civilians who live in Kashan, a city of about 50,000 people that lies nearby. If the bunker buster has a nuclear warhead, those unfortunates – and a lot of other innocents in the Middle East – will die a horrible death from the radioactive sand that will be spewed into the air.

Radioactive sand is not concerned about one’s religion, ethnicity, heritage, skin color, sexual preferences, ego or intelligence level.

Cancer and it’s twin Death are equal opportunity destroyers, something Fred Barnes, Brit Hume and Mort Kondracke should think about before laughing about bombing another country! (See second video below.)

FOX REPORT: BUSH SEEKING CAPACITY TO DROP 30,000 MOAB.

ALL-STAR PANEL LAUGHS ABOUT WAR

Source: News Hounds

CFR / NAU & 2008 Presidential Candidates (video)

“What Presidential Candidates are part of the CFR? What are they trying to accomplish?

Fred Thompson
Rudy Giuliani
John McCain
Mitt Romney
Jim Gilmore
Newt Gingrich
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John Edwards
Joe Biden
Chris Dodd
Bill Richardson

Who Opposes the CFR?
Ron Paul

Read this for yourself:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9903/sovereignty_and_globalisation.html“

What World War III May Look Like by Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer

Neoconservatives are great observers of war and warriors, though they are sometimes not in complete agreement about the numbering of the conflicts that they send other people’s sons and daughters to fight. Norman Podhoretz, the patriarch of the neocons, believes that the Cold War was World War III and that the U.S. is now fighting World War IV against “Islamofascism.” He intends to expand World War IV by slating Iran as the next domino to fall to America’s military might. Podhoretz undoubtedly sees the current global conflict as something that is good and necessary, both containable and winnable, but as his judgment on Iraq was fallible, his prediction of Iran’s rapid destruction is also unreliable. It might be useful to imagine just how war with Iran could play out if the Iranians don’t roll over and surrender at the first whiff of grapeshot.

It might start with a minor incident, possibly involving an American Marine patrol operating out of the new base at Badrah near the Iranian border. The Marines are surrounded by superior Iranian forces claiming that the Americans have strayed inside Iranian territory. The Marines refuse to surrender their weapons and instead open fire. The Iranians respond. Helicopter gunships are called in to support the Marines, and artillery fire is directed against Iranian military targets close to the border. President Bush calls the incident an act of war and, in an emotional speech to the nation, orders U.S. forces to attack. A hastily called meeting of the UN Security Council results in a 17-1 vote urging the United States to exercise restraint, with only Washington voting “no.” In the UN General Assembly, only the U.S., Israel, Micronesia, and Costa Rica support the military action. The U.S. is effectively alone.

In the first few days, overwhelming American air and naval superiority destroy Iran’s principal air, naval, and army bases. Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities are particularly targeted and are obliterated, as are the known Iranian nuclear research and development sites. Population centers are avoided, though smart weapons destroy communications centers and command and control facilities. There are nevertheless large numbers of civilian casualties and widespread radioactive contamination as many of the targeted sites are in or near cities. Infrastructure is also hit, particularly bridges, roads, and power generation stations close to known nuclear research centers and military sites. The U.S. media, which had supported the administration’s plans to engage Iran, rallies around the flag, praising the surgical attacks designed to cripple Tehran’s nuclear weapons program. Congress supports the bombing, with leaders from both parties praising the president and commenting that Iran had it coming.

The Pentagon and White House call the attacks a complete success, but Iran strikes back. With five years to prepare, Iran has successfully hidden and hardened many of its military and nuclear facilities, a large percentage of which are undamaged. The aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower operating in the Persian Gulf is hit by a Chinese Silkworm cruise missile and grounds itself in shallow water to avoid sinking. Three other support vessels are also hit and severely damaged when they are attacked by small craft manned by suicide bombers. Pro-Iranian riots break out in Beirut, where the government is forced to call in soldiers to shoot at the crowds. In the south of Lebanon, Hezbollah fires salvoes of rockets into Israel. Israel responds by bombing Lebanon and Syria, which it blames for the attacks. Iranian Shahab-3 missiles also strike Israel, killing a number of civilians. The Israeli Defense Forces are mobilized, and troops are sent to the northern border. Syria and Lebanon also mobilize their forces. Rioters in Baghdad attack US. .troops and the American embassy and are driven back only after the soldiers open fire and call in helicopter gunships. Snipers attack American soldiers all over Iraq. Shi’ites sympathetic to Iran sabotage Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields. The Saudi fields suffer some damage, and hundreds of alleged saboteurs are shot dead by Saudi security forces. An oil tanker out of Kuwait is hit by a Silkworm close to the Straits of Hormuz and runs aground. Another hits a mine planted by Iran. Insurers in London refuse to cover any tankers transiting the Persian Gulf. Oil shipments from the region, one quarter of the world supply, stop completely, and oil goes up to $200 a barrel. Wall Street suffers its biggest loss in 20 years, with the Dow Jones index plummeting by more than 800 points.

The U.S. offers Iran a cease-fire, which Tehran rejects. Two days later, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is assassinated under orders from Tehran. Fearing that he will be next, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf flees to Dubai. Order breaks down in both countries. The Pakistani army declares a state of emergency. Several leaders in the Pakistani tribal areas that are sheltering Osama bin Laden declare themselves independent. Fighting increases in Iraq with U.S. soldiers being targeted by both leading Shi’ite militias. U.S. troops evacuate Baghdad, fighting their way out with heavy casualties. There are reports of Iranian soldiers and militiamen massing at the border. Rioters in Basra succeed in cutting the main roads leading to Kuwait that supply U.S. forces.

The U.S. scrambles to contain the damage, pressuring the Pakistani army to put down the riots and secure the country’s nuclear arsenal, while at the same time trying to restore order in Kabul through the multinational force. Several NATO allies balk at using their soldiers in what they see as a burgeoning civil war, and the U.S. suffers heavy losses in street fighting before withdrawing to its bases. Taliban-backed militias take over much of Kabul and Kandahar. Afghanistan’s Mazar-i-Sharif, which is largely Shi’ite, declares itself part of Iran. Waves of Iranian soldiers and militiamen cross the border into Iraq, where they are welcomed by the Iraqi militias. U.S. troops are under siege countrywide and are forced to withdraw into their bases where they can be supplied by air. The Iraqi government resigns and is replaced by a group of Shi’ite clerics. The government in Lebanon falls and is replaced by a coalition headed by Hezbollah. A salvo of Iranian Silkworm missiles sets the Saudi Arabian eastern oil fields ablaze. Saudi Arabia sends an urgent message to Tehran declaring that it is “neutral” in the fighting and will not assist the U.S. in any way. Kuwait sends the same message, as does Egypt. Kuwait refuses to allow the U.S. to use its men and supplies at Camp Doha against Iran. In Bahrain, rampaging Shi’ite crowds depose Sheik Khalifa al-Khalifa and set up an Islamic Republic which immediately demands that the U.S. Fifth Fleet dismantle its headquarters and go home. The Dow Jones index loses another 1,000 points.

The U.S. attempts to get China and Russia to mediate with Iran to end the fighting, but they refuse to do Washington any favors, noting that they had opposed the attack in the first place. Suicide bombers attack London, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. The attacks are poorly planned and inflict only a few casualties, but panic sets in and the public demands that the respective governments do something. The U.S. tells the Iranian government that unless resistance ceases, nuclear weapons will be used on select targets. India and Pakistan are alarmed by the U.S. threat and put their own nuclear forces on high alert, as does Israel. Russia and China also increase their readiness levels to respond to the crisis.

Iran refuses to concede defeat, and the Iranian people rally around the government. The U.S. public clamors for action. Oil prices continue to surge, and even the long term viability of petroleum supplies is in question as the Straits of Hormuz continue to be closed. Another U.S. ship is sunk by suicide attackers in the Persian Gulf. U.S. troops are under fire nearly everywhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Anti-American rioting takes place in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Dhaka. The U.S. consulate general in Karachi, Pakistan, is overrun and sacked. Forty Americans are killed, along with hundreds of Pakistanis. The Pakistani army announces that it can no longer protect Americans. There are frequent terrorism scares in a number of American cities, which are under red alert security lockdown, though there are no new attacks. As a preventive measure, Muslim leaders and some antiwar activists are arrested and detained at military prisons, including Guantanamo. Israel continues to be bombarded from inside Lebanon and Syria. Its air attacks on targets in both countries inflict major damage on civilians but are unsuccessful in stopping the rockets. Rioting rocks the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas flees to Cairo. India threatens to attack Pakistan if there is any question about the security of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal.

The United States uses a neutron-type bomb against the main Iranian nuclear research center at Natanz, which it had already bombed conventionally and destroyed. It vows to bomb again if Iran continues to resist. Iran is defiant and fires another wave of Silkworms at U.S. ships, sinking one. Suicide bombers hit U.S. targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia and China place their nuclear forces on high alert. Pakistani militants take over parliament, aided by radical elements in the army and the intelligence service. India launches a preemptive strike against the main Pakistani nuclear centers at Wah and Multan, where the country’s arsenal is believed to be concentrated. Pakistan has hidden some of its nukes elsewhere, however, and is able to strike back by bombing New Delhi. World War III has begun.

Source: AntiWar.com

Hillary’s Blackwater Connection

A lot of negative things have been written in the blogosphere about pollster Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s increasingly-powerful advisor. Penn’s critics have focused on his firm’s union-busting work. They’ve also attacked his insistence on promoting a strategy of so-called “centrism,” even as supposedly “centrist” policy positions – especially regarding Iraq – become increasingly unpopular. And now we learn that the PR firm he runs, Burson-Marsteller, has been hired to repair Blackwater’s reputation.

Which raises a question: If they’re so good at PR, how did Burson-Marsteller manage to make themselves such a potential public relations disaster for their most famous client? After all, the firm helps “drive strong corporate and brand reputations for its clients,” according to its corporate webpage. What will this link with out-of-control mercenaries do for Sen. Clinton’s “brand reputation?”

While I haven’t hesitated to criticize the Clinton campaign or its advisors, I’ve deliberately refrained from commenting on Mark Penn for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I work in the corporate world too. We’re a capitalist society, and if a person chooses to function in that world the lines aren’t quite as black-and-white as they may seem from the outside. (Although union-busting is, or should be, beyond the pale – especially for someone with a leadership role in a campaign that seeks union support.)

For another, I’m not prepared to heap the kind of scorn on Penn that others do (although Kos’ impaling of him yesterday is pretty much the definitive blog commentary on Penn’s shortcomings). I haven’t read “Microtrends,” Penn’s new book. But Ezra Klein has, and his piece on it and Penn may be the definitive print takedown of the pollster.

Yet another reason I’ve stayed away from commenting on Penn is that Sen. Clinton seems committed to working with him – and, despite all evidence to the contrary, I suppose I keep clinging to the tattered hope that she develop into a candidate worth supporting in 2008. Some of us haven’t completely given up on her yet … but time is growing short.

Now we have the news that Burson-Marsteller, under Penn’s leadership, has taken on Blackwater as a client. Blackwater has become a symbol for everything that’s wrong with the incumbent Administration, from the greedy and irresponsible outsourcing of governmental functions to Pentagon-sanctioned atrocities like the shooting of an Iraqi politician’s bodyguard by a drunken mercenary operating beyond the law.

Ezra Klein quotes Penn’s partner and others as saying that he’s driven by “the numbers,” and only by the numbers. Yet numbers can only be understood in context - and political contexts include the social, the perceptual … and the ethical. Taking on Blackwater shows a blindness toward context.

Mel Brooks said this about Hitler in a 1966 Playboy interview:

“There was a whole nice side of Hitler. He was a good dancer – no one knows that. He loved a parakeet named Bob – no one knows that either.”

Here’s some professional advice for Burson-Marsteller. The best you can do for your new client is to try an approach like that for your client (although Brooks, of course, was joking).
This latest revelation about Penn and his firm doesn’t seem to have hit the mainstream media, at least so far. But it doesn’t have to get wide press in order to do lasting damage to her campaign, especially during the primaries. That’s something we’re about to address in our next post – one that will presumably meet with Mr. Penn’s approval, since it will be driven by “the numbers.”

We’re being told that Sen. Clinton and her staff combine “experience” and management savvy with the ability and desire to create “change.” This example of poor judgment casts doubts on both claims. It’s not smart management, and it certainly doesn’t make her look like the candidate of “change.”

As for Burson-Marsteller, the best thing it can do for its new client is to buy it a parakeet named “Bob.”

Source: The Huffington Post 

Officials: Bush Setting Up Attack on Iran

Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action.

In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq – arming and training militants – would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.

A prime target would be the Fajr base run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force in southern Iran, where Western intelligence agencies say armour-piercing projectiles used against British and US troops are manufactured.

Under the theory – which is gaining credence in Washington security circles – US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.

Senior officials believe Mr Bush’s inner circle has decided he does not want to leave office without first ensuring that Iran is not capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

The intelligence source said: “No one outside that tight circle knows what is going to happen.” But he said that within the CIA “many if not most officials believe that diplomacy is failing” and that “top Pentagon brass believes the same”.

He said: “A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq.”

Previously, accusations that Mr Bush was set on war with Iran have come almost entirely from his critics.

Many senior operatives within the CIA are highly critical of Mr Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, though they themselves are considered ineffective and unreliable by hardliners close to Mr Cheney.

The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias.

Recent developments over Iraq appear to fit with the pattern of escalation predicted by Pentagon officials.

Gen David Petraeus, Mr Bush’s senior Iraq commander, denounced the Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq last week as he built support in Washington for the US military surge in Baghdad.

The US also announced the creation of a new base near the Iraqi border town of Badra, the first of what could be several locations to tackle the smuggling of weapons from Iran.

A State Department source familiar with White House discussions said that Miss Rice, under pressure from senior counter-proliferation officials to acknowledge that military action may be necessary, is now working with Mr Cheney to find a way to reconcile their positions and present a united front to the President.

The source said: “When you go down there and see the body language, you can see that Cheney is still The Man. Condi pushed for diplomacy but she is no dove. If it becomes necessary she will be on board.

“Both of them are very close to the president, and where they differ they are working together to find a way to present a position they can both live with.”

The official contrasted the efforts of the secretary of state to work with the vice-president with the “open warfare between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld before the Iraq war”.

Miss Rice’s bottom line is that if the administration is to go to war again it must build the case over a period of months and win sufficient support on Capitol Hill.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Mr Bush has privately promised her that he would consult “meaningfully” with Congressional leaders of both parties before any military action against Iran on the understanding that Miss Rice would resign if this did not happen.

The intelligence officer said that the US military has “two major contingency plans” for air strikes on Iran.

“One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would – over two or three days – hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets.”

Source: The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/16/wiran116.xml

A Hegemonic Hubris

More War on the Horizon

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

No pullout from Iraq while I’m president, declares George W. Bush.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a “peace-seeking state” that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers’ money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns.

The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it.

Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime’s build up for initiating war with Iran.

The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran’s military — the Revolutionary Guards — a terrorist organization, whose bases and facilities Bush intends to bomb along with Iran’s nuclear energy sites. Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. B-2 Stealth bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. The media are feeding the US population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer, has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months. Remember the “cakewalk war”? Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause Iranians to back the US against their own government.

Lies, unprovoked aggression, and delusional expectations — the same ingredients that produced the Iraq catastrophe — all over again. The entire Bush regime and both political parties are complicit, along with the media and US allies.

According to Baer, the Bush regime has given no consideration to whether Iran’s response to a US attack might be different than to welcome it as liberation. What if Iran really were to arm the Iraqi resistance and/or to sink our aircraft carriers? How can any government, even one as incompetent, delusional and unaccountable as the Bush regime, initiate war without any thought to the consequences?

The Bush regime’s planned war against Iran casts light on the large increase in military armaments that the US is supplying to Israel. With Iraq in chaos and civil war, an attack on Iran leaves as opposition to Israel only Syria and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot finish off the Palestinians until Hezbollah is destroyed. An Israeli attack on Syria while the US attacks Iran would leave Hezbollah without supplies in the face of a new Israeli attack.

The agenda unfolding before our eyes may be the neoconservative/Israeli/Cheney plan to rid the Middle East of any check to Israeli territorial expansion.

Nicholas Burns said that the $30 billion in military aid was not conditional on any Israeli concessions or progress toward resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s ghettoizing and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian West Bank proceeds apace.

Meanwhile in America, while more money is poured into more war, condemned bridges collapse killing Americans who trusted their government to provide safe infrastructure. Devastated residents of New Orleans remain unaided. Financial difficulties deepen for more Americans as falling home prices and jobs lost to offshoring push more Americans into desperate straits. The US dollar continues to fall as the government’s war debts build up abroad.

Except for the armaments industry, where is the gain to America in Bush’s wars? Before Bush invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had stamped out drug production. The US invasion has brought it back.

On August 22 Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that US troops are the “greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” Tell that to the 650,000 dead Iraqis and the 4 million displaced Iraqis, and the tens of thousands of slaughtered Afghans, and the coming civilian deaths in Iran. Tell that to all the bombed civilians from Serbia to Africa who are blown to pieces in order that a US president can make a point. Bush goes far beyond George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in his novel, 1984, when Bush equates US hegemony with liberation.

America’s hegemonic hubris is a sickness. A country that tolerates a war criminal while he openly plans to attack yet another country is definitely not a light unto the world.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts08242007.html

Video: Pearl Jam’s AT&T-”Censored” Segment

The controversy surrounding AT&T’s alleged censorship of a Pearl Jam Lollapalooza show that AT&T webcast as part of its Blue Room series continues, despite AT&T’s Statement that Eddie Vedder’s anti-Bush lyrics were excised from the show footage by a third-party webcasting service provider.

SavetheInternet agrees with Pearl Jam that the situation could indicate how AT&T might act if net neutrality laws are not passed, and posted the footage on YouTube:

The unedited version, as shot by a fan

Source: Listening Post – Wired Blogs
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/video-pearl-jam.html

What Montebello NAU Meeting?

On page one of Fox News, we learn that “ubermodel” Heidi Klum is working with Victoria Secret’s to promote a “new breast booster: Body By Victoria Full Coverage Uplift,” and yet not a word about Bush’s plan to sell the country down the river next month at the Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Quebec. All the news fit to print, I guess, or rather post. Of course, it is no secret the corporate media is ignoring this story—not breasts, mind you, but treason.

Open your browser and enter “Security and Prosperity Partnership” in Google News search. Google returns recent articles from the National Ledger, Infoshop News, Bay Area Indymedia, the Free Market News Network, the Hindustan Times, and a bevy of Canadian news sources, including the Ottawa Citizen and the Nova News Now, but nary a trace of any reportage from the likes of the New York Times or the Washington Post. You’d think Bush trekking off the Canada would be news, but no. Instead, we get Full Coverage Uplift news.

“If you don’t know what the Security and Prosperity Partnership is, welcome to the crowd. Most people have never heard of it, even though it is clearly the framework by which three countries—the United States, Mexico and Canada—could give up their sovereignty in order to band together in some kind of new North American Union,” writes Frank Miele for the Daily Interlake, a newspaper reaching a whopping 17,500 people out in the boonies of northwest Montana. “I was one of those people who used to laugh at the idea of a North American Union…. And if you are foolish enough to talk about it in public, you are dismissed as a paranoid kook or a right-wing goon.”

As Jerome R. Corsi notes on the usually stock and trade neocon World Net Daily, despite “evidence to the contrary, Vice President Dick Cheney says there is no ’secret plan’ to create a continent-crossing superhighway to help facilitate a merger of the United States, Mexico and Canada.” Cheney told a “constituent” the “administration is not engaged in a secret plan to create a ‘NAFTA super highway.’” Indeed, it may be said Cheney is pulling a George Washington “never told a lie” routine, because the plan to criss-cross the United States with NAFTA super corridors glutted with Mexican semi trucks ferrying cheap goods manufactured by Chinese slaves is not a secret, it is simply that the corporate media is not reporting it, thus people like Mr. Miele feel foolish talking about it in public. If you don’t want to be relegated to the tinfoil hat brigade, stick to Full Coverage Uplift.

“Bush Quebec” entered in Google returns nada, or almost nothing. Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, makes mention of the summit to sell out the United States, Canada, and Mexico in the National Ledger, otherwise we confront silence. The London Free Press (Ontario, Canada) reports “Prime Minister Stephen Harper phoned U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday as the two leaders prepare for the North American leaders’ summit” next month in Montebello, Quebec. No mention of the SPP or the plan to merge nations, although a recent Harper trip to Latin America is billed as “free-trade negotiations,” as in the freedom to pillage, rob, swindle, and hold fire sales with the property of Latin Americans, a long accepted—at least by mobster heads of state and “investment” bankers—policy under the rubric of “globalism,” now touted as an inevitability and irreversible by the corporate media.

It seems Corsi is tireless when it comes to warning folks of the SPP agenda. “A multinational business agenda is driving the upcoming summit meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, according to a document obtained through an Access to Information Act request in Canada,” Corsi reported last month. “The memo shows a secondary focus of the leaders’ meeting in Montebello, Quebec, Aug. 20-21, will be to prepare for a continental avian flu or human pandemic and establish a permanent continental emergency management coordinating body to deal not only with health emergencies but other unspecified emergencies as well.”

Is it possible our rulers will use an avian flu epidemic to stampede us into a North American Union scheme, sort of the same way they stampeded us into disemboweling the Constitution and Bill of Rights after nine eleven?

Maybe. But then, of course, I am a “paranoid kook” and “a right-wing goon,” although I am hardly “foolish enough to talk about it in public.”

Source: Another Day in the Empire
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=945