President Bush saluted the resilience of Hurricane Katrina survivors here Monday and promised that their plight hadn't been forgotten a year after the storm cut a swath of death and destruction along the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts.

"Even though we've been through about one year together, one year doesn't mean that we'll forget," Bush told community leaders at a luncheon in Biloxi, Miss. "As a matter of fact, now is the time to renew our commitment to let people down here know that we will stay involved and help the people of Mississippi rebuild their lives."

Bush's stops in Mississippi and New Orleans were part of a two-day trip to mark the first anniversary of a hurricane that killed 1,695 people, displaced 770,000 others and caused at least $96 billion in damage when it hit land on Aug. 29, 2005.

Bush is using the anniversary to reassure gulf residents and Americans that his administration is on top of the recovery effort after doing an admittedly poor job in the initial days following the hurricane.

Americans deserve more than no-bid contracts, bureaucratic inefficiencies and a too little, too late PR campaign. One year later, the Gulf Coast continues to need the financial, health care, education, housing and small business support that they deserve to turn devastated neighborhoods into thriving communities. And we still need an independent commission, modeled after the 9/11 Commission, to find out what exactly went wrong, why it went wrong, and how to fix it.

I can even give a hint about where the biggest problem is. Start at the top.

And then there were the pranksters.

CNN reports on them here, figuring out a little too late it was a hoax.

It was The Yes Men, the guys responsible for the Halliburton SurvivaBall (to protect managers against rapid climate change), and a hamburger made from human waste (to solve the global hunger crisis). They were the subject of the 2003 documentary The Yes Men - "A comedic documentary which follows The Yes Men, a small group of prankster activists, as they gain world-wide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization on television and at business conferences around the world." (They fess up here.)

People are always too late to get it - they're not who they say they are. The trick is to start off sounding quite reasonable (and dress right). Then you get people to nod yes to all sorts of foolishness. And they fooled New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, and a full thousand construction-industry members at a privately-organized conference in Kenner, Louisiana.

It seems Andy Bichlbaum posed as a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official, a Rene Oswin, and pulled it off. He said the government was really going to help, and so was private industry.

Exxon and Shell would spend $8.6 billion "to finance wetlands rebuilding from $60 billion in profits this year." Wal-Mart would withdraw its stores from poor neighborhoods and "help nurture local businesses to replace them." The federal government would spend $180 million to fund "at least one well-equipped public health clinic for every housing development." And the kicker - the federal government would reverse plans to replace public schools with private and charter schools, and instead create a national tax base to supplement local taxes.

HUD hurriedly confirmed Oswin wasn't part of their agency. Their spokeswoman Donna White - "This announcement is totally false; it's totally bogus. I'm like, who the heck is that?"

And she added - "It's really a sick, twisted - I don't even want to refer to it as a joke. At this point, it's not funny."

No, it isn't. The people and organizations that have the power to do good, and the government, which has the mandate to do good, don't do that sort of thing. It's not funny at all.

As for the president's problem, other than that nasty Yes Men hoax, Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the New York Times puts it nicely here -

When Americans record the legacy of George W. Bush, 43rd president and self-described compassionate conservative, two competing images will help tell the tale.

The first is of Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bullhorn in hand, feet planted firmly in the rubble of New York's twin towers. The second is of him aboard Air Force One, on his way to Washington from Crawford, Texas, peering out the window at the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina below.

If the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina called into question the president's competence, that Air Force One snapshot, coupled with wrenching scenes on the ground of victims who were largely poor and black, called into question something equally important to Bush: his compassion.

A year later, he has yet to recover on either front.

It's a strange thing primarily because Bush didn't really do anything on 9/11 or its immediate aftermath. Terrorists hijacked four planes and sought to crash them into buildings. They succeeded in doing so with three of the planes. Thousands died. The physical destruction was enormous. It was terrible. But it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. The passengers on one plane downed it before it could reach its target. Many people were evacuated from the World Trade Center and their lives were saved. But none of the good work that was done on that day - and there was some good, heroic work done - was done by the president or had anything in particular to do with him.

Rather, the good vibes about 9/11 Bush all, in essence, relate to a series of speeches he gave in the days following the event (his immediate evening-of speech was poorly received). And I think they were good speeches. The rubble/bullhorn event was a good event. The address to a joint session of congress was great, too. But what does that all really amount to?

Not nothing. Providing inspirational rhetorical leadership in a time of panic is legitimately part of the president's job. But it still doesn't add up to very much. A speech is just a speech. It's not, moreover, like this was a DeGaulle or Churchill type situation where the disaster struck and then a new leader stepped forward to take the reigns of authority from those who had failed and gave a speech to mark a new beginning. His popularity skyrocketed because, having failed to foil a serious terrorist plot, he made a series of pleasing remarks about the plot. And ever since that day, I think this dynamic has been infecting our national strategy. The main goal, in essence, is to do things that signify the adoption of an appropriate attitude toward hostile elements in the world rather than to evaluate possible courses of action in terms of their effects.

The debate on Iraq is just awash in this. The war gets discussed as if it's a metaphor of some kind. A good opportunity to demonstrate resolve or commitment, or else the lack thereof. A place where our stick-to-it-tiveness will show how strongly we feel that democracy is good. A shadow theater wherein we send messages to al-Qaeda or Iran or what have you. But, of course, Iraq is a real place. The soldiers and civilians in that country are real people. They shoot real bullets and detonate real explosives. And so the question has to be, what, actually, is being achieved? What more might realistically be achieved? What are the consequences - not intentions, not desires, not hopes, but consequences - of our policies?

… I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C- Students from Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C- students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it! [Out of print, but used copied of the 1988 edition available here, starting at only $109.83! - AMP]

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!

By now the brain circuits of the authoritarians and their followers are breaking down. Ken Lay's did, and he killed himself. Rush Phlegmball's did, so he turned to painkillers. George Bush never had any circuits. The man used to blow up frogs with firecrackers. Now he blows up children with bombs. He can't feel a thing. Who will do the post-mortem on the brains of these psychopaths? Whoever it is, surely they will find broken circuits.

Unfortunately, the hysterics surrounding John Mark Karr served only to distract Boulder officials from doing their job, which should be solving the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. I find it incredible that Boulder authorities wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars to bring Karr to Colorado given such a lack of evidence. (District Attorney) Mary Lacy should be held accountable for the most extravagant and expensive DNA test in Colorado history.

A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.

No injuries were reported although both vehicles were slightly damaged, it said.

The woman, identified only be her surname, Li, said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive," according to Xinhua.

"She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."

Xinhua did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved but Li paid for repairs.

The ineptitude bared by the storm - no planning for a widely predicted catastrophe, no attempt to secure a city besieged by looting, no strategy for anything except spin - is indelible. New Orleans was Iraq redux with an all-American cast. The discrepancy between Mr. Bush's "heckuva job" shtick and the reality on the ground induced a Cronkite-in-Vietnam epiphany for news anchors. At long last they and the country demanded answers to the questions about the administration's competence that had been soft-pedaled two years earlier when the war first went south.

What's amazing on Katrina's first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush seems aware of this change in the political weather. He's still in a bubble. At last week's White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom Cruise on the "Today" show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, "Nothing," adding that "nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks." Like the emasculated movie star, the president is still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy such nonsense.

I hadn't thought about the similarities between Bush's plight and that of Tom Cruise before and I should have. After all, Bush consciously adopted the Cruise Top Gun persona for the most audaciously over-the-top performance of his presidency. And here they both are today: absurd, clownish versions of their former selves, rejected by the masses who once worshipped them. The only difference is that Cruise was massively successful at everything he did until he fired his amazing publicist Pat Kingsley and turned into a freak a couple of years ago. Bush's Pat Kingsley, Karl Rove, hasn't been nearly as successful over the long haul.

To achieve this feat, Dick Cheney spent two years publicly hyping a "pretty well confirmed" (translation: unconfirmed) pre-9/11 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and a Saddam intelligence officer, continuing to do so long after this specious theory had been discredited. Mr. Bush's strategy was to histrionically stir 9/11 and Iraq into the same sentence whenever possible, before the invasion and after. Typical was his May 1, 2003, oration declaring the end of "major combat operations." After noting that "the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001," he added: "With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." To paraphrase the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, this was tantamount to saying that the Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941, and war with Mexico is what they got.

Mr. Bush's press-conference disavowal of his habitual efforts to connect 9/11 to Saddam will be rolled back by the White House soon enough. When the fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrives in two weeks, you can bet that the president will once again invoke the Qaeda attacks to justify the Iraq war, especially now that we are adding troops (through the involuntary call-up of reservists) rather than subtracting any. The new propaganda strategy will be right out of Lewis Carroll: If we leave the country that had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again.

As an opening act, Mr. Bush met on Wednesday with Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who with much publicity drove a "replica" of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington to seek an audience with the president. No Cindy Sheehan bum's rush for him. Mr. Bush granted his wish and paraded him before the press. That was enough to distract the visitor from his professed message to dramatize the unfinished job on the Gulf. Instead Mr. Vaccarella effusively thanked the president for "the millions of FEMA trailers" complete with air-conditioning and TV. "You know, I wish you had another four years, man," he said. "If we had this president for another four years, I think we'd be great."

The CNN White House correspondent, Ed Henry, loved it. "Hollywood couldn't have scripted this any better, a gritty guy named Rockey slugging it out, trying to realize his dream and getting that dream realized against all odds," he said. He didn't ask how this particular Rockey, a fast-food manager who lost everything a year ago, financed this mission or so effortlessly pulled it off. It was up to bloggers and Democrats to report shortly thereafter that Mr. Vaccarella had run as a Republican candidate for the St. Bernard Parish commission in 1999. It was up to Iris Hageney of Gretna, La., to complain on the Times-Picayune Web site that the episode was "a huge embarrassment" that would encourage Americans to "forget the numerous people who still don't have trailers or at least one with electricity or water."

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, "The Great Deluge," is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. "I don't think anybody's getting the Bush strategy," he said when we talked last week. "The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate - the inaction is the action." As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans's opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees ("Only Band-Aids have been put on them"), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. "Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains," Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. "The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state."

… with no plan for salvaging either of the catastrophes on his watch, this president can no sooner recover his credibility by putting on an elaborate show of sermonizing and spin this week than Mr. Cruise could levitate his image by jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. While the White House's latest screenplay may have been conceived as "Mission Accomplished II," what we're likely to see play out in New Orleans won't even be a patch on "Mission: Impossible III."

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles. They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain.

I don't think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) is to use the word "evil" as if it were a button he can touch to increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value conservative. A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on manipulation. What they want is power. They believe in America. That they do. They believe this country is the only hope of the world and they feel that this country is becoming more and more powerful on the one hand, but on the other, is rapidly growing more dissolute. And so the only solution for it is empire, World Empire. Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world. Once we become a twenty-first century version of the old Roman Empire, then moral reform will come into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers can, of course, be wilder than anyone, but the overhead command is a major pressure on soldiers, and it is not permissive.

You see, behind flag conservatism is not madness but logic. I'm not in accord with the logic. But it is powerful. From their point of view, America is getting rotten. The entertainment media are loose. They are licentious. The kids are getting to the point where they can't read, but they sure can screw. Morals are vanishing. The real subtext may be that if America becomes again a military machine that is huge in order to oversee all its new commitments, then American sexual freedom, willy-nilly, will have to go on the back burner. Commitment and dedication will become necessary national values (with all the hypocrisy attendant on that.) Flag conservatives may see all this as absolutely necessary.

… The point I want to make is that - let me do it in two parts: First, there was a fierce point of view back when the Soviet Union fell. Flag conservatives felt that was their opportunity to take over the world because we were the only people who knew how to run the world. And they were furious when Clinton got in. One of the reasons he was so hated was because he was frustrating what they wanted. That world takeover, so open, so possible from their point of view in 1992, was missed. How that contributed to intense hatred of Clinton! This attitude, I think, grew and deepened and festered through the eight years of the Clinton administration. I don't know if White House principals talk to one another in private about this, but the key element in their present thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of necessity, everything here that needs to be strengthened will be affected positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, then it will be necessary to rear whole generations who can serve in the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments. They are not mine. I am not for World Empire. I can foresee endless disasters coming out of that.

Flag conservatives are not Christians. They are, at best, militant Christians, which is, of course, a fatal contradiction in terms. They are a very special piece of work, but they are not Christians. The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and it is usually observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the same anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal before God. But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A host of Arab leaders, who do not look upon their poor people in any way as equals, make up a perfect counterpart to the way we live with Christianity. We violate Christianity with every breath we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam. Your question, is it a war to the end? I expect it is. We are speaking of war between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it may prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core and the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I expect, makes it worse. The large and unanchored uneasiness I feel about it is that we may not get through this century. We could come apart - piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large.

Recently there was some controversy when the Bush Administration accidentally left off evolution from a list of subjects eligible for government grants - whoops! But Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush has an even better suggestion: That we just leave off science altogether. The debate between Evolution and Intelligent Design, he says, "got me thinking, and today ii [sic] occured [sic] to me: science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science." I must say I haven't been so happy since we reached the End of History. What is especially great about Noonan's theory that science is dead is that he doesn't have to conduct any experiments or present any evidence to prove science is dead because science would actually have to be alive to do that.

Why did science stray from the path of truth? I think it is because we ceased educating the men of science with a knowledge of religion.

The truth will out - and that means that the quest for the truth will continue, and that will mean that efforts in science will continue to yield results... but the Age of Science is over, killed off by lies. I don't regret its passing - hopefully we will soon start to really educate people, so that even as they pursue science, they keep it in perspective, and in relation to the real human condition.

To the right - Junichiro Hannya, Monument to Sontuko (Kinjiro) Ninomiya, 1983 - a bronze sculpture of the "Peasant Sage of Japan," 1787-1856 (200 South San Pedro Street)

That would be this fellow -

Part farmer, part philosopher and part government administrator, Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856) advocated diligence, cooperation, deference to authority and thrift as ways of improving Japan's rural economy at the end of the feudal Tokugawa era. He revitalized agriculture by establishing credit associations to finance roads, aqueducts and housing, and he taught farmers to apply new methods of irrigation and to use better fertilizers. Between 1830 and 1843, Ninomiya and his disciples established the hotoku movement to promote morality, industry and economy.

The government attempted to maintain a rural social structure by encouraging hotoku after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. During the 1930s, Ninomiya's teachings were reinterpreted as supportive of Japan's aggressive military expansion. Small statues, based on an iconographic portrayal of Ninomiya at about age 14 learning to read while carrying a load of firewood on his back, were placed in elementary schools throughout Japan. Though initially installed as reminders to children of the ideal of combining work with study, these statues became associated with the pre-war period and many were destroyed by the American Occupational forces after World War II. Located in front of the Mitsui Manufacturers Bank, the bronze memorial to Ninomiya (which should be titled Ninomiya Sontuko in recognition of the sage's official name, rather than Kinjiro, which was both his boyhood and his popular name) replicates the design but greatly enlarges the size of the pre-World War II statues. Albert Taira, the Nisei developer of the bank building, proposed the statue to Obayashi, the contractor for the project, to symbolize the Issei's hard work and self-sacrifice when establishing roots in America. Obayashi commissioned the work from a Japanese foundry that in turn hired the artist to increase the size of the monument.

Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

… The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks, surfaced in a Congressional report about Iran released Wednesday. They echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

The criticisms reflect the views of some officials inside the White House and the Pentagon who advocated going to war with Iraq and now are pressing for confronting Iran directly over its nuclear program and ties to terrorism, say officials with knowledge of the debate.

There is a popular sentiment among the Washington elite that what went wrong in the run-up to the war in Iraq has been sufficiently examined, and that it's all water under the bridge anyway.

It's popular in the White House and among Republicans for obvious reasons. But it's also remarkably popular among top Democrats and the establishment media, because they aren't all that eager to call any more attention to the fact that they were played for suckers.

There are, however, some people who believe that what led this country to launch a war of choice under false pretenses must be examined in detail - over and over again if necessary - until the appropriate lessons have been learned.

Otherwise, one might argue, history is doomed to repeat itself.

Enter history, stage right.

Once again, powerful neoconservative politicians who just know in their hearts that there is a terrible threat posed by a Middle Eastern country they have identified as part of the axis of evil are frustrated by the lack of conclusive evidence that would support a bellicose approach. So they are pressuring the nation's intelligence community to find facts that will support their argument.

This time, that scenario is being played out right in front of our eyes. Maybe that will make a difference?

Probably not. Americans have come to think of themselves as victims - everyone wants to kill us - and seem to revel in the fear and low-level hysteria of the "big threat." That's how we define ourselves now. It's sort of the national myth of who we really are. We're fed that, and we eat it up.

Who feeds us such stuff?

Froomkin points to this item from Dafna Linzer also in the Post noting that the report was "principally written by a Republican staff member on the House intelligence committee who holds a hard-line view on Iran." So of course the report "fully backs the White House position that the Islamic republic is moving forward with a nuclear weapons program and that it poses a significant danger to the United States [and] chides the intelligence community for not providing enough direct evidence to support that assertion." And the author? It seems "the principal author was Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department." He's one of Cheney's guys. It's the same gang at it again.

Don't believe it? Read this from May 2005 - when the senate was trying to decide whether to conform Bolton to the post as UN Ambassador (which they didn't). Everyone was upset that Bolton had written a memo to the CIA telling them they were full of shit about Iraq - they knew nothing and there were nukes and chemicals and biological weapons. Frederick Fleitz settled the matter, saying he had written the memo for Bolton and the CIA was useless, and Iraq did have all those things. It seems he's at it again.

So it's war. Or it's sanctions, as at the same time Iran said let's talk, but not on the condition we stop our research. We say that's unacceptable. And in the deepest of ironies, the president had said this at his August 21st press conference - "In order for the UN to be effective, there must be consequences if people thumb their nose at the United Nations Security Council."

Yeah, except when we do it and launch a preemptive war against their advice. Not one reporter pointed that out, and surprisingly no one laughed out loud.

And we're not getting any help, as noted here -

US officials tell ABC News the White House had intended to issue a stronger statement rejecting Iran's response and calling for talks on sanctions against Iran to begin quickly, but pressure mounted from European countries overnight to hold off on the strong language and to allow time for countries to carefully consider Iran's response.

Ultimately, US officials say, the United States yielded to pressure from the European countries, namely Britain and France, to issue the milder statement that was released today.

No one wants to play with us, it would seem.

Well, we do make adjustments, as noted here - the president has apparently dropped his attempts to reassure us all that more progress is being made in Iraq than we all realize, "in favor of the contention that things could be even worse."

He was a cheerleader at Andover, but now it's yeah, team, it's awful, but really it could be much worse if we're not careful. That's some cheer -

The shifting rhetoric reflected a broader pessimism that has reached into even some of the most optimistic corners of the administration - a sense that the Iraq venture has taken a dark turn and will not be resolved anytime soon.

… While still committed to the venture, officials have privately told friends and associates outside government that they have grown discouraged in recent months.

… But with crucial midterm elections just 2 1/2 months away, Bush and his team are trying to turn the public debate away from whether the Iraq invasion has worked out to what would happen if US troops were withdrawn, as some Democrats advocate. The necessity of not failing, Bush advisers believe, is now a more compelling argument than the likelihood of success.

Basically, the report appears to be the first salvo in a fall campaign to justify a war against Iran (with Andy Card gone, they've perhaps forgotten that you don't introduce a new "product" in August). Only this time, they're not just presenting us with shitty intelligence and telling us we have to go to war (though the report does serve that purpose too). They're also saying, "the intelligence is shitty, so we cannot negotiate and therefore have to go to war."

The Iranian government is training and equipping much of the Shiite insurgency in Iraq, a senior US general said Wednesday, drawing one of the most direct links by the Pentagon.

... Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero said it is a "policy of the central government in Iran" to destabilize Iraq and increase the violence there.

"I think it's irrefutable that Iran is responsible for training, funding and equipping some of these (Shiite) extremist groups and also providing advanced IED technology to them," Barbero said. "IED" refers to the improvised explosive devices - roadside bombs - that have caused much death and destruction in Iraq.

• Iran has conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of its International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement, and despite its claims to the contrary, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons...

• Iran likely has an offensive chemical weapons research and development capability.

• Iran probably has an offensive biological weapons program.

• Iran has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East. The U.S. Intelligence Community has raised the concern that Tehran may integrate nuclear weapons into its ballistic missiles.

• Iran provides funding, training, weapons, rockets, and other material support to terrorist groups in Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, and elsewhere.

• Elements of the Iranian national security apparatus are actively supporting the insurgency in Iraq.

… this is part of the meaning of the President's embrace of the "Islamic fascism" locution. If the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, then a big confrontation with Iran is psychotic. But if the United States is at war with Islamic fascism, then the term fits the Iranian regime about as well (or as poorly) as it fits al-Qaeda, so we may as well start a war with Iran. Note that although the administration itself didn't play this particular card in selling the Iraq War the basic structure of how the sales pitch goes was previewed in Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism. He argued that al-Qaeda should be seen as a species of "Muslim totalitarianism" and that Baathist Iraq was also a species of Muslim totalitarianism, and that, therefore since we were at war with the one we should also be at war with the other.

Bush and Cheney, of course, preferred the more straightforward gambit of simply implying that Saddam was behind 9/11 but the blueprint for the semantic switcheroo is already out there. And now we have the demands for the intelligence to be cooked up to order.

So we will have another war. There's no way to stop this. Everything has been lined up. So say "no" and you want us all to die. You hate America. And that's that.

Of course we may not have a war if someone takes care of things for us.

Thursday, August 24, Jeralyn Merritt reports this -

I'm just tuning into today's news, and Wolf Blitzer on CNN reported that Israel has nuclear weapons and may decide to try and take Iran out even if it has to go it alone.

A reporter from the Jerusalem Post said he has heard this too but that there has been no official confirmation from Israeli officials.

The reasoning seems to be that Israel wants to stop Iran's nuclear weapon development plans which it thinks will reach the R&D stage within six to 12 months. The US may not have the military capability to fight Iran, given how stretched it has become in Iraq.

So, we lost more than 2,000 precious U.S. lives to take out a despot who had nothing to do with 9/11 or the war on terror, only to be impotent at taking out what could be a real threat not just to hundreds of millions of Americans but the whole world?

I realize there is a big issue as to whether Iran is 5 to 10 years away from having a viable nuclear weapons program or 6 to 12 months away from entering R&D, but either way, it just shows what a waste this war in Iraq has been.

There is growing consensus within the defense establishment that the United States will not attack Iran, and that Israel might be forced to act independently to stop the Islamic republic from obtaining nuclear weapons, a high-ranking defense official told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

According to sources within the defense establishment, the Bush administration does not have political support for launching a strike against Iran's nuclear sites. "America is stuck in Iraq and cannot go after Iran militarily right now," the official said.

The defense official blasted the US for "not doing enough" to stop Teheran's race to the bomb. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he said, was leading the State Department in the direction of "appeasement."

With the purchase of two more German-made Dolphin submarines capable of carrying nuclear warheads, military experts say Israel is sending a clear message to Iran that it can strike back if attacked by nuclear weapons.

The purchases come at a time when Iran is refusing to bow to growing Western demands to halt its nuclear program, and after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

The new submarines, built at a cost of $1.3 billion with Germany footing one-third of the bill, have diesel-electric propulsion systems that allow them to remain submerged for longer periods of time than the three nuclear arms-capable submarines already in Israel's fleet, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The latest submarines not only would be able to carry out a first strike should Israel choose to do so, but they also would provide Israel with crucial second-strike capabilities, said Paul Beaver, a London-based independent defense analyst.

Israel is already believed to have that ability in the form of the Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, which are buried so far underground they would survive a nuclear strike, he said.

Like our first-strike multi-billion-dollar submarines aren't good enough? We're too scared to use them?

It's more pressure.

Again there's no way to stop this. Everything has been lined up. So say "no" and you want us all to die. You hate America. And that's that.

The irony of course is that our two wars - Afghanistan and Iraq - have inflamed the world against us and not produced the results we claimed would follow, liberal democracies that would transform the region, and subsequently bring an end to all terrorism. More and more terrorists are popping out all over the world as we do the best we can to kill all we can in those two nations. Israel had a parallel experience with Hezbollah. If war - no diplomacy, no talking and no listening (and don't treat terrorism like it is just some dinky little law enforcement issue either) - is the answer to keeping us safe, then the demonstration of that theory is not going well. It's rather the opposite - the concept was just wrong. No one feels any safer. Everyone knows things are getting worse. So we have another war to keep us safe? You'd think that would be a hard sell, but it isn't. We see no alternatives, or are told the alternatives are just stupid.

And off we go.



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Footnote:

Some related thoughts…

This -

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute. The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Why do we need terrorists to destroy the cornerstones of democracy with bombs when governments are willing to do it themselves out of fear? Isn't that a sign that the terrorists have won? First the US with its Patriot Act and warrantless NSA surveillance and now Britain, which is considering a new racial profiling program aimed at Muslims based on behavior, ethnicity, and religion.

Who needs the terrorists to take down America when the government is doing such a better job of it by eradicating the civil liberties that are the hallmark of this great nation? At one time we were the beacon of liberty in the free world. That light has been dimming since September 11, and unless we clap three times for Tinkerbelle, it's about to go out.

The next question is who will it be after the Muslims? My answer: no one important, just you and me.