Pat Buchanan and William Kristol Lead This Week's Shrill...

Salon reportes:

Salon.com Politics: Pat Buchanan asked President Bush to tell the American public the “Unvarnished Truth” about the current situation in Iraq. For starters, Buchanan would like the President to tell us why we are really there. Referring to “One of the greatest bait-and switches in the history of warfare," Buchanan again reminds us of the now-discredited reasons Bush and his neocon advisers at the Pentagon used as a pretext to war with Iraq: WMDs, ties to 9/11 and al-Qaida. Since the initial invasion, we have suffered over 1,300 servicemen and women killed, over 10,000 wounded, and enormous setbacks to our prestige and national reputation as a result of prisoner abuse scandals. Our risk of suffering another terrorist attack is greater than ever.

Buchanan has been critical of the Iraqi incursion for some time. But he uses some of his strongest language yet in urging Bush to abandon his neocon advisors and lose the spin control. And he's not alone. In the past week, several of our nation’s top military and civilian security officials have come out repeatedly against both the decision to invade Iraq and the Pentagon’s handling of the occupation. Even stalwart Bush supporter William Kristol has admonished Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for both his poor war planning and his handling of post-war Iraq. Rumsfeld’s exchange in Kuwait recently with the National Guard soldier over the continuing lack of armor for military vehicles seemed to even put some the last Republican diehards over the edge.

Has Donald Rumsfeld Joined the Shrill?

A claim that the latest Robert Novak column reveals the hidden secret that the latest shrill unbalanced critic of George W. Bush is... Donald Rumsfeld himself:

From AndrewSullivan.com:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: Rummy's own self-defense is... revealing.... If you read Bob Novak's column today, it's hard not to see Rumsfeld's flunkies or Rummy himself doing some energetic spinning. Here's the key paragraph:

Rumsfeld is often bracketed with the neocons, but that is incorrect. In a long political career that dates back to his election to Congress in 1962, he has not even been associated with the traditional conservative movement. In the run-up to the attack on Iraq, he was not aggressively pressing intervention by force of arms, but instead was shaping a military response to fit President Bush's command.

Translation from Rummy: "This is Bush's war, not mine. I never really wanted it. I don't believe in the democratic transformation of the Middle East. I don't want to shift gears from my lean, mean fighting machine concept to one of a military that has to be big enough to impose a new order on societies where liberty has never had deep roots. I'm just taking orders." You can either see this as true (my view) - in which case, Rumsfeld really is the wrong man for the president's Wilsonian agenda. Or you can see this as disloyal spin: in which case, Rummy has lost confidence in the war he was obliged to run...

We Welcome James di Benedetto

We welcome James di Benedetto to the Order of the Shrill:

The Eleven Day Empire: These People Have Jobs Why, Again?: This is, of course, madness. The whole point of having plainclothes air marshalls is that they NOT be immediately recognizable. Sure, SOME of them probably should be wearing suits or sportcoats. And some of them should be in sweatpants, a dirty shirt, and generally look like they got about 5 minutes of sleep the night before. And some of them should be wearing jeans and a polo shirt. And... You'd think this wouldn't be a terribly difficult concept to grasp, but apparently the folks in charge of the program are none too bright. Fire them. Fire them now.

Lech Walesa Is Shrill! Of Europe Are Drawing Closer

Shrill screeds of Bush hatred from the founder of Solidarity:

WSJ.com - At Expense of U.S., NationsOf Europe Are Drawing Closer: "America failed its exam as a superpower," says Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity trade-union leader who became Poland's first post-Communist president. "They are a military and economic superpower but not morally or politically anymore. This is a tragedy for us."

Man, That's a Lott of Shrill Senators

Trent Lott, to be precise:

"I'm not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld," Lott told the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce (news - web sites) on Wednesday. "I don't think he listens enough to his uniformed officers."

Rumsfeld has under heavy criticism since a soldier asked him last week why the combat vehicles used in the war in Iraq (news - web sites) don't have the proper armor. Both Rumsfeld and President Bush (news - web sites) have said more vehicle armor will be shipped to Iraq.

Lott, speaking to the civic club Wednesday, said the United States needs more troops to help with the war and a plan to leave Iraq once elections take place in late January. The Mississippi Republican doesn't think Rumsfeld is the person to carry out that plan.

"I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year or so," Lott said. "I'm not calling for his resignation, but I think we do need a change at some point."

We asked the Magic Eight Ball to translate that last bit. It said:

Answer hazy. Why hasn't the President fired him?

We're also uncertain regarding the specific mention of uniformed officers. I mean, most officers are in uniform. Are there some other officers out there, commanders who don't wear a uniform and probably spend 40% of their time slacking off or something, yet have the ear of the Secretary of Defense?

New York Times Coverage of the Other Order

New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd checked into the Ward Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken saying nothing but "shills. shills.... aigh!" over and over. Dr. Hastur eventually realized she'd suffered a serious break at the thought of the number of members of the Order of the Shill who are fleeing to the Order Of The Shrill, driven to sheer unholy madness by the mendacity, incompetence, malevolence, incompetence, sheer disconnection from reality, and sheer connection to incompetence of the Donald "Why Do I Still Have A Job?" Rumsfeld defense department.

He has surrounded himself with so many sycophantic generals that it took a grunt from Tennessee to point out that the defense secretary has no clothes - or armor for his troops. He has taken the greatest military in the history of the world and pushed it to the breaking point.

Some people think he's toast, now that conservatives like John McCain, Chuck Hagel and Bill Kristol have turned on him - and now that the grumbles are getting louder in the military, from Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf and the TV generals to the rank-and-file reservists who have other jobs to go back to.

In her lithium inspired fervor, Dowd has a new plan for our troops abroad: branding*.

If the Olympics can attract top corporate sponsors, why can't Rummy's Global War on Terrorism? Bring it on, Bank One!

Picture this: a truck rumbling across the desert on the evening news, completely armored and emblazoned with golden arches. Or a fleet of Visa Humvees. You know Donald Trump would love to slap his name on a few Chinooks. The 82nd Trumpborne.

Now, we were usually the first ones seen running for the door after the marketing V.P. said "global brand strategy", but we're pretty sure that there are a few things that IBM would like to stick their name on more than the corpses of the sons of daughters of America, sent abroad for a fool's errand. But then, what do we know?

Nouriel Roubini Is Shrill!

And boy is he shrill! Worst case of shrillness this month!

Dr. Mbogo to the Shoggoth Wing, stat!

Nouriel Roubini's Global Economics Blog: December 2004 Archives: In another example of the economic brilliance of our MBA President (who taught him economics and when?) and of his economic team, Dubya just found out today the Holy Grail that will eliminate in an instant our trade deficits.

Bush told reporters that the trade deficit was "easy to resolve. People can buy more United States products if they're worried about the trade deficit."

Very deep and profound concept and idea...and altogether wrong on all matters of economic substance. As any freshman in Economics knows, the current account deficit is, by definition,equal the excess of the country's expenditure relative to its income; so if a country spends more than its income, it will have a current account deficit, regardless of its preferences for domestic or foreign goods. If we spend more than we earn, if we have lower savings (because of the huge budget defitics) than our real investment, the current account will be and remain in a large deficit. Also, the demand for imports depends mostly on relative growth rates across countries and relative prices of foreign goods relative to foreign goods (i.e. exchange rates). So, assuming the trade deficit will disappear will not change it by a iota. And too bad that the masses of red state evangelicals on their way to join the social and economic lumpenproletariat crave and can only afford the good and cheap Chinese goods that made the fortune of Wal Mart.

It is not surprising that Dubya displays a crass ignorance of Economics 101 ("let us assume we import less" is his basic solution to our trade problems). It is a little more shocking that no one in his economic team his giving him any parental guidance on basic economics. But maybe not that surprising. With Lame Duck Cheerleader-in-Chief Melting Snow still kept warm for a little while in sinking Treasury, with his Under Secretary for International Affairs (of "there is no problem with the current account deficit" fame) on the way out (as one would assume as the most lame U/S for Int. Affairs ever), with NEC being headless after stealthy & gagged Friedman kept his mouth shut for two years and finally exited, with CEA also headless as the smart Mankiw may wonder why the hell he risked his stellar academic reputation for becoming associated with such economic buffons at the White House, the Chief Ecomomic Strategists at the White House are now Mr. Rasputin Karl Rove and that Most Eminent Economist called Dick Cheney who, today, opened the White House economic summit by pushing again for making the tax cuts permanent and privatizing Social Security, two policies that will certainly lead us to fiscal bankruptcy in the next decade.

With this Motley Crew running our ecomomic non-policies in a time of falling dollar, massive fiscal and current account deficit, even the most conservative Wall Street Journal op-ed page was begging last week for a strong Treasury Secretary in the Rubin tradition and pleading the White House to dump Snow, only to be rebuffed the next day. As the hapless WSJ editors had to admit and beg under a "Stronger Treasury" headline:

"The larger issue is why the Bush Administration has settled for a weak Treasury...on economic policy he has preferred to run things out of the White House, and sometimes even Karl Rove's hip pocket....The financial world is a far more unsettled place, for starters...Inevitably, when interest rates rise, there are going to be financial casualties to be cleaned up. Mr. Rove knows a lot, but we doubt he knows how to work out the next Long Term Capital Management failure, much less handle a dollar crisis...."

Of course, the next day, the White House reconfirmed lame duck and lame non-leader snow-flaky Snow to the Treas job after letting him hang wet and dry for two weeks; take that WSJ Editorial Board for being real influential in your arch-conservative White House! They told you to get lost the same day you pleaded for a stronger Treasury.

The only solace is that, by the time a year from now these reckless policies - with dumb-wit economic nullities such as Rove and Cheney in charge and Snow cheerleading-in-tow - lead to a hard landing of the dollar, a bond market rout, a LTCM-style meltdwon, and a ugly economic slowdown, Greenspan will step down from his Fed job and may be chosen as Treasury Secretary when Dubya gets desperate enough.

Given that Alan is the smartest guy in town and knows better, one will hope that he will reverse his support of the Bush tax cuts (his worst call in 20 years at the Fed), he will emphasize that fiscal restraint must include not only controls on spending but also reversals of some of the reckless tax cuts on high incomes, dividends, capital gains and estate taxes and that he will suggest to reform Social Security along the lines of what he brilliantly did 20 years ago when he headed the Commission that rescued our Social Security system: i.e. raise a litte the payroll tax, lenghten the retirement age and control modestly benefits. I.e., real reform Social Security that maintains its Security and its Social element rather than the mother of all smoke and mirrors shell-games "privatization" that would create another $5 trillion of transition costs and lead us on the same path as Argentina that similarly bothched its social security privatization and ended up defaulting on its entire public debt.

William Kristol Is Shrill!

The latest shrill America-hating critic of George W. Bush and his administration is William Kristol:

The Defense Secretary We Have (washingtonpost.com): Decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week, after a fashion: "I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that's fine." Except he fails to take responsibility.

All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments. Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments. But have any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?

In Sunday's New York Times, John F. Burns quoted from the weekly letter to the families of his troops by Lt. Col. Mark A. Smith, an Indiana state trooper who now commands the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, stationed just south of Baghdad:

"Ask yourself, how in a land of extremes, during times of insanity, constantly barraged by violence, and living in conditions comparable to the stone ages, your marines can maintain their positive attitude, their high spirit, and their abundance of compassion?" Col. Smith's answer: "They defend a nation unique in all of history: One of principle, not personality; one of the rule of law, not landed gentry; one where rights matter, not privilege or religion or color or creed. . . . They are United States Marines, representing all that is best in soldierly virtues."

These soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have.

Norman Schwartzkopf Is Shrill!

Keening Blasphemy Kevin Drum modems in the details:

The Washington Monthly: RUMSFELD UNDER FIRE....We all know that John McCain isn't a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld, and Chuck Hagel isn't a surprise either. But Stormin' Norman? "I was angry by the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, as the secretary of defense, didn’t have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up." Good point. Plus there's the fact that Rumsfeld was lying through his teeth about armor production already being at capacity, and how there was nothing more he could do about it. That was bad too.

Senator McCain: Tell Us How You Really Feel!

With President George W. Bush's election in the bag, Senator McCain can go back to pointing out that the emperor is slightly naked. Today's target: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It seems the Senator might be displeased with the Secretary's performance, although he might be a bit murky about his exact feelings:

Asked about his confidence in the secretary's leadership, McCain recalled fielding a similar question a couple weeks ago.

"I said no. My answer is still no. No confidence," McCain said.

Yeah, we're not sure exactly what that's about. Does it involve an aiiigh! or a Ph'nglui. We aren't sure. We'll keep you posted.

Edmund Andrews of the New York Times Is Shrill

Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Andrews R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Economic View: Social Security Reform, With One Big Catch: OF all the arguments being made to replace part of Social Security with private retirement accounts, few are more seductive and more misleading than the prospect of earning higher returns. Get ready to hear a lot about this next week.... Under the current system, investment returns from Social Security are "abysmal," Mr. Bush said in one recent speech, because the trust fund is allowed to hold only low-yielding Treasury bonds.... According to the Social Security Administration, Treasury bonds can be expected to yield a real annual rate of return of about 3 percent. Equities, by contrast, can be expected to earn 6.5 percent.

That assumption is crucial to arguments that personal accounts can reduce Social Security's long-term shortfall - which the government estimates to be at least $3.5 trillion. Most of the proposals to overhaul Social Security call for steep reductions in future benefits that would be offset by the higher returns people would presumably earn on their investments. Stephen Goss, the Social Security Administration's chief actuary, has endorsed the assumption of higher returns. In evaluating the major proposals for putting some payroll taxes into personal investment accounts, Mr. Goss estimated that even people who hedged their risk by mixing stocks and bonds could expect an average return of 4.45 percent.... "The entire argument is absurd," said William C. Dudley, chief United States economist at Goldman Sachs. "These returns weren't free. You are getting these returns precisely because you are taking on risk."...

Mr. Goss of the Social Security Administration suggested that returns in the future might be even higher than those of the past. "A consensus is forming among economists that equity pricing as indicated by price-earnings ratios may be somewhat higher in the long-term future than in the long-term past," wrote Mr. Goss.... In an interview last week, Mr. Goss acknowledged that many experts believe investment returns should be adjusted for risk and that the common proxy for a risk-free return is the real yield earned on Treasury bonds....

Other government analysts take a much more conservative approach. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a former chief economist in President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers, assumes that equities and bonds will earn no more than Treasury bonds... the White House's own Office of Management and Budget recently made the same assumption....

The more basic question is this: Should a rational person believe that Social Security's very real financial shortfall can be reduced just by shifting from bonds into stocks?...

Pandagon Is Shrill

I wonder what Frist says when family members tell him they caught VD from a toilet seat?

Pandagon: Frist in Flight: Think Bill Frist went home and retched on shame after this? Or think he congratulated himself on a dodge well done? And conservatives? If your majority leader can't safely repudiate the "HIV-travels-through-sweat-and-tears" crowd, don't ever, ever complain to me about Democratic fringe groups. Ever.

Introducing The Order Of the Till

Time was, you couldn't leave the Executive Branch and come back two days later asking for handouts. Now we don't know if this was what drove people into the Order of the Shrill, and not, say, the mendancity, malevolence, incompetence, and sheer disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration, but an awful lot of former high level government officials have been turning up shrill lately.

Most of them, actually.

In an effort to make sure that wasn't the issue, the government ethics office has abandoned testing of their shiny new wrist slapper.

Lobbying Prohibitions Eased For Former Top Officials

Until now, senior officials at Cabinet departments and agencies had not been allowed to lobby former colleagues for a full year after leaving office -- a rule designed to prevent an obvious conflict of interest. But, in a notice in the Federal Register, the ethics office issued a new rule invoking its power to declare that "a former senior employee who served in a 'parent' department or agency is not barred . . . from making communications to or appearances before any employee of any designated component of that parent."

So don't worry about getting your hand caught in the till! Now they have their own order and everything.

Iraqi Torture Victims Are Shrill!

You know, some people just can't take a fraternity prank. A group of totally humorless Iraqi torture victims have decided to take their captors to court. Who's named in the suit? A few minor players such as:

• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Former CIA Director George Tenet
• Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Dr. Steven Cambone
• Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez
• Major General Walter Wojdakowski
• Major General Geoffrey Miller
• Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski

We here at The Order feel sure that the Bush administration will quickly identify this suit as the politically motivated witch hunt it so obviously is. Like that DeLay thing down in Texas, for instance.

Tom Friedman: Heisenberg of the Shrill

We students of The Order are, on occasion, blessed with a screed so truly shrill that it causes little tingles up and down our hermetic spines. Thanksgiving was such a day as Tom Friedman delivered a family-sized serving of sardonic wit:

In my next life, I want to be Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.

Yes, I want to get almost the entire Republican side of the House of Representatives to bend its ethics rules just for me. I want to be able to twist the arms of House Republicans to repeal a rule that automatically requires party leaders to step down if they are indicted on a felony charge - something a Texas prosecutor is considering doing to DeLay because of corruption allegations.

But most of all, I want to have the gall to sully American democracy at a time when young American soldiers are fighting in Iraq so we can enjoy a law-based society here and, maybe, extend it to others. Yes, I want to be Tom DeLay. I want to wear a little American flag on my lapel in solidarity with the troops, while I besmirch every value they are dying for.

If I can't be Tom DeLay, then I want to be one of the gutless Republican House members who voted to twist the rules for DeLay out of fear that "the Hammer," as they call him, might retaliate by taking away a coveted committee position or maybe a parking place.

Yes, I want to be a Republican House member. At a time when 180 of the 211 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq who have been wounded in combat have insisted on returning to duty, I want to look my constituents and my kids in the eye and tell them that I voted to empty the House ethics rules because I was afraid of Tom DeLay.

If I can't be a Republican House member, I want to be Latrell Sprewell, the guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves. I want to say with a straight face that if my owner will only give me a three-year contract extension for a meager $21 million, then he's not worth working for, because "I've got my family to feed."

Yes, I want to be Latrell Sprewell. At a time when N.B.A. games are priced beyond the reach of most American families, when half the country can't afford health care, when some reservists in Iraq are separated from their families for a year, including this Thanksgiving, I want to be like Latrell. I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm looking out for my family - and no one else's.

If I can't be Latrell Sprewell, I want to be any American college or professional athlete. For a mere dunk of the basketball or first-down run, I want to be able to dance a jig, as if I'd just broken every record by Michael Jordan or Johnny Unitas. For the smallest, most routine bit of success in my sport, I want to be able to get in your face - I want to know who's your daddy, I want to be able to high-five, low-five, thump my chest and dance on your grave. You talkin' to me?

I want to be able to fight on the court, off the court, in the stands and on the sidelines. I want to respect no boundaries and no norms. And when I make your kids cry, I want to be able to tell you to just "chill" - that my coach says "stuff happens" and that my union rep is appealing my punishment in the name of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Yes, in my next life, I want to be The Man.

If I can't be The Man, then I at least want to be the owner of a Hummer - with American flag decals all over the back bumper, because Hummer owners are, on average, a little more patriotic than you and me.

Yes, I want to drive the mother of all gas-guzzlers that gets so little mileage you have to drive from gas station to gas station. Yes, I want to drive my Hummer and never have to think that by consuming so much oil, I am making transfer payments to the worst Arab regimes that transfer money to Islamic charities that transfer money to madrassas that teach children intolerance, antipluralism and how to hate the infidels.

And when one day one of those madrassa graduates goes off and joins the jihad in Falluja and kills my neighbor's son, who is in the U.S. Army Rangers, I want to drive to his funeral in my Hummer. Yes, I want to curse his killers in front of his mother and wail aloud, "If there was only something I could do ..." And then I want to drive home in my Hummer, stopping at two gas stations along the way.

If I can't be any of these, then I want to be just a simple blue-state red-state American. I want to take time on this Thanksgiving to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own. And I want to thank them for doing this, even though on so many days in so many ways we really don't deserve them.

I want to be Tom Friedman!

Time's Baghdad Bureau Chief Is Super-Shrill

Senior Bat-Winged Horror Eric Umansky listens to NPR and reports:

Eric Umansky: Michael Ware is Super-Shrill: Time's Baghdad bureau chief is on my local NPR  (WNYC)  right now and he's taking some serious swings: 


On the elections: "You can set any Disneyland date you want. It will look like an election, it will sound like an election, but it won't  be anything other than a sham."


Other broadsides:


"Honestly, I see day by day as we add to the ranks of the insurgency. I've seen civilians atomized before my eyes by the military. That's not meant to be a criticism of the individual soldiers or the military...."


Asked whether there are going to be other Fallujah like situations, he said, "Absolutely. Fallujah was a spectacular act of defiance for the insurgents. But there will be similar acts here, there, everywhere.  This doesn't feel like victory for me."


"We are giving the birth to the next generation of jihadists. 9/11 was a pandora's box. Bin Laden was then hoping for a platform to propel the cause...and we gave it to him."


"Insurgents used to say to me, 'I'm fighting to get the U.S. out of Iraq--Iraq for Iraqis.' Now they say, 'I'm fighting for Islam.' We've created the next Bin Laden, Zarqawi. He was a marginal figure before the war, and now,  he's actually competing with him for primacy."

Administrators at Baghdad’s Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics Are Srhill

We've spent $10,000 per Iraqi on the war, and we can't even get Iraqi children fed:

Crooked Timber: Child malnutrition in Iraq : One of the points made most insistently by critics of the Lancet study was that they disbelieved the claim that infant mortality had increased since the war. Heiko, a contributor to one of Dsquared’s threads , wrote: “I do believe infant mortality may have dropped (though maybe not halved as yet), because a lot of things are available now that weren’t before the war.” The Washington Post has now published an article suggesting that there has been a dramatic rise in child malnutrition since the war:

Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq’s Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway’s Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from “wasting,” a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

The article makes grim reading for anyone concerned about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:

“Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen” with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad’s Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. “So we’re surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice,” the official said.

Juan Cole Is Shrill

The news from Fallujah is not good:

Informed Comment : Heavy fighting continued in Fallujah on Monday, according to Reuters, as some guerrillas there demonstrated that they would fight to the death.

Meanwhile, police stations were attacked in Baqubah and Buhriz in the east, and in Suwairah south of Baghdad. The fighting in Baqubah was so heavy that the US at one point dropped two 500 pound bombs on the guerrillas. Hundreds of people gathered in northeast Baqubah to protest the continued US presence in Iraq, demanding that the foreign troops go home.

Fighting broke out in Baiji, Ramadi and parts of Baghdad, as well. A Mosul oil installation was also attacked, and so was a US convoy near the city, and there appears to have been some fighting inside Mosul on Monday (a US general insisted that the situation there wasn't "desperate." OK.) In general the Sunni Arab regions of the country appear to be in virtual chaos.

Propaganda reared its ugly head on several occasions. US-installed CIA asset Iyad Allawi, the "prime minister," said he was sure there had been no civilian casualties in Fallujah. Allawi is gradually revealing himself as the pro-American twin of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, "Baghdad Bob," who used to deny that US troops were in Baghdad even though journalists could see the tanks over his shoulder. Now Allawi wants to deny that residents of a city that has been invaded and crushed managed to escape without a scratch unless they were active guerrillas. Col. Mike Shupp joined in this vaudeville act, denying that there was a humanitarian crisis in Fallujah or that there was a need for Red Crescent aid.

Let's say there were only 30,000 civilians left in Fallujah, out of 250,000 or so residents as of last year. Given the kind of aerial bombardment, tank and artillery fire the city has taken, it is impossible that there aren't civilian casualties, and probably quite substantial ones. In addition, some reports speak of Marines using heat detectors and shooting at any buildings they think inhabited. Eyewitnesses speak of bodies lying in the street everywhere.

The generally pro-American Saudi daily, Asharq al-Awsat, has a long piece on the sufferings of civilians in Fallujah, based on telephone interviews and eyewitness accounts by Iraqis. The article is extremely suspicious of American motives in having taken the Fallujah hospitals and in having kept the Red Crescent and other aid agencies away from the city. Do they want to get rid of all the bodies lying in the streets before anyone sees them, the article asks.

As for the apparent murder of a wounded guerrilla by a Marine, it was horrible. I fear that the attitude of the other troops, which wasn't exactly shock, suggests that these sorts of murders of prisoners are not uncommon. (But they are not universal, or else there wouldn't be 400 prisoners. There would be no prisoners.) It does concern me that the wounded and bleeding guerrillas were just stacked up in that mosque awaiting medical attention, apparently for days. If there are many prisoners treated that way, then there really is an issue here with regard to US military policy. And, what is the difference between letting them bleed to death and putting a bullet in their heads? Col. Shupp might want to reconsider his position that the Red Crescent is unneeded.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat writes of Fallujah, and I paraphrase: Whatever the number of families that stayed in Fallujah, they are suffering now from lack of food, water, and aid. Although the US and Iraqi military authorities insist they have taken the city with the exception of some pockets of resistance, they refuse to allow Red Crescent aid trucks even into the areas they say they control. It is not known if the reason for this refusal is to prevent the "pockets of resistance" from getting hold of some food, or if it is because they want to get the bodies off the streets before the Red Crescent comes in, so as to avoid shocking the aid workers.

One man said in a telephone interview, from the Dubat Quarter, "Our situation is very bad . . . We have no food or water. My seven children al have bad diarrhea." He added, "there are corpses lying in the street." He said he knew of 6 families in a similar situation nearby, and broke into tears. "We are still fasting, even though the Eid came on Sunday. God is Great, God is Great." (This phrase pulls at the heartstrings among Muslims, given that the fasting month of Ramadan has a holy aura.)

The article describes a family that buried its 9-year-old son in a garden after he was shot and killed (implying that a lot of the dead cannot even be accounted for easily).

Seven Retired Generals Are Shrill!

It is unbelievable. Completely unbelievable:

RollingStone.com: Politics - The Generals Speak: Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94, We have a force in Iraq that's much too small to stabilize the situation. It's about half the size, or maybe even a third, of what we need. As a consequence, the insurgency seems to be gathering momentum. We are losing people at a fairly steady rate of about two a day; wounded, about four or five times that, and perhaps half of these wounds are very serious. And we are also sustaining gunshot wounds, when, before, we'd mostly been seeing massive trauma from remotely detonated charges. This means the other side is standing and fighting in a way that describes a more dangerous phase of the conflict.


The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil. I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These people have no real experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous.


The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam have been overblown, because we were in Vietnam for a decade and it cost us 58,000 troops. We've been in Iraq for nineteen months and we're still under 1,200 killed. But there is one sense in which the parallel with Vietnam is valid. The American people were told that to win the Cold War we had to win Vietnam. But we now know that Vietnam was not only a diversion from winning the Cold War but probably delayed our winning it and made it cost more to win. Iraq is a diversion to the war on terror in exactly the same way Vietnam was a diversion to the Cold War.


Adm. Stansfield Turner
NATO Allied commander for Southern Europe, 1975-77; CIA director, 1977-81
I think we are in a real mess. There are eighty-seven attacks on Americans every day, and our people in Baghdad can't even leave the International Zone without being heavily armored. I think we are in trouble because we were so slow in terms of reconstruction and reconstituting the military and police forces. We have lost the support of the Iraqi people who were glad to see Saddam go. But they are not glad to see an outside force come in and replace him without demonstrating we are going to provide them with security and rebuild their economy. I am very frustrated. Having a convincing rationale for going in gives our troops a sense of purpose. Whatever you call it, this is now an insurgency using the techniques of terrorism. With the borders poorly guarded, the terrorists come in. All in all, Iraq is a failure of monumental proportions.


Lt. Gen. William Odom
Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88
It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse. The sooner we leave, the less the damage. In the months since the invasion, the U.S. forces have become involved in trying to repress a number of insurgency movements. This is the way we were fighting in Vietnam, and if we keep on fighting this way, this one is going to go on a long time too. The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population.


Gen. Anthony Zinni
Commander in chief of the United States Central Command, 1997-2000
The first phase of the war in Iraq, the conventional phase, the major combat phase, was brilliantly done. Tommy Franks' approach to methodically move up and attack quickly probably saved a great humanitarian disaster. But the military was unprepared for the aftermath. Rumsfeld and others thought we would be greeted with roses and flowers.


When I was commander of CENTCOM, we had a plan for an invasion of Iraq, and it had specific numbers in it. We wanted to go in there with 350,000 to 380,000 troops. You didn't need that many people to defeat the Republican Guard, but you needed them for the aftermath. We knew that we would find ourselves in a situation where we had completely uprooted an authoritarian government and would need to freeze the situation: retain control, retain order, provide security, seal the borders to keep terrorists from coming in.


When I left in 2000, General Franks took over. Franks was my ground-component commander, so he was well aware of the plan. He had participated in it; those were the numbers he wanted. So what happened between him and Rumsfeld and why those numbers got altered, I don't know, because when we went in we used only 140,000 troops, even though General Eric Shinseki, the army commander, asked for the original number.


Did we have to do this? I saw the intelligence right up to the day of the war, and I did not see any imminent threat there. If anything, Saddam was coming apart. The sanctions were working. The containment was working. He had a hollow military, as we saw. If he had weapons of mass destruction, it was leftover stuff -- artillery shells and rocket rounds. He didn't have the delivery systems. We controlled the skies and seaports. We bombed him at will. All of this happened under U.N. authority. I mean, we had him by the throat. But the president was being convinced by the neocons that down the road we would regret not taking him out.


Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy
Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 1997-2000
From the beginning, i was asked which side I took, Shinseki's or Rumsfeld's. And I said Shinseki. I mean, Rumsfeld proudly announced that he had told General Franks to fight this war with different tactics in which they would bypass enemy strongholds and enemy resistance and keep on moving. But it was shocking to me that the secretary of defense would tell the Army how to fight. He doesn't know how to fight; he has no business telling them. It's completely within civilian authority to tell you where to fight, what our major objective is, but it is absolutely no one's business but uniformed military to tell you how to do the job. To me, it was astonishing that Rumsfeld would presume to tell four-star generals, in the Army thirty-five years, how to do their jobs.


Now here's another thing that Rumsfeld did. As he was being briefed on the war plan, he was cherry-picking the units to go. In other words, he didn't just approve the deployment list, he went down the list and skipped certain units that were at a higher degree of readiness to go and picked units that were lower on the list -- for reasons we don't know. But here's the impact: Recently, at an event, a mother told me how her son had been recruited and trained as a cook. Three weeks before he deployed to Iraq, he was told he was now a gunner. And they gave him training for three weeks, and then off he went.


Rumsfeld was profoundly in the dark. I think he really didn't understand what he was doing. He miscalculated the kind of war it was and he miscalculated the interpretation of U.S. behavior by the Iraqi people. They felt they had been invaded. They did not see this as a liberation.


As for the recent news about the 380 tons of explosives that disappeared, it's irrelevant when they disappeared. This was known by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a site to be watched. Here is the issue: Bush tried to turn this into a political matter instead of answering questions about why he didn't follow the warnings of the IAEA. It was another example of Bush being a cheerleader instead of a leader. Nothing in Iraq was guarded except for the oil fields, which tells you why we were there. There are any number of indications that with a larger troop strength we would have been able to deal with such sites. Here is my other concern: The IAEA gave us a list of sites to be watched, so there may have been other dumps that were looted. After all, you don't just put one item on a list.


So what do we do? I think it would be very irresponsible for us to simply pull out. It sounds like a very simple solution, but it would have some complexity and danger attached. Still, Iraq is a blood bath, and we need to be dealing with this in a much more sophisticated way than the cowboy named Bush.


Gen. Wesley Clark
NATO supreme Allied commander for Europe, 1997-2000
Troop strength was not the only problem. We got into this mess because the Bush administration decided what they really wanted to do was to invade Iraq, and then the only question was, for what reason? They developed two or three different reasons. It wasn't until the last minute that they came up and said, "Hey, by the way, we are going to create a wave of democracy across the Middle East." That was February of 2003, and by that time they hadn't planned anything. In October of 2003, Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo asking questions that should have been asked in 2001: Do we have an overall strategy to win the war on terror? Do we have the right organization to win the war on terror? How are we going to know if we are not winning the war on terror? As it has turned out, the guys on the ground are doing what they are told to do. But let's ask this question: Have you seen an American strategic blunder this large? The answer is: not in fifty years. I can't imagine when the last one was. And it's not just about troop strength. I mean, you will fail if you don't have enough troops, but simply adding troops won't make you succeed.


Adm. William Crowe
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89
We screwed up. we were intent on a quick victory with smaller forces, and we felt if we had a military victory everything else would fall in place. We would be viewed not as occupiers but as victors. We would draw down to 30,000 people within the first sixty days.


All of this was sheer nonsense.They thought that once Iraq fell we'd have a similar effect throughout the Middle East and terrorism would evaporate, blah, blah, blah. All of these were terrible assumptions. A State Department study advising otherwise was sent to Rumsfeld, but he threw it in the wastebasket. He overrode the military and was just plain stubborn on numbers. Finally the military said OK, and they totally underestimated the impact the desert had on our equipment and the kind of troops we would need for peacekeeping. They ignored Shinseki. The Marines were advising the same way. But the military can only go so far. Once the civilian leadership decides otherwise, the military is obliged.


There is not a very good answer for what to do next. We've pulled out of several places without achieving our objectives, and every time we predicted the end of Western civilization, which it was not. We left Korea after not achieving anything we wanted to do, and it didn't hurt us very much. We left Vietnam -- took us ten years to come around to doing it -- but we didn't achieve what we wanted. Everyone said it would set back our foreign policy in East Asia for ten years. It set it back about two months. Our allies thought we were crazy to be in Vietnam.


We could have the same thing happen this time in Iraq. If we walk away, we are still the number-one superpower in the world. There will be turmoil in Iraq, and how that will affect our oil supply, I don't know. But the question to ask is: Is what we are achieving in Iraq worth what we're paying? Weighing the good against the bad, we have got to get out.

Thing Gettin' Shrill At The CIA

Bush appoints Goss. Goss brings in right-wing staffers. Right-wing staffers go nuts. CIA begins meltdown procedures as directors resign including the chief all overseas anti-terror efforts:

Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his decision until Monday, the officials said.

Several other senior clandestine service officers are threatening to leave, current and former agency officials said.

The disruption comes as the CIA is trying to stay abreast of a worldwide terrorist threat from al Qaeda, a growing insurgency in Iraq, the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and congressional proposals to reorganize the intelligence agencies. The agency also has been criticized for not preventing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and not accurately assessing Saddam Hussein's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.

"It's the worst roiling I've ever heard of," said one former senior official with knowledge of the events. "There's confusion throughout the ranks and an extraordinary loss of morale and incentive."

Looking forward to another 'Mission Accomplished' banner any day now.