Regulatory corruption and 9/11

There has been much written about how our civil liberties have been irrationally eroded after 9/11, and how burdensome air travel has become. What seems to have been forgotten is that a significant factor in 9/11 was our corrupt regulatory system. The FAA had become another federal agency largely unable to regulate because of industry lobbying. The airlines resisted pre-9/11 FAA proposals to strengthen cockpit doors, for example. Failing to require those doors be strengthened was one of nine fatal mistakes made by the government that could have prevented the tragedy, according to the 9/11 Commission.

The industry also was not following passenger screening rules, and the FAA was not holding airlines accountable for this. Some of the hijackers paid for tickets in cash at the airport just before their flights, which should have triggered additional screening. What's more, the hijackers did this several times before 9/11 as a test, and none were subjected to additional checks. If regulations had been followed, the hijackers might have been caught, since some were already on watch lists and the FBI was trying to find them.

Our safety has gotten worse, not better, since 9/11, because in the name of security, we vote for politicians who simultaneously promise more security and preach that we'd all be better off if government just left business alone. In contrast to the some of the overreaction in airline security, regulation abdication by government has made us less safe in so many other ways. For example, although we may be less likely to die in a hijacked airplane, our kids and our pets are more likely to die from tainted food or dangerous toys.

Ron Paul & George Bush: separated at birth?

Ron Paul just set a record for the most money raised on the Internet in a single day. What’s going on here? His Presidential bid has been compared to that of Howard Dean’s in 2004, but other than the outsider label, nothing about them is the same. To find the answer, I suggest you read the Newsweek Magazine story on the politics of fear, which reviews how politicians use fear to get elected.

Then compare the platforms of George Bush in 2000 with Ron Paul in 2008. As loyal Republicans, Bush and Paul both have opposed abortion, gay rights, gun control, taxes and nation building. The first three of these issues are about fear. Abortion opponents boast of their moral outrage at killing, but most of them support the death penalty and don’t bat an eye if a lot of innocent people in other nations are killed in order to eliminate a few terrorists. They also don't tend to support policies that would lower the inexcusable U.S. infant mortality rate below its present level, which is higher than virtually all of Europe. (We nose out Croatia.) If they even give lip service to the need for universal health care, they don't tend to support remedies with any teeth.

Opposition to abortion is mostly driven by fear that making abortion easily available leads to sexual promiscuity and women not assuming their proper role in society, thus destroying the social fabric. An excellent book on this subject published by Cornell University Press analyzed the history of laws in all fifty states affecting women's rights and freedoms and those affecting the protection of life. It concluded that the states with the strictest abortion laws also offer the poorest protection of women's rights and worst protection of life in all areas other than abortion, and that restricting women's rights was a much stronger motivator of anti-abortion laws than fetal protection. (The Journal of Christian Ethics described the book as a balanced prescription for a "seamless garment of love for unborn children.")

Homophobes fear that greater rights for gays would unleash the demon of sexual promiscuity. Fear of crime drives opposition to gun control. Support for strict adherence to the constitution and states rights is intended to counter court decisions supporting gun control, gays, women seeking abortions and host of other fear driven issues. Abandoning federal standards would allow states to revert back to their nineteen century policies, including on criminal justice and discrimination, which were the reason Congress and the courts intervened in the first place. In this context, the states rights movement is akin to the U.S. rendition program sending terror suspects to third world nations to be tortured, enabling the U.S. government to absolve itself of responsibility for the resulting horror.

Those who are adamant about lower taxes are mostly people who would much rather make decisions about charity themselves and who don’t want to give their hard earned money away to people they think are a bunch of lazy lowlifes. This includes lowlifes in poor countries, hence the opposition to nation building. (The story of how the opposition to nation building got perverted by fear of terrorists and an opportunity for some loyal Republican to get rich on the war has been recounted at length elsewhere.) The ridiculous rationalization that lower taxes stimulate today's economy ignores the fact that deficit spending irresponsibly shifts the burden to pay for today's government services on future generations. Not exactly family values.

I don’t see a lot of daylight between what Ron Paul is preaching and what George Bush preached in 2000. On global warming, the only other issue that’s big right now, Paul and Bush both agree that government should not do much.

Paul’s talk about abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and Social Security gives him that radical edge, but the demise of these institutions is a political impossibility and he knows it. So why is Ron Paul a phenom? Some of the right wingers disenchanted with the Republican Party establishment suddenly have found a home. Perhaps he’ll launch a third-party bid and do to the Republicans what Ralph Nader did to the Democrats in 2000 – siphon off votes. Yea!

The pollution problem.

Is the quote below The Economist Magazine talking about the Republican Party in the United States, or The New York Times talking about the Communist Party in China? Click here to find out.

Reining in economic growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country’s political system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public, provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests and threaten the party’s rule.

Should the traveling TB lawyer be disbarred?

It is hard to understand how a person, required by the laws governing his chosen profession to act ethically, could be as irresponsible as Andrew Speaker. This Georgia lawyer was told not to fly because he might infect others with tuberculosis (TB), a contagious and life threatening disease. His father-in-law is a tuberculosis researcher, and Speaker should have fully understood the risks he was imposing on the thousands of people he would come in contact with on his planned trip to Europe. According to the World Health Organization, each person with TB infects 10 to 15 other people on average.

Yet, Speaker got on a plane and flew to Paris. He later flew on five flights to cities in Europe, getting married in Greece. In Rome he was tracked down, and told further testing showed he had an extremely drug resistant form of TB and to await further instructions for treatment. Instead, he flew to Prague, booked a flight to Canada and drove across the U.S. border to avoid detection.

Now, he is under quarantine in a Denver hospital with "a form of TB that kills a high percentage of those infected around the world." Hundreds of his fellow airline passengers may have to be tested for TB. He faces years of treatment that "will involve risks of side effects that could damage his kidneys and liver" and may have to undergo major surgery to remove part of his lung. Anyone he infected on his honeymoon travels may face the same fate. He was reported to be "concerned about the publicity his case was receiving."

Lawyers have a public image of being greedy, selfish and unscrupulous, and the profession's reputation was dealt another blow by Speaker's reprehensible behavior. The laws of Georgia call for an attorney's disbarment for conviction of "a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude." Should Speaker be prosecuted if he violated any laws in his evasion of public health authorities? Should he be disbarred if convicted? Do the answers to these questions change if he infected anyone with TB during his trip?

The phone number for the United States Attorney's Office in Atlanta is:
404-581-6000 Fax: 404-581-6181

The State Bar phone number for reporting attorney misconduct in Georgia is:
800-334-6865 ext. 720 or 404-527-8720

If you want to contact Speaker directly, his contact information published by the State Bar Georgia is:
Mr. Andrew Harley Speaker
Speaker Law Firm
4651 Roswell Road, Suite D-302
Atlanta, GA 30342
Phone: 404-531-9868
Fax: 404-531-4835
Email: aspeaker@speakerlawfirm.com
Admit Date: 10/27/2004
Law School: University of Georgia

Slum lords and pimps.

The three elected Republican administrations of my politically conscious lifetime - Nixon, Reagan/Bush and Bush II stand out for their corruption. Nixon was impeached and forced to resign for masterminding the commission of crimes while spying on his political opponents, for obstruction of justice in trying to cover them up, and for lying about that. Reagan appointed scores of crooks to cabinet and administrative positions, who set about using their power to line the pockets of friends and party loyalists or to look the other way while others did so. The Reagan administration set a still unbroken record for the number of its officials indicted or officially investigated for criminal acts – 138. The Savings and Loan scandal alone cost taxpayers $150,000,000,000.

George W. Bush started a war on false pretenses, and then set about awarding billions in no bid contracts to his friends. Now it appears that many of the Iraq infrastructure projects built by U.S. firms are crumbling and stand mostly as monuments to billions of wasted U.S. tax dollars. Iraq’s infrastructure resembles a scene from the recent dystopian satiric film Idiocracy.

The recent resignation of the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a typical example of the rampant corruption in George W. Bush’s administration here at home. She violated federal rules by giving internal agency documents to industry lobbyists that in some cases were used in lawsuits against the agency challenging its conservation policies. She changed the reports of agency scientists to make their findings more favorable to private and corporate interests, and in one case, her own ranch.

The conduct of the Deputy Secretary of State, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development illustrates the administration's hypocrisy. He pushed for funding to promote abstinence at the expense of funding for condom use in AIDS prevention, but resigned last month after it was alleged that he frequented prostitutes. He also was in charge of enforcing a U.S. requirement that aid recipients swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

It is also worth mentioning that Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, and subsequently appointed as head of the World Bank by Bush II, insisted that the greatest problem facing the World Bank is corruption. He now will likely have to resign because of his own corruption at the bank: using his office to obtain a promotion and a hefty raise for his girlfriend.

Perhaps the best illustration of the pervasive corruption under Bush II is the fact that for the first time in history, four Inspectors General simultaneously are under investigation for corruption. These "watchdogs" are appointed by a President to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. This follows the resignation of three other Inspectors General appointed by Bush II after they were accused of abusing their offices.

Under Bush II, good government always takes a back seat to advancing the power of the G.O.P. Part of this strategy is a widespread effort to "purify" government agencies so that staff, even those in career civil service jobs, are party loyalists. This brings two analogies to mind. The first is the McCarthy era of the 1950's, when Senators McCarthy and Nixon went on a witch hunt for suspected Communists in government. (Watch Good Night, and Good Luck if you want to learn about it.) The second was the practice, during the Communist heydays in the Soviet Union and China, of appointing political officers in every government office and military unit, even in those with as few as a dozen people. The political officer often had more authority than the director or commander, and was responsible for ensuring that policies were in line with party doctrine and that persons suspected of being anything but absolutely loyal were fired or imprisoned. (See The Hunt for Red October for an example.)

As Frank Rich says in his May 13 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times, the focus on party loyalty is the result of Bush II giving his politic strategist Karl Rove free "reign" to remake government. According to Ron Suskind, White House staff have a name to describe their mission: "strategery." This was taken from a Saturday Night Live skit about George Bush in the 2000 election, and reflects the belief that public policy is a farce and politics is all that matters. In Suskind’s January 2003 article, he quotes John DiIulio, an academic who ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for Bush II. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything – and I mean everything – being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." DiIulio added that under Bush II, "policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver."

DiIulio's observation has been borne out in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort. In part to bolster the party’s unholy alliance with the religious right, many of the Americans hired by both government and private contractors to rebuild Iraq were hired primarily for being G.O.P. loyalists and staunch religious conservatives, and often were otherwise unqualified for their positions. Most knew nothing about Middle Eastern culture and had never traveled outside the U.S.

The most recent exposure of Bush/Rove strategery, and how it has been implemented by political officers, comes from the story of Monica Goodling, who took the fifth amendment rather than testify before Congress about her role in the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. (See my previous post.) A 1999 graduate of a law school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, she began as an opposition researcher (dirt finder) for the Republican National Committee in the 2000 presidential campaign. Meteorically, she rose to become deputy director of the executive office of the Justice Department, and then became liaison to the White House. She stands accused of using political criteria when interviewing applicants for civil service jobs and for the department's honors program for recent law school graduates. Posing as the anti-Clinton, she even asked some applicants if they had cheated on their spouses. At the age of 32, she received hiring and firing authority for all political appointments in Justice headquarters, including the heads of the various enforcement divisions. (Readers will be relieved to know that she is currently under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, a political appointee.)

Republican control of Congress over the past twelve years brought a level of corruption unprecedented in past seventy-five years. Ethics and their enforcement were put on hold by Gingrich, Army, DeLay and their cronies. You have to go back to the time of Warren G. Harding to find anything comparable.

Why this pattern? It’s really quite simple. When a basic tenant of your political philosophy is that government is evil and wasteful, it becomes easy to view government as nothing more than a means to power and an exploitable asset. (See Paul Krugman’s March 19 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times.) As Reagan defined it in his inaugural speech, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." The leaders of the Republican party have treated our government as a slum lord treats an apartment building, as a pimp treats a whore, or as a corporate raider treats an acquired subsidiary. The G.O.P. has no respect for government, except as a tool in the party’s crusades for permanent power and as a means to increase the personal wealth of its elites. This has been consistent across four decades of G.O.P. Presidencies.

Postscript: Those who argue that the Clinton administration was similarly corrupt have been getting their news from right wing talk radio. Republican Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who spent most of Clinton’s time as President investigating him, spent more than 50,000,000 tax dollars to prove nothing more damaging to the administration than that Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it. Clinton did let some big political donors spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom, which was not illegal. Republicans castigated him for this, but in the hypocrisy that comes so easily to them, recently rewarded their big donors with seats at the official state dinner for the Queen of England.

Update: The book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, describes how conservatives have set about destroying government from within for the reasons described above.

Kurt Vonnegut

I have been in an other-worldly state since hearing the news of his passing. Someone at work described me has having an unusual aura of calm on an otherwise hectic day. I guess that is my way of mourning this great man, who so affected my life. I'm not quite sure how the world will get by without him.

A Dutch friend lent me his copy of The Sirens of Titan to help me cope with my disorientation in trying to fit in at an IBM sales school in 1976.
Seeing the film adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five forever changed the way I look at films, and eventually led me to teaching how films portray law and society.
I had the unbelievable privilege to play Elliot Rosewater in a community theater production of God Bless You Mr. Rosewater in 1988. During the run, my sister met Kurt Vonnegut and he autographed a copy of the program for the show.
I love Galapagos because of Vonnegut’s cautionary interpretation of the work of my other patron saint, Charles Darwin, with whose father I share my name.
Finally, Vonnegut rightly complained that the greatest malady affecting U.S. society was the loss of the extended family. I see his concern everyday in my job as a lawyer representing children in foster care.
He will be missed...

PS. It is of no small consequence that on the day after the world learned of Vonnegut's passing, a shift in world politics was noted. An unnamed senior foreign official attending a meeting of the World Bank observed, “There is a sense that we’re finally at a moment when Bush needs the world more than the world needs Bush.” It would appear that Vonnegut's departure was the catalyst for a sort of a reverse ice-nine effect. The shock woke people up!

Prosecutor-gate: "Idiocy on the part of the administration"

That’s how Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, member of the Judiciary Committee, described the Bush White House and Justice Department’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys (see previous post). This affair is cratering around "The Architect" Karl Rove. For perhaps the first time in six years, a desire for the appearance of integrity is a stronger motivator for many Republican members of Congress than loyalty to the President. There have been some mavericks before on the war and civil liberties, but what I’m calling "Prosecutor-gate" is bringing out Republican critics in significant numbers.

Today’s news reveals how deep the elbows of the President and senior White House aides were into this putrid mess, despite their repeated earlier denials. But there is another intriguing detail. Apparently the internal rationale used to justify firing the U.S. Attorneys was that they were not pursuing voter fraud cases.

Allegations of cheating in the last two close Presidential elections break down along on party lines. Republicans claim that a significant numbers of voters actually are ineligible to vote because they are felons (in some states) or non-citizens, or because they vote more than once in an election. Although very little voter fraud has been documented, Republicans say that election officials and prosecutors just aren’t looking hard enough.

Democrats assert the bigger problem needing attention is institutional disenfranchisement of poor people more likely to vote Democratic. One tactic Republican elections officials have used is dropping voters from the rolls in heavily Democratic precincts using inaccurate lists of felons, who by law in some states lose their right to vote. Another is threatening to arrest people if they show up to vote and are improperly registered or have outstanding warrants. This scares off people who fear the police. A third method is not providing enough resources to handle demand at polling stations in poor precincts. In the past twenty years, there is far more documented evidence of institutional vote suppression (committed by both parties) that has affected far more elections than there is of fraud committed by voters. The intense scrutiny of the close elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 found many instances of vote suppression, with the Republican Party in charge in both states.

Republicans want more focus on voter fraud for three reasons. The first is because they believe that people desperate enough to take money to engage in voter fraud are usually felons, migrants and poor people more likely to vote for Democrats. The second reason, say Democrats, is that making voter fraud the villain draws attention away from the Republicans' use of institutional disenfranchisement. The third reason is that threats to prosecute voter fraud are themselves a form of vote suppression, and Republican election strategy relies on intimidating indigent and poorly educated voters to stay away from the polls.

What Republican leaders want are some voter fraud prosecutions, especially in states where Democrats are in power. This is where the fired U.S. Attorneys come in. (Never mind that the U.S. Attorneys are supposed to be protecting us from organized crime and terrorists and that local law enforcement is much better suited to going after individual fraudulent voters – if they exist.) Senator Pete Domenici and Congresswoman Heather Wilson, both Republicans from New Mexico – a state with a large number of poor immigrants – have admitted asking the now fired U.S. Attorney to begin a voter fraud prosecution before the last election. Wilson is the ranking Republican member of the House Ethics Committee and should have known better. (By the way, the fired U.S. Attorney in New Mexico was the Navy prosecutor portrayed by Tom Cruise in the film A Few Good Men.)

It’s no surprise that of the eight U.S. Attorneys fired in Prosecutor-gate, seven are from states in the South or West with significant migrant farm worker populations. Seven are from states with administrations controlled by Democrats, or in the case of California, from a state where the Governor is a Republican in name only and the Attorney General is Democrat Jerry Brown. In other words, the fired prosecutors came from states where Republicans have a strong interest in bringing voter fraud prosecutions for partisan political ends.

That's how badly Karl Rove and the Republican party leadership want to win elections.

(See N.Y.Times Editorial published March 16, arguing that "the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people," and that the eight U.S. Attorneys were fired for not using "their offices to help Republicans win elections.")

Rove's latest dirty trick: The Patriot Act prosecutor switch

Just when you may have thought there might be nothing more to know about the extraordinary malfeasance by the Bush administration, come more sickening details. A little-known provision of the "Patriot" Act apparently was designed for no other purpose than to allow Karl Rove to create more Republican pseudo prosecutors to run for Congress. The plan, as described in a N.Y. Times Op-ed, kills two birds with one stone. It lets Bush axe some particularly effective prosecutors of corrupt Republicans and replace them with inexperienced novices who will then use their new title of U.S. Attorney as a tough-on-crime credential to win a seat in the 2008 election. Diabolical. The change in the Patriot Act allows the newbies to serve indefinitely as interim U.S. Attorneys without ever having to face the embarrassment of rejection by the Senate.

As with so many of these political dirty tricks and abuses of power, Democrats will not have enough guile to use them if they get the White House back, so there is very little downside for the Republicans. Public outcry (and maybe some sense of the integrity that is critical to public trust in the inherent power of the U.S. Attorney post) probably will motivate Democrats to close this wormhole if they get the chance to overhaul the Patriot Act. But who knows? The bar has been set so low it may never get raised back to where it was before Bush came to town. (See followup story.)

George and Dick imagined as "Thelma and Louise"

See Thelma and Louise Imperialism: Over the Cliff with George and Dick? by Tom Engelhardt. (imdb link)

Script idea: "Thank You for Spitting"

News accounts of the life of a Georgia Congressman who died today from lung and liver cancer seem too over the top to be real, perhaps a case of life imitating art in the manner of Robert Duval’s spoof of a dying southern conservative in Thank You for Smoking. But he was real, and his life and political career explain a lot about the mess the country is in today with the war, climate change and eroded civil liberties.

According to the Associated Press, tobacco-chewing dentist Charles Norwood, Jr. was first elected to Congress during the Republican Revolution of 1994 and was famous for his infrequent use of diplomatic language. One of his proudest accomplishments was cutting a swath through red tape so that a constituent could bring home a stuffed polar bear killed in a hunt in Canada. Last year, Norwood was one of only 33 House members who voted against renewing the Voting Rights Act. A life-long gun rights advocate, as a teenager he shot and killed a close friend at a private boarding school during a quick-draw contest with what they believed were empty guns. If voters are going to continue to re-elect men like this, the least someone could do is make a comedy about it. Otherwise, our future would seem too bleak.

Democratic blunder on Iraq.

There's been lots of cheering, applause and praise for Senator Webb's speech for the Democrats last night, responding to Bush's State of the Union speech, but I was dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity of the ending. The final mental image that lingers in viewers' minds is key to the success of any important speech and Webb sent exactly the wrong message. I'll lay out the dots and then connect them as I saw it.

It's become politically fashionable of late to use the words and actions of the other side's heroes to make big points, a trend that seems to grow more prevalent as the national discourse has become further partisan and polarized. Republicans cite FDR and Democrats cite Reagan, which they imagine makes them sound more reasonable. So, some genius speechwriter decided that Webb should refer to Teddy Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower. He ended his speech by reminding us that Ike quickly ended the Korean War because it had become a "bloody stalemate."

The main justification Bush gave in 2002 and 2003 for the invasion of Iraq was that some crazy dictator in a country with a culture Americans don't understand was about to get nuclear weapons and use them against the U.S. As Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Of course, the nuclear weapons and WMD claims weren't true. Now, most people believe that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence information to get public support for the war, but the WMD fear is still there. We've heard a lot in the past two years about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, Iraq's neighbor and likely participant in the Iraq civil war meltdown that could follow if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq.

So what do people think of when they think of the legacy of the Korean War? Most likely, it is North Korea, a nation with a culture Americans don't understand, ruled by a crazy dictator who has nuclear weapons and missiles that he may use against the U.S. If Jim Webb and the Democrats want to convince the American public that we should get out of Iraq, I can't think of a worse example to use than the Korean War.

If any of the New York Times reading, latte drinking, sushi eating liberals that Webb surely consulted for his speech had bothered to see Team America: World Police, they would have realized what a blunder it would be to end a pullout-from-Iraq speech with a reference to Korea. If the Democrats want to lead us out of Iraq, they'll have to be a lot smarter in making their case.

Bush spins himself as a stunned onlooker of events in Iraq.

Today President Bush added his own voice to the chorus seeking to increase public perception of the administration’s distance from the policies of Iraq government. (See earlier posts 1 & 2) His verbal imagery took me back to a scene from my own past. I crashed a hang glider I was piloting into a parking lot full of cars. By the time onlookers could get over to the me, I had already unhooked myself from the craft and was standing up– although very dazed. As curious people arrived, I simply blended into the crowd–too numb to accept the role of either perpetrator or victim.

That’s what Bush seems to be doing with Iraq. He’s now pretending to be just one of the crowd of stunned on lookers at a crash scene. On the PBS News Hour, he said, "If you were to take it and put me in an opinion poll and said ‘Do I approve of Iraq’ I’d be one of those that said, ‘No, I don’t approve of what’s taking place in Iraq."’ Bush also criticized the Iraq government’s execution of the Saddam–the man the U.S. handed over to Iraq to be hung and that Bush has called the man who "tried to kill my father." (See earlier posts 3 & 4) Ironically, given his personal issues with Saddam, Bush said the hanging "looked like it was kind of a revenge killing."

Eventually, someone will remind Bush that he’s been piloting the ship of state.

Children of Men

Children of Men, currently in theaters, uses many cliches of the action/adventure drama about the reluctant hero and his eventual passionate engagement in the mission forced upon him, but the social commentary and powerful imagery will leave you pondering scenes in this film long after you leave the theater.

The film is set in Britain in 2027. Heavily armed Homeland Security forces are perpetually rounding up illegal immigrants and putting them in camps. Their processing is portrayed as cross between post 9/11 airport security and entry into a Nazi concentration camp. A large chunk of the film takes place in lawless urban wasteland that has a number of parallels to present-day Iraqi cities outside the Green Zone, and harkens back to British occupation of Northern Ireland. The British forces try to keep order amongst an intimidated non-British population living in squalor, whilst also battling terrorists and heavily-armed sectarian groups. I worry that the portrayal of security forces here is much like the vision present day Iraqis have of occupying coalition armies. One U.S government poll found that 90 percent of young Iraqis view the U.S. "as an occupying force." If so, our enterprise there is doomed.

Iraq is Bush's pet goat

Iraq is now like the exotic pet a kid begs for that he doesn't have the maturity and commitment to care for. Seemed like a great idea at the time, but he has neither the patience to learn how to take care of it, nor the discipline to provide all the cleaning, feeding and exercise that the pet requires. Eventually, the kid may blame the pet rather than face his own responsibilities. So, the pet dies, wanders off, or his parents find it a new home.

Except that this pet is not a goat, but rather a country of twenty-six million people. Its fledgling government has now become Bush's scapegoat for his failed endeavor. (See my earlier post.)

The misunderestimation of Gerald Ford.

Who could have predicted, in 1977 or 1981, that in the waning days of some Republican administration in the future we'd be reminiscing about how Ford’s skills as a President were misunderestimated? (See word use in a speech.)

U.S. to Iraq: "You just can't change your evil ways..."

As I said in my previous post, the Saddam execution is serving as a focal point for the Bush Administration's efforts to distance itself from the new regime it created in Iraq, so as to smooth the way for an inevitable abandonment. According to a new New York Times article, U.S. officials are saying:

• The hanging reveals "how the 'new Iraq' is starting to resemble, the repressive, vengeful place it was under Mr. Hussein, albeit in a paler shade."
• "The way it has come out with the hanging, we’ve substituted one dictatorship for another.”

My previous post also scoffed at U.S. claims that it was compelled to bow to Iraqi sovereignty on the timing and manner of Saddam's execution, and the New York Times article contains more U.S. spin on this. However, the article also notes that the American military fort ironically named "Camp Justice" completely encloses the Istikhbarat prison in which Saddam was executed, and where thousands of hangings occurred under Saddam's regime.
(A Carlos Santana song inspired the post title)

The light at the bottom of the gallows.

Against the backdrop of recommendation by a New Jersey legislative commission that the State abolish the death penalty because it does not serve "a legitimate purpose" and "is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency," the U.S. government appears to be spinning the story that it bowed to the wishes of the sovereign nation of Iraq as to the timing of Saddam’s execution. Not turning Saddam over "would have involved riding roughshod over the Iraqi leaders’ insistence on their sovereignty in the execution," says an unnamed source in the New York Times. Balderdash – American taxpayers bought the Iraq government and are still paying for it.

It’s just a coincidence that the execution happened on the Friday evening before New Year’s weekend, 10:10 PM, Washington Time, the beginning of a non-religious holiday, when, for the next three-and-a-half days, the fewest number of people in the U.S. were reporting, reading or viewing the news. And, that the preparations for national mourning over the death of President Ford three days before were dominating what little news bandwidth there was. The White House claims that President Bush went to sleep without knowing whether the execution had been carried out, which would have been just after 9 PM Texas time, because he "knew that it was going to happen." If Iraq really is "sovereign nation," how did he "know" with such certainty?

A more likely explanation for U.S. insistence that Iraq is operating independently is that the Bush administration has now written off the whole affair as a bad investment, and wants to be in a position to wash it hands of it before the President’s term expires. The more opportunities Washington can give the Iraqi government to screw up before then, the easier it will be for Bush to blame the failure on them. Here is how the administration is using the New York Times to weave this theme:

For the past three years, the United States has attempted to lay the foundations in Iraq for a civil society and a nation under law. American officials say privately that the Maliki government, by allowing the Hussein execution to be conducted as it did, signaled more powerfully than ever before that it was unwilling or incapable of surmounting the deep sectarian divisions here.

Expect to hear "We gave them a great shot, and they blew it" repeated many times before the last American flies on the last flight out of Baghdad. Nobody in the current administration fought in Vietnam, but they surely remember the mockery of the "light at the end of the tunnel" promises when that last helicopter lifted away from the American embassy in Saigon, and they want to avoid it this time.