Friday, August 24, 2007

Bob Gates on the Iraq War Hot Seat

By Robert Parry
August 24, 2007

Defense Secretary Robert Gates may be confronting the career decision of a lifetime: Should the former CIA director lash himself to the mast with George W. Bush and risk going down with the foundering Iraq War ship or should he look to a post-Bush period and position himself as a Washington wise man?

Now that President Bush has invited comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, a parallel could be drawn between Gates and Clark Clifford, the Defense Secretary who took over the job in March 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War and persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to start down the road toward a negotiated settlement.

Read on.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Bush's Bogus Vietnam History Kills

By Robert Parry
August 23, 2007

It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But a much worse fate may await countries whose leaders distort and falsify history. Such countries are doomed to experience even bloodier miscalculations.

That was the case with Germany after World War I when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis built a political movement based in part on the myth that weak politicians in Berlin had stabbed brave German troops in the back when they were on the verge of victory.

Read on.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Many Democrats Wrong on Iraq, Again

By Brent Budowsky
August 22, 2007

Here is my answer to Kenneth Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon and the latest tragic evasion and spin on the Iraq War currently circulating in high Democratic circles:

The Aug. 22 story in The Washington Post is accurate and fits with what I am hearing privately. Many Democrats are again missing the first principle of the matter and treating Iraq in political and tactical terms.

Read on.

If the Democrats Want to Lose...

By Robert Parry
August 22, 2007

Many national Democrats saw last year’s election as a political turning point. They cheered the voters’ repudiation of a Republican one-party state; they hailed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ouster the next day; and they were sure that resurgent GOP “realists” would help wind down the Iraq War.

In this Democratic view, George W. Bush was going to be both the lamest of lame ducks and a deadly albatross draped around the neck of the Republican Party in Election 2008. The Democrats believed they could pretty much start measuring their curtains for a move into the White House on Jan. 20, 2009.

Read on.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Bush's New War Drums for Iran

By Ray McGovern
August 21, 2007

It is as though I’m back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.

It is precisely the work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now—ever since 9/11, when “everything changed.”

Read on.

Monday, August 20, 2007

NYPD's Homegrown Hysteria

By Nat Parry
August 20, 2007

An influential report by two New York Police Department counterterrorism analysts crosses a dangerous threshold in recasting the “war on terror” as primarily a struggle that requires increased domestic surveillance and pre-emptive action against American Muslims who might become “homegrown terrorists” by visiting Internet sites.

Written by Mitchell Silber and Arvin Bhatt, the Aug. 15 report recommends increased police attention “to identify, pre-empt and thus prevent homegrown terrorist attacks.” The report was promptly hailed in the U.S. news media. (Newsweek called it “insightful.”)

What makes the report troubling to civil libertarians, however, is that it lowers the bar for fighting terrorism to simply the possibility that some domestic Muslims might be influenced by jihadist Web sites, and it applies lax standards to target Americans of a specific religious faith as prospective terrorists.

Read on.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Bush Fails Upward in 'War on Terror'

By Ivan Eland
August 19, 2007

If a restaurant, dry cleaner, or home repair business provided inferior goods or shoddy services, it is likely that the concern would go belly up. Yet when the U.S. government makes a blunder, the more its citizens reward its failure with further money and authority.

For example, after the Bush administration exacerbated the worldwide threat from Islamic terrorists by invading and occupying two Muslim nations, spied on Americans without warrants—which is both illegal and unconstitutional—to “urgently” combat such terrorism, and then saw its Attorney General dissemble about the espionage program, Congress has actually rewarded the administration for its actions.

Read on.