Bush Progress

Donald Rumsfeld’s measurement standard for judging our progress in Iraq:

Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Samantha Powers’, the Anna Lindh, professor of the practice of global leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, evaluation of the Bush administration in the New York Times Book Review:

Leaked intelligence reports have shown that the answer is negative. The administration’s tactical and strategic blunders have crippled American military readiness; exposed vulnerabilities in training, equipment and force structure; and accelerated terrorist recruitment. In short, although the United States has not been directly hit since 9/11, we are less safe as a result of the Bush administration’s rhetoric, conduct and strategy.

And what about the impact on Iraq itself? Is it better off? Not according to the researchers from the British-based humanitarian group Oxfam International and a coalition of nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq in the 40-page report released yesterday:

Living conditions in Iraq have deteriorated significantly since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, leaving nearly one-third of the population in need of emergency aid. The numbers in the report offer a contrast to the picture of steadily improving conditions painted by the Iraqi government and the U.S. military over the past several months. Seventy percent of Iraqi residents lack adequate water supplies, compared with 50 percent in 2003, while more than 4 million people have been displaced during that time. Yet funding for humanitarian assistance in Iraq has declined precipitously, from $453 million in 2005 to $95 million in 2006.

Iraq's civilians are suffering from a denial of fundamental human rights in the form of chronic poverty, malnutrition, illness, lack of access to basic services, and destruction of homes, vital facilities, and infrastructure, as well as injury and death. Basic indicators of humanitarian need in Iraq show that the slide into poverty and deprivation since the coalition forces entered the country in 2003 has been dramatic, and a deep trauma for the Iraqi people.

Two million people have left their homes for other parts of the country, the report concludes, while an additional 2 million have fled to other nations, mostly Syria and Jordan. The problem is especially acute among professional workers, the report said, estimating that more than 40 percent of doctors, engineers and other highly skilled workers have left the country.

Bush, of course, continues, impervious of the disaster he has caused, blindly unchanging his belief that God supports his position. Based on the polls, there may be no one else. His simplistic view that we are fighting a war started on 9/11 and that the only response is by military force displays such ignorance of the world and that motivations of people that it would be laughable if not for the dire consequences that wil be haunting us for years.

Metallica at Live Earth - Nothing Else Matters

Today the President plans to start talking about his "post surge vision" while making absolutely no change in his present policy, which is to stay in Iraq until he leaves the Presidency. As he always does, he is saying one thing (spinning/ lying?) while doing the opposite. Although his base may have problems understanding these words in comparison to his claims of staying the course. But of course that is giving them too much credit for rational thought.

When you can't take anymore of George, it is time to turn to the music.

The Cat

From the NPR Morning Edition website:

Andrew Carroll compiled a collection called Operation Homecoming, writings from those who've been to Iraq or Afghanistan, and the families back home. The book is part of a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In April 2004, twenty-eight-year-old Ryan Alexander deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army's Stryker Brigade Combat Team. (Alexander had served in the U.S. Marine Corps but was honorably discharged in 2001. When Operation Iraqi Freedom began, he volunteered to work with the SBCT as a civilian. The specifics of his job cannot be disclosed.) Alexander wrote the following poem about a cat he encountered soon after he arrived in Mosul.

The Cat
by Ryan Alexander

She came to me skittish, wild.
The way you're meant to be,
surrounded by cruelty.
I did not blame her.
I would do the same.

A pregnant cat, a happy distraction;
some sort of normal thing.
Calico and innocent.

The kittens in her belly said feed me.

And I did.

She crept with careful eye,
Body held low to the dirt,
Snagged a bite,
And carried it just far enough away.

She liked the MREs,
the beef stew, the chicken breast, the barbeque pork,
but she did not like canned sardines.
I do not blame her.
I would do the same.

She came around again and again
finally deciding that I was no threat,
that this big man wasn't so bad.

I was afraid to touch her as the docs warned us.
Iraqi animals were carriers of flesh-eating disease.
I donned a plastic glove and was the first to pet
this wild creature who may be

the one true heart and mind that America
had won over.

After a while I forgot the glove and enjoyed
the tactile softness of short fur,
flesh-eating bacteria be damned.

Her belly swelled for weeks
and she disappeared for some days
until her kittens were safely birthed

in the shallow of a rusted desk
in the ruins that lined the road behind us.

She came around again slim
with afterbirth still matted to her hind legs.

She would return, but not quite as often.
She came to eat and for attention,
but there was nursing to be done.

One day she crept up with a kitten in her mouth.
She dropped it at my foot and stared up at me;
she expected something, but there was nothing I could do.
The young black and white kitten was dead,
its eyes not yet opened.

It looked like some shriveled old wise thing,
completely still, mouth puckered,
small body curled and limp.

She let me take the baby without a fight.
She knew, but seemed unaffected.

She had fetched me a gift,
a lesson,
among the worried nights,
shot nerves from poorly aimed mortar rounds:

Everything dies.
The evil, the innocent,
her baby and
me.

I thought I should say a prayer and bury
this poor little thing,
but I did for it what will be done for me.
I laid it in the burn can amongst the ash
and said I'm sorry.

Its Not What You Are, It’s Who You Are

The President and the law and order party have spoken:

President Bush’s statement on the commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby -
From the very beginning of the investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame's name, I made it clear to the White House staff and anyone serving in my administration that I expected full cooperation with the Justice Department.

… a jury of citizens weighed all the evidence and listened to all the testimony and found Mr. Libby guilty of perjury and obstructing justice. They argue, correctly, that our entire system of justice relies on people telling the truth. And if a person does not tell the truth, particularly if he serves in government and holds the public trust, he must be held accountable.

Mr. Fitzgerald is a highly qualified, professional prosecutor who carried out his responsibilities as charged.

I respect the jury's verdict.


Robert Bork and James Rosen, National Review -
Lying under oath strikes at the heart of our system of justice and the rule of law. It does not matter in the least what the perjury is about.

Bill Bennett, Wall Street Journal -
And we know that when a person testifies under oath that he doesn't remember something when in fact he does, he has committed perjury.

One might think that these statements are all endorsements of the Court of Appeals decision to deny Libby’s claims and recognition that he would soon begin his prison sentence. But that would be falling into the old trick of thinking that Conservative public words stand for truth and consistency of ideas and values, rather then attempts to fool the public by claiming one thing while doing the opposite.

Bush logic (I know it is a contradiction in terms) has concluded that despite the jury decision, the distinguished prosecution, and the verdicts of courts appointed by Republican Presidents; they all got it wrong and that therefore he has to rectify their errors. Bush pretty much on his own, after one and one half terms of almost never using Presidential pardon authority, has found this particular decision to be so grievous that compassion just impelled him to act.

He, so far, has not issued a full pardon; although today he said that is still on the table. But to his mind the jury sentence “was excessive.” Let’s not let words get in the way. If something were excessive wouldn’t that argue for reducing the period rather then eliminating it altogether?

Could this be hush money?

The real message is to everyone else who has not yet bailed out of the administration: lie as often as you need to in order to protect Bush and Cheney, and you won’t have to pay the consequences.

Both Bush and Cheney lament that Libby is faced with a $250,000 fine and diminished reputation. How long is it going to be before some Republican think tank, lobbying firm, or big business hires Scooter to provide his government expertise, at multiple millions per year, and we see pictures of him smiling as he pays the fine, while being lauded as a hero by the GOP base that despite the glaring evidence thinks Bush can do no wrong? In case you’ve forgotten, Spiro Agnew forced to resign as Vice President for accepting bribes while Governor of Maryland, retired in wealth to Palm Springs golf courses and numerous remunerative speaking engagements.

White House thinking must have been that with poll numbers as low as any President’s what is one more heinous act. Just a blip on an already tainted record. At least he is making the base happy, which is all he ever tries to do. Its been a good week for them – Libby spared from jail and the now the officially conservative Supreme Court grandiosely claiming to strike the specter of discrimination from the schools by preventing school districts from using race to achieve diversity has actually ensured that the stark reality of geographic segregation will remain in place for the foreseeable future.