by Larry Beinhart - Common Dreams
Reason #1 to be suspicious of the Big Big Bailout, is George Bush.
This is not a Bush bash, it's actually an analysis.
All major George Bush initiatives, and most of the minor ones too, have certain things in common.
#1: They're failures.
#2: They leave a big mess for other people to clean up. Someday.
#3: They make matters worse.
#4: Some small group of people profit from it, and they profit hugely.
#5: That profit comes from using the government to take money from ordinary people and give it to people who are already very rich and well connected.
The Bush initiatives include:
1. The decision, before 9/11, to ignore Al Qaeda and concentrate on ... who knows exactly what.
2. The invasion of Afghanistan for the purpose of capturing (or killing) Osama bin Laden & the rest of Al Qaeda.
When thinking about this war, and the others below, keep in mind that an unknown amount of the spending - but certainly more than half - goes to private contractors, the defense and the intelligence industries.
3. The invasion of Iraq.
4. The occupation of Iraq.
5. The reconstruction of Iraq.
6. The reconstruction of New Orleans.
7. The Medicare Care enrich the pharmaceutical companies bill
8. The tax cuts that would promote jobs - "good jobs" - and growth.
9. When the tax cuts failed and led to a recession, more tax cuts.
10. The theory that tax cuts would not create deficits and would pay for themselves.
11. Anti-regulation efforts. There were thousands of these. They came through setting policies, executive orders, selecting pro-industry, anti-regulation, incompetent - and sometimes corrupt - staffers.
12. Hyper-low interest rates from the Fed. This created the flood of cheap money and created the conditions under which the most profitable thing that banks could do was to borrow from the Fed, turn around, make loans as fast as possible, then rush back for more. It was the equivalent of giving free coal to power companies and not anticipating that they would then proceed to create more pollution.
13. The attempt to privatize Social Security.
If we step back a moment from the crisis, and look at it as if we're not involved, the likelihood is that saving Wall Street - in this fashion - will do exactly the same thing.
It is certain, absolutely certain, that it will make a group, a very small elite group, of very, very rich people, even richer.
A cap on executive pay, while laudable and a step in the right direction, will not, in the end make much difference. They have millions to spend on accountants, lawyers and lobbyists who will find, or create, ways around any caps.
It will make them rich by using the government to take money from ordinary people and giving it those rich people.
Will it fail?
Based on Bush's track record, the smart bet has to be yes.
Why will this one, like all the others, fail?
Because it's addressing the wrong things.
The real problem is that we have moved from a production economy to a consumption economy. Even worse, a consumption economy that supports the production economy in other countries. When we start to consume more than we produce - which we have - we must borrow. That means we're selling off or mortgaging our assets. If we were to do that to create more production which would ultimately pay for the investment, that would be alright. But we're not, we're just consuming more.
You can't borrow your way out of too much debt. At least not without a plan to create more income.
You can't consume your way out of an over-consumption problem.
If we don't address the fundamentals now, we will have to do so later. At that time, they we will be worse. Both by themselves and with the addition of the new $700 billion debt.
The ultimate problem is remaking ourselves into a production economy.
Is that possible?
Yes.
And it's probably cheaper than $700 billion or a $1 trillion bailout of the banks.
What if we took some smaller number - say a mere $500 billion - and decided to invest it in thngs like the following:
1. National health. Thereby making our older industries, burdened with health insurance commitments more competitive.
2. Protecting our coastlines. Thereby protecting ourselves against the huge losses from hurricanes like Katrina & Ike.
3. Investing in alternative energy, particularly wind and solar, and rebuilding the electrical grid to facilitate that. The work required to do that could not, for the most part, be outsourced. The jobs and the business would stay here.
4. Rebuilding our infrastructure generally. Good, efficient infrastructure makes business easier, quicker and cheaper.
5. Buying up individual problem mortgages.
6. Setting up a federal bank to make emergency loans to businesses and individuals who have come into harms way as a result of the crisis created by the Bushocrats and the Titans of Banking. When they're busy scaring us into this greatest of all heists in human history, they always talk about how it will affect "small business owners" who won't be able to make payroll, and the jobs and homes lost, to average folks on main street. If they need taking care of, let's do it directly, instead of through the rip-off artists who created the crisis.
The Big Big Bailout, as it is, will be crowning glory of Bushianity. One, gigantic theft of from real Americans to enrich the ruling class. It's a hell of trick. It's just like all the ones he's pulled before. If we fall for it, we are suckers and rubes, indeed.
US president told Israeli prime minister he would not back attack on Iran, senior European diplomatic sources tell Guardian
Israel gave serious thought this spring to launching a military strike on Iran's nuclear sites but was told by President George W Bush that he would not support it and did not expect to revise that view for the rest of his presidency, senior European diplomatic sources have told the Guardian.
A view of the nuclear enrichment plant of Natanz in central Iran. Photograph: EPAThe then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, used the occasion of Bush's trip to Israel for the 60th anniversary of the state's founding to raise the issue in a one-on-one meeting on May 14, the sources said. "He took it [the refusal of a US green light] as where they were at the moment, and that the US position was unlikely to change as long as Bush was in office", they added.
The sources work for a European head of government who met the Israeli leader some time after the Bush visit. Their talks were so sensitive that no note-takers attended, but the European leader subsequently divulged to his officials the highly sensitive contents of what Olmert had told him of Bush's position.
Bush's decision to refuse to offer any support for a strike on Iran appeared to be based on two factors, the sources said. One was US concern over Iran's likely retaliation, which would probably include a wave of attacks on US military and other personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on shipping in the Persian Gulf.
The other was US anxiety that Israel would not succeed in disabling Iran's nuclear facilities in a single assault even with the use of dozens of aircraft. It could not mount a series of attacks over several days without risking full-scale war. So the benefits would not outweigh the costs.
Iran has repeatedly said it would react with force to any attack. Some western government analysts believe this could include asking Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbollah to strike at the US.
"It's over ten years since Hizbollah's last terror strike outside Israel, when it hit an Argentine-Israel association building in Buenos Aires [killing 85 people]", said one official. "There is a large Lebanese diaspora in Canada which must include some Hizbollah supporters. They could slip into the United States and take action".
Even if Israel were to launch an attack on Iran without US approval its planes could not reach their targets without the US becoming aware of their flightpath and having time to ask them to abandon their mission.
"The shortest route to Natanz lies across Iraq and the US has total control of Iraqi airspace", the official said. Natanz, about 100 miles north of Isfahan, is the site of an uranium enrichment plant.
In this context Iran would be bound to assume Bush had approved it, even if the White House denied fore-knowledge, raising the prospect of an attack against the US.
Several high-level Israeli officials have hinted over the last two years that Israel might strike Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent them being developed to provide sufficient weapons-grade uranium to make a nuclear bomb. Iran has always denied having such plans.
Olmert himself raised the possibility of an attack at a press conference during a visit to London last November, when he said sanctions were not enough to block Iran's nuclear programme.
"Economic sanctions are effective. They have an important impact already, but they are not sufficient. So there should be more. Up to where? Up until Iran will stop its nuclear programme," he said.
The revelation that Olmert was not merely sabre-rattling to try to frighten Iran but considered the option seriously enough to discuss it with Bush shows how concerned Israeli officials had become.
Bush's refusal to support an attack, and the strong suggestion he would not change his mind, is likely to end speculation that Washington might be preparing an "October surprise" before the US presidential election. Some analysts have argued that Bush would back an Israeli attack in an effort to help John McCain's campaign by creating an eve-of-poll security crisis.
Others have said that in the case of an Obama victory, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the main White House hawk, would want to cripple Iran's nuclear programme in the dying weeks of Bush's term.
During Saddam Hussein's rule in 1981, Israeli aircraft successfully destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak shortly before it was due to start operating.
Last September they knocked out a buildings complex in northern Syria, which US officials later said had been a partly constructed nuclear reactor based on a North Korean design. Syria said the building was a military complex but had no links to a nuclear programme.
In contrast, Iran's nuclear facilities, which are officially described as intended only for civilian purposes, are dispersed around the country and some are in fortified bunkers underground.
In public, Bush gave no hint of his view that the military option had to be excluded. In a speech to the Knesset the following day he confined himself to telling Israel's parliament: "America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.''
Mark Regev, Olmert's spokesman, tonight reacted to the Guardian's story saying: "The need to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is raised at every meeting between the prime minister and foreign leaders. Israel prefers a diplomatic solution to this issue but all options must remain on the table. Your unnamed European source attributed words to the prime minister that were not spoken in any working meeting with foreign guests".
Three weeks after Bush's red light, on June 2, Israel mounted a massive air exercise covering several hundred miles in the eastern Mediterranean. It involved dozens of warplanes, including F-15s, F-16s and aerial refueling tankers.
The size and scope of the exercise ensured that the US and other nations in the region saw it, said a US official, who estimated the distance was about the same as from Israel to Natanz.
A few days later, Israel's deputy prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, told the paper Yediot Ahronot: "If Iran continues its programme to develop nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The window of opportunity has closed. The sanctions are not effective. There will be no alternative but to attack Iran in order to stop the Iranian nuclear programme."
The exercise and Mofaz's comments may have been designed to boost the Israeli government and military's own morale as well, perhaps, to persuade Bush to reconsider his veto. Last week Mofaz narrowly lost a primary within the ruling Kadima party to become Israel's next prime minister. Tzipi Livni, who won the contest, takes a less hawkish position.
The US announced two weeks ago that it would sell Israel 1,000 bunker-busting bombs. The move was interpreted by some analysts as a consolation prize for Israel after Bush told Olmert of his opposition to an attack on Iran. But it could also enhance Israel's attack options in case the next US president revives the military option.
The guided bomb unit-39 (GBU-39) has a penetration capacity equivalent to a one-tonne bomb. Israel already has some bunker-busters.
Robert Gordon - American Prospect
Conservatives blame the housing crisis on a 1977 law that helps-low income people get mortgages. It's a useful story for them, but it isn't true.
The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.
The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."
Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."
This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.
The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)
The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.
But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?
The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by 2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.
Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.
Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."
Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich, a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA, saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates. Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."
It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did.
And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.
By Danny Schechter, AlterNet
Missing in our media coverage is a sense of what's really behind this mess -- a debt we cannot manage or wish away.
The Hank and Ben Show was doing so well in the ratings. They crafted a plan -- ok, only 3 pages but still a prodigious effort in an era when so few can agree on the need for heat on a freezing day. But now the great unraveling has begun. Remember Karl M's lesson on the dialectic: thesis leads to anithesis resulting in synthesis. Maybe.
They sold the Democrats on the need for a bailout. They made it big so the rest of the world would notice and be impressed. They started out unreasonably demanding total power knowing they would have to compromise and so allow all sides to win something and hence come aboard.
Paulson knew he had to act fast, to make it happen in the same time period in which God was said to created the world. The 7 Day clock was ticking and they seemed headed for the endzone. A former football player, he avoided blocks by Nancy and tackles by Barney and was ready to throw a Hail Mary Pass if all else failed. President Bush was awakened from his slumber, given a script and a role to play in his White House pulpit. When his own party balked summarized the problem this way:
"This sucker could go down."
It wasn't clear who was the sucker -- the system, the taxpayers or both but it didn't matter. The credit markets were seizing up. Washington Mutual imploded and that hard rain that Dylan warned about was falling ominously on Washington and Wall Street at the same time.
Was this the deluge Jackson Browne warned about?
"By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge"
There certainly was a deluge of conflicting opinions, posturing and polemicizing. There was hysteria on the right about the coming of communism which must have amused the Chinese, and anger on the left which expressed itself in protests that the Big Chief Democrats ignored as they compromised or cave their way to the table.
Missing in most of our media coverage which reported the drama as a sit-com while focusing on the political debate to be or not to be, was any sense of what's really behind this -- a debt we cannot manage or wish away.
We are bankrupt and this may be a going out of business sale, as foretold by the Iranian President who said the U.S. Empire is spent. Noted the Journal Inquirer.com:
... even if it can work -- that is, prop up insolvent financial institutions -- the Treasury's proposal is still a proclamation of the collapse of the whole U.S. financial system. Even if some financial institutions are saved, the collapse will manifest itself in other ways, probably ways more damaging to the public. For who cares if Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley endure if the issuance of $700 billion more in government bonds drives interest rates way up, diverts credit from the private economy, devalues the already sinking dollar, and sends commodity prices soaring again?
Lordy, Ms. Claudy!
Across the pond where the Bank of England was joining other central bankers including the Fed in pumping more billions into money markets, the right wing magazine of Tory leanings, The Spectator ran a piece that said; "FACE IT, MARX IS HALF RIGHT ABOUT CAPITALISM." Oh the pain in that admission. The article focused on DEBT, the d word that is so often conspicuous by its absence:
Trading the debts of others without accountability has been the motor of astronomical financial gain for many in recent years. .... This crisis exposes the element of basic unreality in the situation -- the truth that almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders. But while we are getting used to this sudden vision of the Emperor's New Clothes, there are one or two questions that, in government as in society at large, we at last have a chance to ask. Some of these are elementary and practical. Given that the risk to social stability overall in these processes has been shown to be so enormous, it is no use pretending that the financial world can maintain indefinitely the degree of exemption from scrutiny and regulation that it has got used to. To grant that without a basis of some common prosperity and stability, no speculative market can long survive is not to argue for rigid Soviet-style centralised direction. Insecure or failed states may provide a brief and golden opportunity for profiteering, but cannot sustain reliable institutions.
And so they too call for more regulation to save capitalism from itself.
Perhaps that's why usually conservative money managers are backing the bailout as James Quinn explains in an article that calls the U.S. the Titantic.
As I've watched the various business networks over the last few weeks, I sense desperation and fear among the commentators, pundits, and "experts". It is a fear based upon self interest. Their lives depend upon the masses keeping their money invested in the market. They have overwhelmingly been in favor of the bailout bill. I wonder why. Jim "Mad Money" Cramer, who has a net worth of $100 million, is in favor of the bill. Larry "Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity" Kudlow, a multi-millionaire, is 100% in favor of a socialist bailout of the criminal investment banks. They support this "blank check" to a government that is already $9.65 trillion in debt, because they want to maintain their lavish lifestyle, multiple estates, and prominent positions in society.
So as the contradictions mount, the real audience that Hank and Ben are playing to are the investors and banks in Asia who have kept our economy afloat. It is they who are losing confidence with China warning its banks not to pump more money into the USA. We are dependent on their largess, on OCM (Other country's money) and as they go, we go. This reality is not being made clear as the Republicans and Democrats trade accusations or just stop talking to each other.
I fear President Bush may finally be right: "This sucker could go down." Part of me thinks that may not be a bad thing -- but, alas, I know better. What we really need is debt relief but that's the stuff of another column.
By Robert Parry - Consortium News
Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect a U.S. presidential debate to deal substantively – and honestly – with wrongful actions by the American government, even at the end of George W. Bush’s eight-year reign as one of the planet’s preeminent rogue operatives.
The acceptable political parameters may allow some tactical disagreements (Barack Obama saying the Iraq War “took our eye off the ball”) or even some implied moral criticism (John McCain saying he opposed Bush “on torture of prisoners”).
But there’s no place for a serious discussion of wholesale U.S. war crimes, such as Bush’s decision to launch an aggressive war under false pretenses, the sort of offense that the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II called the “supreme” international crime.
In a healthy democracy, moderator Jim Lehrer might have been expected to ask Obama and McCain whether President Bush should be shipped off to The Hague for a trial as a war criminal or whether he should be put before American courts to face serious criminal charges, such as violation of anti-torture statutes.
There might be a question, too, about hypocrisy: how can Obama and McCain so righteously condemn Russia for its alleged aggression against Georgia (after Georgia attacked the pro-Russian province of South Ossetia) when the United States has asserted its right not only to invade Iraq (under Bush) but to attack Yugoslavia when it was throttling a separatist movement in Kosovo (as Bill Clinton did)?
Granted, endless double standards have become part of the American political landscape. Many journalists and politicians have avoided criticizing the illegality or immorality of U.S. foreign interventions since 1984 when U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick famously chastised anyone who would “blame America first.”
Since then, questions about American misconduct had to be muted for fear that any criticism would be labeled unpatriotic or disloyal. Mainstream journalists and politicians learned to couch their concerns about U.S. foreign policy as questions about tactics or effectiveness.
Arguably, however, that timidity has contributed to the frequency, brutality and criminality of U.S. military actions. It is hard to explain the Iraq War, for instance, without observing that Bush and his neoconservative advisers were confident they could roll both Congress and the Washington press corps.
Knowing that few people of conscience would dare stand in the way, Bush and the neocons sold the war based on false allegations about WMD and a historically unprecedented claim that the United States had the right to intervene preemptively anywhere in the world if it could foresee some possible future threat to its security.
This so-called Bush Doctrine meant that the United States and its political leadership had stepped beyond the reach of international law. Even as President Bush railed about the need to eliminate “rogue” regimes, he was turning the U.S. into the ultimate “rogue” state.
(Interestingly, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson did ask Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine in the Republican vice presidential nominee’s first prime-time debate, and she flubbed the answer, seeming not to know that the Bush Doctrine was.)
Not Mentioned
For Lehrer’s part, however, this stunning doctrine was never mentioned in the debate between the two politicians seeking to succeed President Bush. Only implicitly was it clear that McCain supported the notion of intervening aggressively abroad and that Obama was somewhat less eager to send troops on overseas missions.
Though a constitutional law scholar, Obama avoided posing either a moral or legal argument against Bush-style interventionism. Instead, he posited his opposition to the Iraq War on practical grounds.
“Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war," Obama said, "because I said that not only did we not know how much it was going to cost, what our exit strategy might be, how it would affect our relationships around the world and whether our intelligence was sound but also because we hadn’t finished the job in Afghanistan.
“We hadn’t caught bin Laden. We hadn’t put Al Qaeda to rest. And as a consequence, I thought that it was going to be a distraction.”
Obama also cited the war’s extraordinary cost to the U.S. Treasury (over $600 billion and sure to pass $1 trillion), the blood shed by American soldiers (more than 4,000 dead and 30,000 wounded), and the fact that “Al Qaeda is resurgent” in secure base camps along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Obama concluded that “we did not use our military wisely in Iraq.”
While there can be little doubt about the accuracy of his points, Obama dodged the larger question of whether the Bush Doctrine was illegal and immoral, nor did he mention the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the unnecessary invasion that turned their country into a living hell.
If Obama had ventured into that territory, he surely would have invited accusations that he was “blaming America first.” Or if he had compared Russian actions in South Ossetia to NATO’s intervention to protect Kosovo, he would have faced charges of “moral equivalence,” a favorite neocon attack line that essentially argues that the United States cannot be held to the same standards as other nations.
So Obama retreated behind a defensive line of what’s practical and what’s not.
McCain’s Counterattack
That opened Obama to McCain’s own practical arguments, that whatever the initial mistakes in Iraq, the real question now is what can be done.
“The next President of the United States is not going to have to address the issue as to whether we went into Iraq or not,” McCain said. “The next President of the United States is going to have to decide how we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind.”
McCain mocked Obama’s proposal for a withdrawal timetable and insisted that victory was the only acceptable outcome.
Faced with McCain’s flurry of attacks, Obama didn’t even respond by noting that the Iraqi government has been insisting on a withdrawal time frame for American troops and that the White House has generally accepted that idea.
Indeed, the end result of all the U.S. sacrifice in blood and treasure in Iraq might well be the Iraqis saying “thanks, but no thanks” to a continued U.S. presence – or Washington laying bare its imperialist designs by staying regardless of what the Iraqis want.
Obama also chose not to reengage in a debate over whether McCain’s “successful surge” argument is a reality or a myth. Over the past several months, Obama has been pummeled in interview after interview for not completely accepting the current conventional wisdom that the “surge” has worked and that McCain deserves credit.
For instance, on Sept. 7, ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: “How do you escape the logic that … John McCain was right about the surge,” dispatching an additional 30,000 combat troops to Iraq.
When Obama responded that he couldn’t understand “why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five,” Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying “Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?”
Again, this was a case of a limited frame allowed by the major U.S. news media giving McCain a strong advantage. It is now widely accepted in Washington – despite evidence to the contrary – that the “surge” was the singular reason for the drop in Iraq’s violence.
This conventional wisdom has prevailed even though it is challenged by military officials interviewed for Bob Woodward’s new book, The War Within. Some of Woodward’s sources saw the “surge” as more of a secondary factor.
As Woodward writes, “In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”
Woodward, whose book draws heavily from Pentagon insiders, reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.
A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.
But there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]
Successful Repression
As we’ve reported previously, other brutal factors – that the Washington press corps almost never mentions – help explain the decline in violence:
--Vicious ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.
--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also have “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.
--During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called “military age males” and locking up tens of thousands in prison.
--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.
--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.
But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate, much like the illegality of Bush’s original invasion.
That blindness to what might be the most important geopolitical question of this era – the presumed Bush Doctrine right of the United States to invade any country of its choosing – has now continued into the presidential debates.
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