Northman's Fury

Monday was the 20th anniversary of our Supreme Court striking down Canada's abortion law, and as I said then, the battle over abortion still continues. There was a great round-up of posts supporting one side of the battle over at Hope and Onions. And it is still clearly a battle, something I understand better today than I have before

And that's because it is the other side of the who will be celebrating this story:

A Dutch woman is being prosecuted for murdering her unborn child in an unprecedented case after she travelled to Spain for an abortion when she was already 27 weeks pregnant.

Today a judge rejected the 24-year-old woman's request for an injunction ordering an end to the Dutch murder probe, her lawyer Gerard Spong said.

. . .

Abortion is legal in the Netherlands up to the 24th week of pregnancy and it is extremely rare for Dutch authorities to file murder charges linked to such a procedure. The fact that the woman is being prosecuted for an abortion carried out overseas makes the case unprecedented.

Rare or unprecedented, their are those who would love to see the precedent set, and expanded.

This is insane. I can only hope the story gets enough coverage that the Dutch are embarrassed into doing the right thing and dismiss the charges.

Horse-race just seems to be too grandiose a term for the coverage these days.

Checking memorandum today, we can learn that Obama is the most liberal senator of them all. I seem to remember the same thing being said about John Kerry in 2004, with Edwards running a close 2nd. Basically, the ranking is meaningless BS due to the way it's compiled, but you can bet it will be trumpeted from the rooftops by every conservative spokesperson and blogger, and will be the be the opening line of every post they write if Obama gets the nomination. (As in, "Obama, the most liberal/leftist/radical leftist/moonbat senator in Congress, said today . . . )

And Obama seems to have got off relatively easy compared to the Clintons, (so far at least). Just after lunch, the top three stories were, Bill: “We Just Have to Slow Down Our Economy” to Fight Global Warming, Clinton Remained Silent As Wal-Mart Fought Unions, and After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton Charity.

November is starting to seem such a long ways away.

Like Cernig, I have to do a lot more research before I'd trust myself to offer any kind of opinion on the deteriorating situation there, but this post at the PoliGazette likening Kenya to a possible Rwandan situation does provoke a question I'll be looking for an answer to.

The aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda sparked a much larger, and mostly ignored, multi-sided bloodbath centered in neighbouring Congo, with, at its peak, something like 20 African militaries involved, and smaller massacres and other reverberations continuing to this day.

Refugees from neighbouring conflicts creating conflicts in the host countries are far from uncommon, as Lebanon can attest, and as Chad, neighbouring the Darfur region of Sudan, is also in the midst of.

Kenya has been receiving a large influx of refugees from the Somali-Ethiopian conflict in the north. Both from Somalia proper and from the under-reported Ogaden region. So the question is:

Did that influx of refugees and the strain they put on Kenya's resources prove the tipping point in the underlying issues of those resources' distribution among Kenya's own multi-ethnic population?

It's interesting sometimes to see the differences in perspective when Canadian stories get reported internationally. A recent example is how the recent Manley report and the government's response to it has been reported.

Take CNN:

Canada will extend its military mission in Afghanistan only if another NATO country puts more soldiers in the dangerous south, the prime minister said Monday, echoing the recommendation of an independent panel to withdraw without additional forces.

. . .

The panel, led by John Manley, a former Liberal deputy prime minister and foreign minister, recommended last week that Canada coninue its mission only if another NATO country musters 1,000 troops for Kandahar.

. . .

"Both of those recommendations will have to be fulfilled, or Canada will not proceed with the mission in Afghanistan," he said.

Then we have the BBC:

Canada has told US President George W Bush that it will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan next year unless Nato deploys more soldiers there.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is demanding that a further 1,000 Nato troops be sent to Kandahar province where Canada's 2,500 troops are based.

. . .

White House press secretary Tony Fratto said that in reply, the president had "noted the deployment of 3,200 additional US marines to Afghanistan".

It is not clear if the additional US troops meet Canada's requirements for more troops in Kandahar.

Somehow, I think those additional US troops will meet Harper's requirements, because as Cathie has noted, and the foreign news services above have missed, is that the debate within Canada has shifted over time:

Somehow, the Harper promise that the mission in Afghanistan wouldn't be extended unless Canadians supported it has morphed into the Harper promise to "ensure Canadian soldiers get the help that will allow them to stay ... indefinitely".

To a large extent, that was the whole purpose of the Manley report. Harper, who has always supported an extension, hand-picked a panel of "experts" who all supported extention, who then wrote a cut-and-paste report calling for extension, that Harper could use as ammunition to get the extension.

The so-called "threat" is just an escape valve if, despite the kabuki theatre as Cathie puts it, Harper still can't get the support required to extend the mission. But as long as Harper has any say over it, Canada is staying put.

Thanks to the US presidential horse-jockeying, this story seems to be off the radar for the moment, but it certainly deserves some attention.

The preliminary stories seem to confirm what many have said all along; a complete clusterf*ck for the IDF, though it appears Olmert is going to get off easier than he probably should:

The committee called the war a "great and severe missed opportunity."

"Israel embarked on a prolonged war that it initiated, which ended without a clear Israeli victory from a military standpoint," Justice (ret.) Eliyahu Winograd told a press conference in Jerusalem.

"A quasi-military organization withstood the strongest army in the Middle East for weeks," he said.

"Hezbollah rocket fire on the Israeli home front continued throughout the war, and the IDF failed to provide an effective response," he continued. "Daily life was disrupted, residents left their homes and entered bomb shelters."

"These results had far-reaching consequences for us and our enemies," he continued.

Winograd assailed the final, large-scale ground operation launched in the final 60 hours of the war in which dozens of IDF soldiers were killed, saying it "did not achieve any military objectives nor did it fulfill its potential."

"The ground operation did not reduce the Katyusha fire nor did it achieve significant accomplishments, and its role in accelerating or improving the political settlement is unclear," said Winograd. "Also unclear is how it affected the Lebanese government and Hezbollah regarding the cease-fire."

. . .

"The failures began long before the Second Lebanon War," said Winograd. "Ambitious goals were chosen for the war, after which Israel was left with only two main alternatives - the first was a short, severe strike [on Hezbollah], the second was to fundamentally alter the reality in southern Lebanon through a wide-scale ground operation."

"The manner in which the original decision to go to war was made, without discussing the alternatives, and the manner in which Israel embarked on the war prior to determining which of the alternatives it had chosen, or an exit strategy ? these were severe failures that impacted the entire war, which were contributed to by both the political and the military echelon," said Winograd.

"The indecisiveness continued into the war itself," the retired justice continued. "There was no proper discussion or decision on the war's objectives for several weeks."

"There was also a serious delay in preparing for a wide-scale ground operation, reducing Israel's options," he said. "The result was that Israel did not make do with maximizing immediate military achievements, but rather was dragged into a ground offensive only after a cease-fire [decision] made it impossible to effectively fulfill its potential. Both top military and political leaders are responsible for this."

Two points: The first is that, given the failures stem from ambitious goals chosen, "long before the Second Lebanon War", seems to confirm that Israel was waiting for an excuse to launch the war.

Second, the two main alternatives listed are what the IDF would actually be capable of, though whether the wide-scale ground operation would have accomplished anything beyond bogging Israel down in another long-term occupation of southern Lebanon is anyone's guess. (When I examined this war as an example for possible Turkish action in northern Iraq, I concluded that a short, severe strike was the best a conventional military could hope to do against a non-state force like Hezbollah/PKK.)

The biggest problem from a decision standpoint, was that the decision makers didn't seem to really see those alternatives clearly. They believed they could fundamentally alter the reality in southern Lebanon purely by an overwhelming application of air power. They went well beyond the short, severe strike before they realized that they couldn't achieve their objectives without a wide-scale ground assault that they hadn't planned for, called up troops for, trained for, or had sufficient supplies laid in for.

And so, clusterf*ck, and strategic defeat.

Joe Lieberman has apparently ruled out being John McCain's running mate. Of course, this is the same guy who said he would support whoever the Democratic nominee for president was, and then went on to endorse and campaign for McCain before the primary season even started. His word is pretty much worthless.

And speaking of people whose word is worthless, Lieberman may find himself a perfect match for the Hillary campaign, who has proven that even her signed pledges mean little when political maneuvering and expedience call.

And it's nice to see at least someone in the press taking her to task over her "victory" in Florida.

Cheering supporters? Check. Election returns on the projection screen? Check. Andrea Mitchell and Candy Crowley doing stand-ups? Check and check. In fact, the only piece missing from Hillary Clinton's Florida victory party here Tuesday night was a victory.

. . .

But in a political stunt worthy of the late Evel Knievel, the Clinton campaign decided to put on an ersatz victory party that, it hoped, would erase memories of Obama's actual victory Saturday night in South Carolina's Democratic primary.

This, along with her contention that the delegates here and in Michigan, where she ran unopposed, should be awarded to her and seated at the Democratic convention, smacks of desperation. What's odd about that, is that she's still the front-runner, still ahead in the polls, and still likely to win the nomination. By all rights, this blatant attempt to game the system in her favour shouldn't even be necessary. What does she know or fear that the rest of us don't?

Michael van der Galien's quote of the day:

“This is one of the key failures of the Bush presidency, and it will dog his legacy.  As Andrew Cochran observed today, the president never once used the words “Islamic” or “Islamist” in describing the core of this war.  The war is with Al Qaeda, or Iraqi insurgents, or the Taliban or something.  Abandoning his lofty, Wilsonian rhetoric from 2006, President Bush has once again changed the course and repudiated his very own doctrine.  A war against finite gangs, or their various surrogates in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not what it’s about.  The mullahs in Qom are not what it’s about.  By declaring a litany of shadowy villains all around the world, the president creates an ambiance of war that has no direction and no clear finality”[Link]

Sullivan, and particularly Cochran, make it pretty clear what they would like to see:

Why did President Bush retreat from the obvious? Who imposed upon him, employing what logic, to depart from his past clear and accurate statements on the nature of Islamic-based terrorism and extremism?

The reason is entirely obvious, and one I'm sure they've celebrated, though their biases are obviously blinding them to it's implications.

The truly ironic part about this all is, is that the key failure that will be dogging Bush's legacy here is the exact opposite of what these guys are advocating, which is probably why they're not seeing it.

As Cochran also notes, before the mostly ignored SOTU last night, Bush has done everything he can to lump all of two-bit gangs and tinpot dictators into one cohesive threat. That "strategy" has cost the US from the very beginning, when it shut down the intelligence being provided to the US by the Iranians against their foes in Afghanistan; the Taliban. The "axis of evil" speech also lumped the Iranians in with their bitter foes in Iraq.

The whole concept of "divide and conquer" seems to have passed these people by. Which given they're the same demographic buying up Jonah Goldberg's drivel about how liberals are fascists because Nazis liked organic farming too, probably shouldn't surprise me.

Even if these fools were right, and there was some massive, Islamofascist movement out there trying to link up all of these disparate groups into a cohesive whole to face off against western civilization, only a complete and utter idiot would do as Bush has done and try to help link them all up by treating them as though they already were.

The Reagan administration was at least smart enough to realize that having Saddam Hussein's Iraq duking it out with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, (while they happily and secretly armed both sides), was an elegant if brutal solution to their regional concerns.

The neocon plan is to attack them both and fight their combined, (admittedly still puny in comparison), might with the blood of Americans and the borrowed treasure of the Chinese. Disciples of Sun Tzu, they ain't.

Fortunately, there are still a few professional individuals left out there whose strategic knowledge is based on more than the occasional friendly game of Risk, and they've provided the proof positive of why Bush's previous statements were so foolish, and why he, or at least his speechwriters, were a little less stupid this time around.

The great "awakening" in Iraq that has caused the much celebrated reduction in violence and apparent success of the "surge", happened in large part because the US military stopped treating every Muslim with a gun as though he were part and parcel of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and actually took the time to find out which groups they could work with, at least temporarily, to defeat the true extremists.

And hey! It worked! And it has given the war's supporters an at least temporary lull in violence to celebrate, even if the political reconciliation needed for long-term success is no closer than it ever was. One could hope that they might learn something from the strategy employed, but when you see your enemy through the prism of religious intolerance, and believe that Islam is the issue, than an Islamic militant is an Islamic militant, regardless of their actual interests and beliefs.

Attack them all and in so doing force them all to fight you. Al Qaeda's provocation strategy in a nutshell. And the true tragedy of Bush's legacy is how far he's assisted that strategy's furtherance.

Apparently. New to me in any case.

I'm not sure if I should be offended that my nationality is being used as a racial slur, or delighted that a bunch of racist yokels are so clearly defining themselves as something different than us, but I'm definitely leaning towards the latter.

Somehow, in all the hoopla over how much better the American health system is than the rest of the industralized world with their fascist, government-run health systems, I'm betting stories like this didn't factor in too much.

Baking soda nearly killed an elderly man. He was using it to relieve the stomach pain caused by an ulcer, but went way overboard with the home remedy.

After slipping on a children's toy, the retired gentleman could not get back up. Paramedics transported him to Cooper Hospital in New Jersey. En route, they noticed that he was short of breath and picking at his side for no apparent reason.

In the emergency room, the patient was completely incoherent. He looked disheveled, underweight, and could not tell them what year it was.

. . .

Once their patient was stable, the doctors questioned his niece. She had found several empty boxes of baking soda at his home and explained that her uncle, who lacked health insurance, had been using it to cope with severe indigestion.

Yep, best health care system money, lots and lots of money, can buy.

Huckabee challenges Romney over fried chicken

Because really, that's the kind of substantive political issue we need answers on before choosing someone to lead the United States. What's even worse, is that Huckabee is the proverbial man in the glass house throwing stones here:

Mitt Romney's failure to eat fried chicken with the skin on is nothing short of blasphemy here in the South, according to GOP rival Mike Huckabee.

. . .

Huckabee admitted that he hasn't eaten fried chicken in a while because of his weight loss program, preferring it broiled or baked instead.

What a circus.

As John Cole points out, despite Hillary still being the frontrunner in the polls and with the establishment "superdelegates" most likely in her favour, Obama's campaign seems to be picking up speed since the crushing win in South Carolina, picking up endorsements left and right. (Cole misses a really big one, though :))

One other point from Cole's post stands out, though.

Obama is running a momentum campaign, which is why people like me say things like “pretty thin gruel” when we listen to him speak.

A common theme, but one that may not be as accurate as a lot of people seem to think. One of the points in Howard Kurtz's article today lamenting Obama's non-courting of the press like himself, was this:

One media narrative that seems to be taking root is of Obama as the candidate of lofty rhetoric and Clinton as the maven of pedestrian policy talk. At a rally at Furman University here Tuesday, Obama brought the audience to several peaks, raising his voice over the applause while describing how his days as a community organizer "taught me that ordinary people can do extraordinary things" and how "the dream that so many generations fought for feels like it is slipping away."

But the address was saturated with proposals. Obama called for tax rebates; a one-time boost in Social Security checks; extending unemployment insurance; mortgage aid for those facing foreclosure; raising the minimum wage; protecting pensions; and college tuition credits. And that was before he got to his support for solar and wind power and biodiesel fuel. (There was no discussion of how he would pay for all this, other than to say his health-care plan would be partly financed by ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.)

How, then, has Obama been saddled with an image of being long on inspiration and short on details? The answer is that journalists are not accustomed to covering a candidate who moves crowds the way Obama does, who uses speech cadences and rhythm like Martin Luther King Jr. without making his talk explicitly about race. Sen. Clinton already owned the policy-wonk slot, so by default, Obama was cast as the poetic one.

So is it possible that Obama's "thin gruel" is due not to his failure to make policy speeches, but that he's found a way to not make boring policy speeches and nobody has figured out how to deal with such beasts?

Oh well, at least the next week will be full of interest for political junkies like me.

Really, racism isn't a problem in the US anymore.

Honest.

Just look at this lovely little, "humorous" article posted in a paper from the Hamptons. "Why I Should Be Our Next President", by Yo Mama Bin Barack.

Military background: I was the first black troop leader of the Boy Scouts Troop 43 in my home state of Illinois. Well, that's not quite true, because they didn't let black kids in the Boy Scouts, so I lied and said I was Hawaiian, which I kind of am, sort of. You see, part of my strategy of becoming our first black president is to deny I am black unless I am campaigning in Harlem. The truth is, I don't know many black people, but my advisors have drafted a strategy to reel in the black vote:

1) Call everyone "Brother." Blacks, I am told, do this, even if their real brothers are mostly in jail.

2) Talk Jive. Brothers want to hear jive. During my speech I told the crowd "We be, you know, sick of whitey supressin' and congestin' so, you know, we won't denigrate or sophisticate but emulate and populate, you know, the system is, like, broken, y'all!"

I have no idea what that means. The black folk loved it, though, so they all vowed to vote for me. The New York Times covered it, but they are so afraid of saying something racist they twisted my words around and reported:

"Yesterday in Harlem YoMama articulated his vision of a new America, an America with less congestion, a country free of drug use, a world without segregation or racism where citizens emulate the lives of great Americans like YoMama, John F. Kennedy and Doctor Martin Luther King."

So you see, there is my strategy. I get the black vote, I get the white vote, and then I go after the female vote by attacking that bitch Hillary for being the Nasty Witch from Hell.

. . .

Ultimately, if she gets too close, one of my New York advisors has advised me to, "Bitch slap that ho." White women, I am told, like that. (Black women, on the other hand, do not. I tried that once on AliBama and she beat the living shit out of me.)

Yes. Quite the chuckle. Bin Barack, married to AliBama, daughter Bama Slamma. How so incredibly funny it all is, to someone stuck in the fifties in the deep south.

Un-fucking-believable. [Via]

So says some doctors in Britain, apparently:

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

The US conservative blogs are abuzz with how this proofs just how nasty socialized medicine is, and how it's the leftist egodiest's(?) fault. That second link has really missed the boat, given what else these doctors would like to stop funding for.

Fertility treatment and "social" abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

I mean, I can't begin to list all of the left-wing groups and organizations out there campaigning for the end of funding for "social" abortions, mainly because there are none. ("Social" abortions? WTF? When the hell has abortion ever been a social exercise? "I'm going out to end my pregnancy and meet new people!" Idiots! [/rant])

Anyway, the really fun claim is that somehow the American system is better because a profit-driven private insurance industry would never act the way government of Britain isn't actually acting and deny coverage to people like those listed above.

Of course, the profit-driven, private industry health providers in the US have long since figured out that the best way to make those profits is to save as much money as possible, by providing the least amount of actual health care possible, and that one of the most effective ways to do so is to deny coverage to high-risk individuals like the very elderly, heavy smokers and drinkers, those on the heavy side, and so on. Either that, or charge them ridiculously high premiums and still deny the coverage for complications resulting from "pre-existing" conditions.

Basically, what the doctors above are advocating, and what the British government is likely to refuse to do, is to turn British health care into something that far more closely resembles the American system, which, it is always wise to point out, costs Americans far more than any single-payer system anywhere else does for provably worse overall results. Dangers of a socialized system indeed.

So who is telling the truth here?

U.S. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said on Thursday a new draft resolution against Iran agreed by major powers over its nuclear work would be punitive, despite Russian remarks to the contrary.

"This resolution will be punitive. I saw some comments from Moscow yesterday saying it will not be punitive. That's not correct. It's a punitive resolution," Burns told reporters during a visit to Israel.

The Russian comments in question are, I assume, these:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the draft encourages countries to be vigilant in their dealings with Iran to prevent the illegal transfer of nuclear material, but it ``does not foresee any harsh sanctions.''

``It calls for countries to be vigilant while maintaining trade and economic and transport and other ties with Iran so that they are not used for the transfer of forbidden nuclear material,'' he said at a news conference a day after the draft was approved by the five permanent Security Council members and Germany.

We won’t know for sure until the sanctions get tabled, but it looks like the Russians may be right.

World powers agreed on Tuesday on the outline of a third sanctions resolution against Iran over its disputed nuclear work, but diplomats said the draft did not contain the punitive economic measures Washington had been seeking.

Regardless, I doubt it will have any effect of the Iranian government's position, outside of possibly hardening it.

Yeah, no shit:

Capturing Usama bin Laden has been one of President Bush's top priorities during his time in office, but the president now seems to doubt the Al Qaeda mastermind will be found before his term ends next January.

Hmm, one of your top priorities, you say? So when you said, "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him", and "I truly am not that concerned about him", it was indicative of just how important your top priorities are?

What about when the CIA closed down the unit that had been hunting bin Laden for over a decade? Was that also a sign of your great concern for his capture?

Silly me for thinking that if capturing bin Laden was truly a top priority, you would actually spend some time and effort on it.

An article I came across that makes the point of why I would choose Obama over Clinton.

On positions from Iraq to health care, the policy differences between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are minute. Much of the debate between them has involved making these molehills look mountainous or clashing over who-shifted-when.

The one most significant difference between them can be found in how they would approach the presidency - and how the nation might respond.

Hillary Clinton has been a policy wonk most of her life, a trait she has carried into the U.S. Senate. As her debate performances have shown, she has intelligence and a deep understanding of many issues. Her efforts in New York focused first on learning her adopted state’s issues in detail, and pursuing legislation that would not necessarily grab headlines.

But we also have a good idea what a Clinton presidency would look like. The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare. That is not all Bill and Hillary’s fault - but it exists, whomever you blame, and cannot be ignored. Hillary Clinton doesn’t pretend that it won’t happen; she simply vows to persevere, in the hope that her side can win. Indeed, the Clintons’ joint career in public life seems oriented toward securing victory and personal vindication.

Sen. Obama’s campaign is an argument for a more unifying style of leadership. In a time of great partisanship, he is careful to talk about winning over independents and even Republicans. He is harsh on the failures of the current administration - and most of that critique well-deserved. But he doesn’t use his considerable rhetorical gifts to demonize Republicans. He’s not neglecting his core values; he defends his progressive vision with vigorous integrity. But for him, American unity - transcending party - is a core value in itself.

Effectivness in government is about more than competence, though that will be a nice change from the Bush administration. It also means mobilizing the political base in a way that overcomes the obstructions that the opposition puts in your way.

The Republicans in Congress will do their damnedest to obstruct either presidency, particularly given the Democrats tendency to roll over on just about everything the White House wants, training the Republicans that they can get away with whatever they want so long as they bully the Dems.

A Democrat in the White House will do a fair bit to change that dynamic, but only if, when the Republicans take their obstinate stands, their base doesn't rally to them. The base has learned to hate the name Clinton, and there's a reason Hillarycare is used as an epithet. If Clinton is the nominee and/or manages to win the presidency, the Republican base will rally to oppose her on every little issue she tries to address.

Basically, the partisan divide will be as deep as ever, and the most likely result will be a Republican-controlled Congress sooner rather than later, and a Republican president following shortly thereafter. It is important to remember that part of the Clinton legacy from their last presidency was giving the Republicans control over both houses of the Legislative branch and the key to the executive.

I don't know if Obama can break that partisan divide, keep the ultra-partisan obstructionists from rallying much base support, but there is at least a chance that he could.

The Clintons can't, and while they may be able to fight the partisan battle well, they are still just a continuation of the status quo. I'd really like to see some change from that.

An Afghan court on Tuesday sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that three judges said violated the tenets of Islam, an official said.

So we're supposed to stick around indefinitely losing soldiers to defend what principles exactly?

Dispute who's saying it:

The AP reports, and the New York Times expands, on a new study by a supposedly "independent" organization that claims to have assembled hundred of "false statements" by the Bush administration in the course of the Iraq war. However, the Center for Public Integrity hardly qualifies as "independent". It gets much of its funding from George Soros, who has thrown millions of dollars behind Democratic political candidates, and explicitly campaigned to defeat George Bush in 2004:

As for the statements themselves, Ed makes an attempt at trying to discredit one of the 935, taking a line from Wilson's Niger report and ignoring what the report concluded to pretend that Bush talking about Iraq seeking yellowcake from Niger wasn't actually a lie.

The rest? Didn't we already tell you it's George Soros? Pay no attention.

For anyone that has actually been paying attention, the fact that there was a major campaign of deception leading up to the Iraq War isn't exactly news. That said, it is nice to have a searchable database ennumerating the lies.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

. . .

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

It should be helpful to those who want to point out the similaritites in the more recent campaign against Iran, and become a big part of the Bush legacy.

Around 300,000 Afghan children cannot attend school because of violence in Afghanistan's southern provinces, President Hamid Karzai told the Afghan parliament on its opening day Monday.

The number of children unable to go to school is sharply up - by 50 per cent - from a year ago, when 200,000 children were forced to stay home because of security concerns, Karzai said.

Attendance numbers are still far ahead of what they where under the Taliban, but with the insurgency gathering steam, I expect that further progress will be difficult if not impossible.

But I'm sure that the Afghans can be at least sure that their schools will be well-painted.

For bashing Bush. It seems that with, "Just one more year!", the time to pile on Bush and his policies has come. It has always been there in the background, of course, but with a year to go, it isn't just Bush who is taking a good look at his probable legacy, and there is quite the list to review.

Today is a sombre milestone, marking the start of the last of Mr Bush's eight years in the White House. This being a leap year, exactly 366 days remain until 20 January 2009, when his successor will be sworn into office. It is a time when incumbents look to their legacies. And for this President the view could scarcely be bleaker.

Is he the worst President in US history? Mr Bush faces stiff competition from the likes of James Buchanan, who watched as America slipped towards civil war, or Warren Harding with his corrupt administration, or Herbert Hoover, who failed to halt the slide into the Great Depression, or, more recently, Richard Nixon, the only President to be forced to resign. But in terms of dogmatism, incompetence, ignorance and divisiveness, Mr Bush surely compares with any of the above.

. . . Corporate cronyism has been rife. Globalisation and cuts driven by ideology have turned the wealth gap between rich Americans and the rest from an embarrassment into an obscenity. Since 2001 the real income of ordinary Americans has stagnated.

. . .

Even more corrosive has been the damage inflicted on the US system of governance. This President may have blithely ignored mainstream science, pretended global warming was not happening and only belatedly grasped the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. In one domestic activity, however, Bush has not tarried: that of perverting and undermining the constitution in the name of expanding the President's power to fight his "war on terror".

To that end, what everyone else considers torture has been sanctioned, the basic legal right of habeas corpus has been denied to designated "foreign fighters", illicit eavesdropping on US citizens has been authorised and fear-mongering has been turned into a political strategy. Somehow, the next President must restore Americans' faith in their own institutions.

In foreign affairs, the story is the same. The Iraq invasion may not be the greatest foreign policy blunder in US history. But it is among the greatest, utterly discrediting the country's intelligence services, hugely straining relations with key allies, handing a massive strategic victory to Iran and stretching the country's military close to breaking point.

. . .

The new occupant of the Oval Office can but hope today's dislike for America is directed at a leader, not at a country. That may well be, but one thing is for sure. Never again will the US occupy that extraordinary position of supremacy – military, moral and economic – that it held in the interlude between the demise of Communism and the attacks of September 2001.

To the 44th President falls the task of explaining that truth to the country, as well as dealing with the concrete day-to-day problems left by George Bush. Indeed, one wonders, why would anyone want the job?

There is of course one issue remaining that Bush could turn into an even larger legacy of disaster for whoever comes after him; Iran. The Gulf states which are traditional US allies in the region don't appear to hot on the idea of a military confrontation, which, given they would be on the front lines, isn't too much of a surprise.

But this harsh editorial in the Arab News says something the rest of us would be wise to remember.

Our region is not short of bloodshed and instability. Iraq, Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan are all scenes of past and present conflicts where largely innocent blood has flowed in plenty. We do not need yet another dangerous conflict.

That is why it was so sad, even depressing, to hear US President George W. Bush use his visit to the Gulf to continue his saber-rattling against the Iranians — and over a nuclear weapons program which his own intelligence chiefs say Tehran abandoned five years ago. To any dispassionate observer, US military action against Iran is unthinkable. Unfortunately the Bush administration’s record since 9/11 has not only embraced the unthinkable but more dangerously, it has embraced it in an unthinking fashion.

. . .

Whatever threat Iran may constitute, now or in the future, must be addressed peaceably and through negotiations. The consequences of further war in the region are hideous, not least because they are incalculable. Even Bush, with the ruin of Iraq before him, must surely see that. Yet in his confrontational remarks about Iran, he offers no carrot, no inducement, no compromise — only the big US stick. This is not diplomacy in search of peace. It is madness in search of war.

The ginned-up Gulf of Hormuz incident earlier this month shows the Bush administration is still very much willing to ramp up tensions and possibly find an excuse for attacking Iran, not to mention the media's willingness to buy the administration line without caveats. War with Iran seems less a possibility than it once did, but the possibility is still very much there.

A year can be a long time when you're not concerned about cleaning up the messes you make.

The Republican side of the race remains a bit of a mess, but I'm beginning to lean towards Romney taking it. McCain has some momentum coming out of SC, (somehow Romney winning in Nevada doesn't help?), but he doesn't have much in the way of money and there is still a good chunk of the conservative base that doesn't much like him. He does have good name recognition though, and that can count for a lot, given he seems to be getting the votes of Republicans opposed to the Iraq War and to his immigration plan. It's also unclear whether or not you can count Huckabee out of it yet, particularly if McCain and Romney continue splitting the non-social conservative vote.

For the Dems, unless John Edwards pulls out an increasingly unlikely victory in South Carolina, it is now a two-person race, and it is getting to be an pretty ugly one, with allegations of voter suppression flying back and forth, plus the identity politics of race and gender. (Divisive primary-wise, though when considered on policy positions, Clinton and Obama aren't very far apart on any issue dealing with blacks or women, and will have the support of both going into the national race.) Hillary remains, as always, the front-runner, and thanks to establishment support and a long built-up national campaign machine, has the best chance going into Super Tuesday. I think the only real chance Obama has to pull off the upset now, is to take South Carolina to get back some momentum, and then hope Edwards drops out and joins his former running mate in endorsing Obama. Combined they could hold off the Clinton machine; separately, they're likely to get squished.

This lines up with my thinking:

THE Taliban has seriously rejoined the fight in Afghanistan, an NGO security group said in a report that concluded the country was at the beginning of a war, not the end of one.

The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) said the Taliban's "easy departure" in 2001, when a US-led invasion drove them from power, was more of a strategic retreat than an actual military defeat.

"A few years from now, 2007 will likely be looked back upon as the year in which the Taliban seriously rejoined the fight and the hopes of a rapid end to conflict were finally set aside by all but the most optimistic," ANSO said.

. . .

"There would not appear to be any capacity within ISAF to stop or turn back anticipated AOG (armed opposition groups) expansion," the report said.

"In simple terms, the consensus amongst informed individuals at the end of 2007 seems to be that Afghanistan is at the beginning of a war, not the end of one."

Given that our involvement is also helping to destabilize neighbouring Pakistan, we would be well-advised to execute a strategic withdrawal of our own, but so far the likelihood of that seems limited.

So the White House admitted that they "recycled" a number of their e-mail tapes, overwriting much of what they were up to prior to 2003, and doing so with rather significant timing:

The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.

Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA officer's identity to reporters.

. . .

If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that "there is no basis to say that the White House has destroyed any evidence or engaged in any misconduct."

Well, if you destroy the evidence, then there wouldn't be any evidence, I suppose, but there certainly is a basis to say those things, and it appears that it has continued far beyond 2003.

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that when another study is done looking into the post-2005 records, there will be some significant gaps as well. While seemingly incompetent at nearly every other aspect of their responsibilities, they show a surprisingly thorough and competent ability in ensuring that they leave behind as little a paper trial of their plans and activities as possible.

A good number of right-wing blogs are abuzz today over this column in the Wall Street Journal purporting to show that it's the liberals who are hate-mongers. (The irony of gloating over how "intolerant" those hate-mongering liberals are apparently sailing right over their heads.) Of course, as with most numbers games, it is a good idea to see just what it is they're really saying.

As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

The problem here is that having a low opinion of someone with diametrically opposed views from you isn't the same as being intolerant. In fact, to truly be tolerant is to show a willingness to allow viewpoints from people you vehemently disagree with or dislike.

And frankly, there's nothing even irrational about this. The odds of you liking someone who has a totally different and opposing worldview from you is pretty slim, particularly if they return your dislike with animosity. That opposing camps might learn to hate each other is pretty much the way things go.

And the issue isn't just whether conservatives hate liberals more than liberals hate conservatives. Because there is a lot of other groups out there to hate, and most of them aren't the political type people have control over. Groups of people like gays, immigrants, Muslims, women, and other varieties of skin colour or ethnic origin.

Now, it is still wrong to assume that all conservatives hold all, or even any, of those views, and there are more than a few on the left that assume just that. It's also not uncommon to find some of those very same views expressed by people who are nominally on the left. But can you imagine one of the Democratic front-runners promising to round up millions of people and deporting them or comparing homosexuality with bestiality? If they did, and they got raked over the coals by the left-wing blogs for it, would that be a sign of intolerance?

The truth is that the conservative parties in the US and Canada have made a habit of pandering to those intolerant views, and if you support those parties without bothering to make clear your objections, you shouldn't be too surprised if you're painted as being just as intolerant.

The crossover of tactics and strategy between Iraq and Afghanistan continues, this time with Afghans coming over to help the Iraqis farm opium.

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.

Afghan with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad.

This will likely have some significant impact on the overall situation in Iraq, because that shiny counterinsurgency manual the Americans are so impressed with tends to get tossed out the window when the drug warriors get involved.

More to the point, whatever success the "surge" has had, it is more a measure of the Americans giving local warlords and militias control over their fiefdoms. And do you want to guess who the beneficiaries of the opium crops happen to be?

The growing and smuggling of opium will be difficult to stop in Iraq because much of the country is controlled by criminalised militias. American successes in Iraq over the past year have been largely through encouraging the development of a 70,000-strong Sunni Arab militia, many of whose members are former insurgents linked to protection rackets, kidnapping and crime. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, says that criminals have infiltrated its ranks.

The move of local warlords, both Sunni and Shia, into opium farming is a menacing development in Iraq, where local political leaders are often allied to gangsters. The theft of fuel, smuggling and control of government facilities such as ports means that gangs are often very rich. It is they, rather than impoverished farmers, who have taken the lead in financing and organising opium production in Iraq.

So the US now gets to decide whether or not they wish to hold onto the fragile security gains the empowerment of these militias have given them while watching Iraqi opium production bloom forth, or to attempt to undermine the opium harvest and reignite the battle with the very militia groups they've been funding and arming for the past several months.

There are, of course, other more intelligent ways to approach this issue, but given the track record of the administration so far, there is little real prospect of them being even considered, let alone implemented.

In an unusual public criticism, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he believes NATO forces currently deployed in southern Afghanistan do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency, a deficiency that could be contributing to the rising violence in the fight against the Taliban.

. . .

But coming from an administration castigated for its conduct of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such U.S. criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is controversial. Many NATO officials blame inadequate U.S. troop numbers earlier in the war in part for a Taliban resurgence.

"It's been very, very difficult to apply the classic counterinsurgency doctrine because you've had to stabilize the situation sufficiently to start even applying it," said one European NATO official, who discussed the issue on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the alliance. "Even in the classic counterinsurgency doctrine, you've still got to get the fighting down to a level where you can apply the rest of the doctrine."

Gates' views, however, reflect those expressed recently by senior U.S. military officials with responsibility for Afghanistan. Some have said that an overreliance on heavy weaponry, including airstrikes, by NATO forces in the south may unwittingly be contributing to rising violence there.

You know, it’s bad enough that the US, (and their little buddies in Ottawa), denigrate those NATO countries that place restrictions on the use of their forces in Afghanistan.  After all, what better way to convince people to help you than by calling them a bunch of cowardly pansy’s because they won’t fight your battles for you?

Now however, they’ve decided to expand the blame for their misfortune to those few countries like ours that have actually toughed it out in the most violent region of the country.  

Thanks a bunch!  It feels so good to have the sacrifice of our soldiers so well appreciated.

And it's not so much that the criticism isn't accurate.  I mean, there’s little question that the reliance on air power is a severe problem in a counterinsurgency campaign, but every other single story I’ve read puts the US forces at the top of the list for such tactics. Just who the hell are you trying to kid?

Add to that the far less-than-brilliant counter-narcotics strategy the US has pushed for the Afghan opium crop right smack dab in the middle of the area the Canadians, British, and Dutch troops are patrolling; a strategy the Brits, at least, along with the Afghan government, have raised repeated abjections to as being counterproductive to the goal of defeating the Taliban, and I can only wonder what part of his ass Gates pulled this shit from.

It goes to show that however much better Gates is than his predecessor, he still has the patented Bush administration tendency to piss off not only people opposed to their aims, but their allies and friends as well.

Little wonder there’s no small number of folks willing to see them taken down a couple of notches.

Update:

From Dave at TGB, one of the little Bushites in Ottawa spinning furiously to pretend that the criticism wasn't pointed at us. (By my count, that only leaves the British and the Dutch. Does that mean MacKay is criticizing them?)

Ahem! Bullshit.

Gates was throwing a temper tantrum because things in Afghanistan are little better now than they were in 2002. What he won't acknowledge is that the fault lays squarely with the Bush administration for screwing up the job in the first place

MacKay, instead of demanding that Gates come out and clarify his words, sucked up to him because there's nothing more important to a Conservative than a Republican.

There is something interesting out of this little US-spits-on-allies episode though.

Apparently all the sunshine the Harperites continually attempt to blow up everyone's ass about how so much progress is being made in Afghanistan is pure crap.

The last goes without saying, but what pathetic pieces of shit we somehow managed to elect to run our country. They've put Canada, "back on the world stage", by hewing as closely to the US line as physically possible, and when their heroes reward their sucking up as they normally do; dismissively, rudely, and with the occasional slap or two thrown in, they respond like an abused puppy dog. Crawling and squirming around on their bellies trying to cuddle up even closer to the guy who just kicked them.

Such behaviour in an unfailingly loyal canine is tragic; in our Defence Minister, it's sickening.

The Las Vegas Review Journal has little love for Obama:

Is Barack Obama, then, the ideal Democratic candidate for president? Hardly. His policy recommendations -- when he can be convinced to get any more specific than "I represent change" -- are the opposite of "change." They're old-line, welfare-state solutions that haven't spent enough time in the microwave to appear even superficially appetizing.

Sen. Obama is a relatively young man with relatively little of the kind of real-world experience that prepares a candidate to stand firm against urgent advice to, say, bomb some remote population of defenseless civilians to "send a message," or plunge the economy into a dark night of unforeseen consequences by crippling the free market in the name of "fighting greed."

And that’s from an article endorsing him for the Democratic nomination.  Can’t wait to see what they’ll say about him in the general campaign if he winds up winning the nomination.

We may have fudged a few of the numbers.

Highly promising figures that the administration cited to demonstrate economic progress in Iraq last fall, when Congress was considering whether to continue financing the war, cannot be substantiated by official Iraqi budget records, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday.

The Iraqi government had been severely criticized for failing to spend billions of dollars of its oil revenues in 2006 to finance its own reconstruction, but last September the administration said Iraq had greatly accelerated such spending. By July 2007, the administration said, Iraq had spent some 24 percent of $10 billion set aside for reconstruction that year.

As Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, prepared in September to report to Congress on the state of the war, the economic figures were a rare sign of progress within Iraq’s often dysfunctional government.

But in its report on Tuesday, the accountability office said official Iraqi Finance Ministry records showed that Iraq had spent only 4.4 percent of the reconstruction budget by August 2007. It also said that the rate of spending had substantially slowed from the previous year.

The only real surprise here is that anyone is surprised about this. The Bush administration has fudged the numbers for everything from the initial cost of the war to the Prescription Drug Benefit. The same goes for casualty figures and other measures of violence, all released at a politically opportune moment in a way that supports their chosen policy, even as it inevitably turns out to be false upon further investigation.

The truth will out, and they don’t seem to mind so long as it does so after they get what they want.

But this is doubly bad in the strategic sense, because the main issues the “surge” has failed to accomplish are the political reconciliations and strengthening of the central Iraqi government necessary for a US withdrawal, (whether by design or just failure, I can’t say).

One major way to give some semblance of legitimacy to the central government and convince the Iraqis to tolerate continued US presence outside of the hope they’ll fight your internal battles for you, would be to repair the incredible amount of damage the war has caused and raise the standard of living for the average Iraqi.

However much security may have improved, the Iraqi government remains demonstrably dysfunctional. The stalemate continues.