Right Wingers
As my story indicates as far as the Right Wing is concerned W can do no wrong. Conservatives, however, aren't so slavish..
For example, rather than finishing the war in Afghanistan to rout out al-Qaida, he started a war in Iraq at the *same time*, straining our military's resources. (Remember that there is *still* no evidence of any connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida -- as a matter of fact, the al-Qaida leaders considered Hussein an evil infidel.)
Al-Qaida and the Taliban are *still* killing Americans in Afghanistan, but Bush has simply "declared victory". Any sensible anti-terrorist policy would have finished the war in Afghanistan and prevented it from being reoccupied by terrorists.
Meanwhile, Iraq, which had very few terrorists under the tyrannical, authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein, is now a magnet for terrorists thanks to massive lawlessness and unguarded weapons caches combined with the presence of Americans to attack.
Meanwhile, Bush is underfunding port security, reducing air marshals, etc. -- all vital measures for stopping further terrorist attacks.
He talks the talk about anti-terrorism, but he doesn't walk the walk. His anti-terrorism stance can only be described as phony.
Posted by: Nathanael Nerode at November 5, 2003 01:00 AM
President Bush promised fiscal responsibility, but instead has delivered a budget rife with profligate spending
By David Tancabel | Staff Writer | 30 July 2003
The Republican Party took control of Congress with the 1994 Republican Contract with America on the idea that government "is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." Almost a decade later, with control of the White House, the Republicans in power have turned around and created the largest budget and deficits this county has ever seen. At a time when this country needs a sound fiscal policy, President Bush has led the path away from fiscal conservatism, and Republicans in Congress and across the country have followed. Conservatives have blindly followed Bush away from what used to be one of their pillars, low government spending and a balanced budget.
During the Clinton years, federal spending as a percentage of the nation's total economic output dropped from 22% at the start of his first term to below 19% at the end of his second. Huge deficits were replaced with record surpluses while the Republican Congress kept his spending in check. Regulatory costs also declined steadily throughout Clinton's presidency, according to a study released by Americans for Tax Reform, a group that favors lower taxes.
Under Bush, government spending is up 12.4% over the past three years, record deficits have returned and regulatory costs are up 8.4%. The $2.2 trillion budget is the most of any budget in United States' history. This number does not include the $74 billion spending bill already past to pay for the war in Iraq, nor does it include the further supplemental appropriations that will be needed for the increasingly expensive occupation of Iraq.
It used to be the Republicans who would start an outcry on spending increases, but for now, they are content spending away, creating the big government they supposedly abhor. If the Federal Government needs to increase its spending this much, a tax cut to boost the economy is not prudent. Making sure the war and the government can be paid for is a more pertinent issue.
There was also little opposition from Republicans on Bush's tax plan. A large $330 billion tax cut that, if Bush got his way, would have been closer to $750 billion. Bush now faces the largest deficits in the history of the Federal Government, estimated at $455 billion. Republicans and fiscal conservatives had believed for quite some time that a balanced budget was a good policy, but now that they have control, they believe they can do whatever they want with the public's money. Some economists agree that the tax cut will give the economy a boost, but the economic conditions are not bad enough that such a boost is needed when expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought.
Blaming the higher budgets on the "war on terror" stretches credulity too. As The Economist put it, "Federal spending has increased by 18% in Mr Bush's first two years--far more than the forecasts allow for in the future. The non-military component has been rising by more than 6% a year, which makes blaming it all on the war on terror seem strange. And the forecasts do not include the costs of war in Iraq, which are unpredictable."
President Bush and the self-proclaimed "conservatives" in Congress are showing they have no discipline when they are in control of the money. Bush and many of the Republicans have turned on their roots that won them control of Congress and are now blazing a trail back to the big government and big money that they were suppose to destroy.
http://www.conservativesagainstbush.com/30july.html
Mired in a quagmire and not any safer, the aftermath of the Iraq war
By Daniel J. Cragg | Editor-in-Chief | 4 July 2003
Last Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defensively spurned accusations that Iraq was turning into a Vietnam like quagmire. He also denied that Iraq was becoming a guerrilla war, even after one reporter cited the Defense Department's own definition of guerrilla war, "military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular ground indigenous forces," which seems to fit the description of what is occurring in Iraq. W. Patrick Lang, former head of Middle Eastern Affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a former professor at the Virginia Military Institute, told the Washington Post that the situation in Iraq is "exactly" what a guerrilla war looks like in its early stages. So why is the Secretary so defensive about the guerrilla label -- of course, it is because of the last guerrilla conflict the U.S. was involved in, Vietnam.
It goes deeper than this though. Since the end of World War II, nearly three quarters of all military conflicts have been low-intensity conflicts (LIC) (characterized by guerrilla warfare and terrorism, often they involve regular armies fighting guerrillas, terrorists, and even women and children. LICs involve mostly small arms on the part of the insurgent force).
Out of all these LICs, the conventional forces lost all but one time. The one success story is the British suppression of a communist insurgency in Malaysia. This was a special case, though. The communists were part of the Chinese minority in the country, and the British promised to leave immediately after defeating the insurgency, which they did. Every single other example of LIC was a victory for the insurgent forces, from the British in India, Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, the French in Indochina and Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Syrians in Lebanon, the Cubans in Angola, the Chinese in Vietnam, to the Vietnamese in Cambodia -- the list goes on. Mr. Rumsfeld has a lot to fear from the guerrilla war label. Indeed, it would reveal the quagmire that this Administration has gotten us into.
If these are Iraqis with even a modicum of popular support carrying out attacks on U.S. soldiers, the record does not bode well for the U.S. If LIC caused the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and institute democracy prematurely, the majority Shia country would very democratically elect a theocracy just like that other illiberal democracy, Iran.
An Iraqi Islamic theocracy would surely make an authoritarian socialist secular state look attractive as an alternative. But we had to go in and get Saddam because he would have given WMD to al Qaeda, right? Hardly. "The often postulated scenario of a state sponsor providing unconventional weapons to a terrorist group is unlikely to materialize," former deputy chief of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA Paul Pillar asserts in his book, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy. "The state would lose control over the material, an uncontrolled use of it by a group would serve no plausible purpose of the state, and sophisticated unconventional agents might be more traceable to their origin than the more mundane forms of assistance that sponsors usually provide to client groups."
It is likely that because of the U.S. invasion, Iraqi WMD were perhaps shipped to Syria, or even Libya. So, the invasion of Iraq has led to a LIC that could at worst turn Iraq into an Islamic fundamentalist state, and at best be a persistent drain on U.S. resources that could be dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda, while it concomitantly sent WMD into who-know's hands. The U.S. may not be any safer because of the invasion, but hey, at least we got the oil, right?
Calling a spade a spade: Wolfowitz, the neo-cons, and imperialism
By Daniel J. Cragg | Editor-in-Chief | 27 June 2003
"Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."
John Quincy Adams During the administration of the first President Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, the then third-ranking civilian in the Defense Department, made major waves when his annual review of Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) articulated a doctrine of ensuring American preeminence at all costs and was leaked to the press. Democrats had a field day deriding the draft DPG as un-American, and an embarrassed Bush administration disowned the document, saying it had no official sanction. This document just would not go away, though. Wolfowitz continued to promote the idea of American preeminence and called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s.
Both of these neo-con ideas had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism aimed at the U.S. They did not then and they do not now, but after 11 September 2001, Wolfowitz, now the Deputy Secretary of Defense, dusted off his preeminence doctrine and got the President to sign off on it. This doctrine was publicly articulated in the President's National Security Strategy published in September of 2002. Bush was also convinced by the neo-cons that the U.S. should invade Iraq, and according to the Washington Post, he decided to do so on 17 September 2001, well before U.N. inspectors failed in their mission in Iraq. For Wolfowitz, Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, at least terrorism against the U.S. It did not really even have to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD); as he told Vanity Fair, WMD was just a "bureaucratic reason" that "everyone could agree on." Indeed, he asserted that a "huge" reason was to remove U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. presence on "sacred" Saudi soil if often cited by Al Qaeda as one of the main grievances with the United States. Wolfowitz had also hoped for the construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel. Of course, the grand scheme to democratize the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, is routinely attributed to the neo-cons in the Administration. A plan to turn the Middle East into a region of democratic republics in the American tradition sounds remarkably like the avowed mission of the British Empire, "to make the world England." This is the kind of thinking that is forming our foreign policy -- not as much a concern for U.S. security and beating Al Qaeda as what Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich called, "a fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik...the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke."
Certainly Saddam Hussein's human rights record could not be the cause of the war either -- the list of authoritarian regimes with human rights violations contains much worse offenders than Saddam Hussein, and he was just as much an offender when he was our ally in the 1980s. It is time to stop mincing words and call Wolfowitz and his ilk what they are -- imperialists. Some may chortle at this accusation, but the appellation fits. The Incas and Aztecs ruled their empires through subordinate tribal chiefs outside of their capitals. Rome governed its empire through hundreds of autonomous city-states and even client-kings. The threat of force is what kept the periphery in line for these empires. Now Wolfowitz has the United States doing the same thing and calling it "preeminence."
Saddam Hussein's real crime, apparently, was not complying with the wishes of the U.S. government, and now the neo-cons have sent a message -- comply or else. This is a radical and dangerous upset to the Westphalian nation-state system of sovereignty. Wolfowitz wants an American Empire, but empires enrage so many. In an age when individual terrorists will decide to go to war against the U.S. and not heads of state, it shows how parlous Mr. Wolfowitz's imperial designs are.
The Ashcroftonian assault on liberty presses on
By Daniel J. Cragg | Editor-in-Chief | 24 June 2003 Last week the Justice Department scored a major victory with the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris, a naturalized U.S. citizen whom the Justice Department says plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. What many do not know though, is that the Government did this the old fashioned way -- without expanded police power. He was not jailed indefinitely as an "enemy combatant."
Despite this success, the Attorney General continues to propound that he can detain any U.S. citizen without due process -- that is, without formal charges, the right to a hearing or legal counsel. Whether an individual is captured in the United States or not, the Justice Department says "A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown ... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant. The court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination." In other words, the Executive Branch can detain anyone without any oversight and without any respect for a U.S. citizen's Constitutional rights. Whether John Ashcroft has exercised good judgment thus far with this new power or not is irrelevant, this power is downright un-American and is a bouleversement to U.S. civil liberties.
Even the 1942 Supreme Court case that the Attorney General is basing his indefinite detentions on, which allowed military trials of German saboteurs arrested in the U.S., affirmed the defendants' right to appeal their status in federal court. The court did not allow for indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, nor did it deny them counsel. Every American should be able to see how parlous this policy is. I cannot emphasize this enough: if the designation of U.S. citizen's as enemy combatants stands, any American could be detained indefinitely on simply the Executive Branch's word. This is not a liberal caviling, but a conservative that is genuinely concerned.
Former conservative Congressman Bob Barr, who currently chairs the civil liberties committee at the American Conservative Union, has even said that the government is "reaching too broadly and gaining too much power." Privacy concerns over Ashcroft's Patriot Act have caused ACLU membership to increase thirty percent since September 11, 2001, the largest increase in the organization's history. Librarians and booksellers are also rankled by the Patriot act because it eliminated the need for a court order to obtain records from libraries and booksellers. "Libraries are very local and we're hearing about this every day. People don't want the government snooping on them," Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "People understand when their rights are being thrown away and they aren't going to stand for it."
Not all of the Ashcroftonian assault is terrorism related either. As reported in this week's Economist, The Justice Department is prosecuting Brett Bursey, a veteran protester, for holding up a sign saying "No War For Oil" at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Ironically, Bursey was arrested thirty-three years ago for the same thing, only then against Vietnam and Richard Nixon. That case was dropped when the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that anti-war demonstrators could not be charged with trespassing on public property. This time around, the government has decided to prosecute him under an obscure law that allows the Secret Service to deny access to places where the President is visiting. According to prosecutors, Bursey should have been in a designated "free-speech zone," which was about a half a mile from the hangar where the President landed. Bursey rightly averred that all of America was a free-speech zone.
It should be noted that Bush proponents were not confined to the designated "free-speech zone." This petty persecution of an American who was simply exercising his first amendment right is yet another example of the Attorney General's assault on our most basic freedoms. New leadership is desperately needed in the Justice Department, before even more of cherished rights are taken away from us.
The Ashcroftonian assault on liberty presses on
By Daniel J. Cragg | Editor-in-Chief | 24 June 2003 Last week the Justice Department scored a major victory with the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris, a naturalized U.S. citizen whom the Justice Department says plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. What many do not know though, is that the Government did this the old fashioned way -- without expanded police power.
He was not jailed indefinitely as an "enemy combatant." Despite this success, the Attorney General continues to propound that he can detain any U.S. citizen without due process -- that is, without formal charges, the right to a hearing or legal counsel. Whether an individual is captured in the United States or not, the Justice Department says "A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown ... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant.
The court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination." In other words, the Executive Branch can detain anyone without any oversight and without any respect for a U.S. citizen's Constitutional rights. Whether John Ashcroft has exercised good judgment thus far with this new power or not is irrelevant, this power is downright un-American and is a bouleversement to U.S. civil liberties. Even the 1942 Supreme Court case that the Attorney General is basing his indefinite detentions on, which allowed military trials of German saboteurs arrested in the U.S., affirmed the defendants' right to appeal their status in federal court. The court did not allow for indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, nor did it deny them counsel. Every American should be able to see how parlous this policy is. I cannot emphasize this enough: if the designation of U.S. citizen's as enemy combatants stands, any American could be detained indefinitely on simply the Executive Branch's word. This is not a liberal caviling, but a conservative that is genuinely concerned.
Former conservative Congressman Bob Barr, who currently chairs the civil liberties committee at the American Conservative Union, has even said that the government is "reaching too broadly and gaining too much power." Privacy concerns over Ashcroft's Patriot Act have caused ACLU membership to increase thirty percent since September 11, 2001, the largest increase in the organization's history. Librarians and booksellers are also rankled by the Patriot act because it eliminated the need for a court order to obtain records from libraries and booksellers.
"Libraries are very local and we're hearing about this every day. People don't want the government snooping on them," Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "People understand when their rights are being thrown away and they aren't going to stand for it." Not all of the Ashcroftonian assault is terrorism related either. As reported in this week's Economist, The Justice Department is prosecuting Brett Bursey, a veteran protester, for holding up a sign saying "No War For Oil" at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Ironically, Bursey was arrested thirty-three years ago for the same thing, only then against Vietnam and Richard Nixon.
That case was dropped when the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that anti-war demonstrators could not be charged with trespassing on public property. This time around, the government has decided to prosecute him under an obscure law that allows the Secret Service to deny access to places where the President is visiting. According to prosecutors, Bursey should have been in a designated "free-speech zone," which was about a half a mile from the hangar where the President landed. Bursey rightly averred that all of America was a free-speech zone.
It should be noted that Bush proponents were not confined to the designated "free-speech zone." This petty persecution of an American who was simply exercising his first amendment right is yet another example of the Attorney General's assault on our most basic freedoms.
New leadership is desperately needed in the Justice Department, before even more of cherished rights are taken away from us.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/blog/archives/000189.html
