THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Good links, Fox. Here's one excerpt, "While 64% of the military sample said the situation in Iraq had been worth going to war over, only 55% of those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan said the Iraq war had been worth it." I don't see "way off the charts," but I probably don't understand percentages that much!

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.
February 27, 2005

W.'s Stiletto Democracy

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases.

The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "Fair and Balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.

W., who once looked into Mr. Putin's soul and liked what he saw, did not demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural Address. His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Instead, he said that "the common ground is a lot more than those areas where we disagree." The Russians were happy to stress the common ground as well.

An irritated Mr. Putin compared the Russian system to the American Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular vote, the standard most democracies use.

Certainly the autocratic former K.G.B. agent needs to be upbraided by someone - Tony Blair, maybe? - for eviscerating the meager steps toward democracy that Russia had made before Mr. Putin came to power. But Mr. Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration as a paragon of safeguarding liberty - considering it has trampled civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the torture of prisoners to bastions of democracy like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt this week after Egypt's arrest of a leading opposition politician.)

"I live in a transparent country," Mr. Bush protested to a Russian reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the private lives of American citizens "are now being monitored by the state."

Dick Cheney's secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

When nearly $9 billion allotted for Iraqi reconstruction during Paul Bremer's tenure went up in smoke, Democratic lawmakers vainly pleaded with Republicans to open a Congressional investigation.

Even the near absence of checks and balances is not enough for W. Not content with controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and a good chunk of the Fourth Estate, he goes to even more ludicrous lengths to avoid being challenged.

The White House wants its Republican allies in the Senate to stamp out the filibuster, one of the few weapons the handcuffed Democrats have left. They want to invoke the so-called nuclear option and get rid of the 150-year-old tradition in order to ram through more right-wing judges.

Mr. Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches - the secretary of state also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy "Matrix"-dominatrix black leather stiletto boots - but they shy away from taking questions from the public unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in advance.

Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting during Mr. Bush's visit to Germany last week after deciding an unscripted setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in Mainz with preselected Germans and Americans.

The president loves democracy - as long as democracy means he's always right.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

CI; I can imagine the comments that you will get for posting MAUREEN DOWD (oh my) , but for me at least, good article.

They know that they simply cannot answer unprepared questions on their policy. There are far, far too many ways that a cadgey questioner could trap either one of them in a logical fault, or bad sound-byte, which would no doubt be all over the news immediately.

It really highlights the weaknesses of our gov't, as compared, say, to the British system, where people at least have to answer for their decisions in person...

Cycloptichorn

Why Not Here?

This is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here?

Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody's vantage point changes.

"Why not here?" is a Kuhnian question, and as you open the newspaper these days, you see it flitting around the world like a thought contagion. Wherever it is asked, people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities have opened up.

The question is being asked now in Lebanon. Walid Jumblatt made his much circulated observation to David Ignatius of The Washington Post: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world."

So now we have mass demonstrations on the streets of Beirut. A tent city is rising up near the crater where Rafik Hariri was killed, and the inhabitants are refusing to leave until Syria withdraws. The crowds grow in the evenings; bathroom facilities are provided by a nearby Dunkin' Donuts and a Virgin Megastore.

The head of the Syrian Press Syndicate told The Times on Thursday: "There's a new world out there and a new reality. You can no longer have business as usual."

Meanwhile in Palestine, after days of intense pressure, many of the old Arafat cronies are out of the interim Palestinian cabinet. Fresh, more competent administrators have been put in. "What you witnessed is the real democracy of the Palestinian people," Saeb Erakat said to Alan Cowell of The Times. As Danny Rubinstein observed in the pages of Ha'aretz, the rules of the game have changed.

Then in Iraq, there is actual politics going on. The leaders of different factions are jostling. The tone of the coverage ebbs and flows as more or less secular leaders emerge and fall back, but the amazing thing is the politics itself. If we had any brains, we'd take up Reuel Marc Gerecht's suggestion and build an Iraqi C-Span so the whole Arab world could follow this process like a long political soap opera.

It's amazing in retrospect to think of how much psychological resistance there is to asking this breakthrough question: Why not here? We are all stuck in our traditions and have trouble imagining the world beyond. As Claus Christian Malzahn reminded us in Der Spiegel online this week, German politicians ridiculed Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech in 1987. They "couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany."

But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, "In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. ... We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."

Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote an important essay for this page a few weeks ago, arguing that American diplomacy is often most effective when it pursues not an incrementalist but a "maximalist" agenda, leaping over allies and making the crude, bold, vantage-shifting proposal - like pushing for the reunification of Germany when most everyone else was trying to preserve the so-called stability of the Warsaw Pact.

As Sestanovich notes, and as we've seen in spades over the past two years in Iraq, this rashness - this tendency to leap before we look - has its downside. Things don't come out wonderfully just because some fine person asks, Why not here?

But this is clearly the question the United States is destined to provoke. For the final thing that we've learned from the papers this week is how thoroughly the Bush agenda is dominating the globe. When Bush meets with Putin, democratization is the center of discussion. When politicians gather in Ramallah, democratization is a central theme. When there's an atrocity in Beirut, the possibility of freedom leaps to people's minds.

Not all weeks will be as happy as this one. Despite the suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq, the thought contagion is spreading. Why not here?


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/opinion/26broooks.html?ex=1110085200&en=478dd9374e74eea9&ei=5070

That is shallow, blinkered and vicious. I am a citizen of a country which has risked its reputation and lost its high standing, moral authority or "soul". I resent this deeply, and will continue to protest it in any and every way I can.
I resent our soldiers being sent abroad for a lie, to attack and kill innocent people. We have lost much, too much in this misguided venture.

As a citizen of this world first, and American second, I agree with you 100 percent, McTag.

Well McTag and C.I. will just have to vet and fume then, for there are plenty of us who think the families who have invested much and contributed all should have the say over how the remains of their loved ones are displayed or not displayed. Those who want them displayed too often want to use them as ammunition for their antiwar or futilitiy of war sentiments and thus spit on those very caskets. This is precisely what the families do not want. The brave young men and women who gave all to their country should be honored as heroes and for their contribution to hope of a better world.

Those who can't see it that way, should at least respect the wishes of the families.

Quote, "Those who want them displayed too often want to use them as ammunition for their antiwar or futilitiy of war sentiments and thus spit on those very caskets." So now, you know exactly how the families of some war vets have acted and will continue to act. Proof please? I want to see pictures of those families spitting on those caskets. Your powers of knowledge goes way beyond what I expect from even some politicians.

It's more like our government spitting on our Iraq war vets.
*******************
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041207-121848-6449r.htm

GW Bush's America
Sick Iraq War Veteran Has to Fight for Medical Treatment

by Lolita C. Baldor

WASHINGTON After Army Sgt. Vannessa Turner survived a still-unknown illness doctors feared would kill her, she thought her toughest battle was over.


Vannessa Turner is seen outside of the John F. Kennedy federal building in Boston, Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2003. There was no parade when Army Sgt. Turner Oliver returned home to Roxbury, Mass., no medal ceremony or VIP reception after she battled back from what doctors said was her imminent death in Iraq. (AP Photo/Chitose Suzuki)

But since a military flight brought Turner home she says she's had to fight to get medical treatment and can't even get personal items returned.

The homefront, she's finding, can be as daunting as the front lines in Iraq.

''It's easier to stay a soldier and be in harm's way than to come home and get care,'' said Turner, her quiet voice quaking with emotion.

Arriving at her mother's home in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood last month after hospital stays in Germany and Washington, the six-year Army veteran says she was told that despite severe nerve damage in her right leg she'd have to wait until mid-October to see a doctor at the local Veterans Affairs hospital.

She sought help from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and eventually got an appointment scheduled this week, but the experience was frustrating for Turner and her family. They look at the hero's welcome given to former prisoner of war Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was in one of Turner's rehabilitation sessions, and see a double standard.

''Some people are getting scholarships, my sister can't get a doctor's appointment,'' said her sister Nicole. ''To me, they threw her away like a piece of trash. She served her country and now nothing is being done for her.''

Veterans' advocates said Turner's frustration is not unusual. More than 110,000 veterans are waiting six months or more for their initial visit with a VA doctor or to see a specialist, the VA acknowledges.

''Is this what our returning heroes from Afghanistan and Iraq can expect from their elected officials as they seek health care for their painful injuries sustained in the line of duty?'' Veterans of Foreign Wars Commander Ray Sisk said.

VA undersecretary for health Robert Roswell said everyone who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom is entitled to two years of VA health care benefits. And the benefits are available to those wounded in combat as well as those injured in accidents or who suffer illnesses.

He blamed Turner's treatment on errors at the VA's West Roxbury facility. Officials there failed to recognize her as a newly released veteran needing immediate care.

The families usually do NOT want them displayed C.I. Please read more carefully. I know several of those families. Do you?

Several do not make the whole.

I know my mathematical skills are weak, but several usually meant "more than two, but not many."

Wow

This thread still running

Went to sleep here for a bout 6 months

just woke up

nuthin changed

Well not quite true. I heard about the sad passing of CavFancier.

And Fox Hunting in England

I wonder if you went to sleep again for six months Iraq still wouldn't have picked a PM or the whole country be knee deep in a civil war. Or will the whole world be focused on Iran or Syria or wherever the administration takes us next.

There is a passage in the Bible that I think applies to this administration very well. Psalms 140 1-4.

Usually walter or someone else manages to hear or read before I do, the price I pay for avoiding TV news I guess, but has anyone heard anything new yet regarding Iraqi's Prime Minister pick?

Yes, McTag. And c.i. protested as a citizen of the world first and of the US, second. I, too.

foxfyre, it is not just that the coffins aren't shown. It is myriad things. Honor and respect are not shown to the troops because they are not given proper armor to save themselves, the injured and maimed reserve troops are not taken care of properly when they return from Iraq, and the numbers are not tolled off in solemn tribute every day except on Jim Lehrer's nightly TV show. (!)

Ge, thanks for Poker with Dick Cheney.

Hello, Steve. Welcome back. If you read a few pages, you will remember why you left.

I pop in every few weeks. And remember why I left.

Hi Kara

Delightful to hear from you

popping in and out

of virtual .....dammit cant spell the bloody word

I mean conscionceness

no that the vodka talk

conscioojnnness

thats worse


consciounness

what the **** you know what I virtually mean