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

Welcome B. .... she nailed it.

When I watched CNN's coverage on the claiming of the bodies at the Russian school the reporter said that some of the bodies were unclaimed because whole families had been killed ... there was no one left to claim anything... I cried at the thought of somewhere there is an empty house where there once was laughter, the shadows now fall on silence.

Then the thought comes to mind of Bush pronouncing the world to be a safer place with Saddam gone and I get angry..... 330 mothers father and babies gone and for what?!?!?

You guys want to read Krugman today.

Link please

September 7, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Mythic Reality
By PAUL KRUGMAN

he best book I've read about America after 9/11 isn't about either America or 9/11. It's "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," an essay on the psychology of war by Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent. Better than any poll analysis or focus group, it explains why President Bush, despite policy failures at home and abroad, is ahead in the polls.

War, Mr. Hedges says, plays to some fundamental urges. "Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours," he says, "is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver." When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy.

This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power.

One striking part of the book describes Argentina's reaction to the 1982 Falklands war. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, the leader of the country's military junta, cynically launched that war to distract the public from the failure of his economic policies. It worked: "The junta, which had been on the verge of collapse" just before the war, "instantly became the saviors of the country."

The point is that once war psychology takes hold, the public desperately wants to believe in its leadership, and ascribes heroic qualities to even the least deserving ruler. National adulation for the junta ended only after a humiliating military defeat.

George W. Bush isn't General Galtieri: America really was attacked on 9/11, and any president would have followed up with a counterstrike against the Taliban. Yet the Bush administration, like the Argentine junta, derived enormous political benefit from the impulse of a nation at war to rally around its leader.

Another president might have refrained from exploiting that surge of support for partisan gain; Mr. Bush didn't.

And his administration has sought to perpetuate the war psychology that makes such exploitation possible.

Step by step, the fight against Al Qaeda became a universal "war on terror," then a confrontation with the "axis of evil," then a war against all evil everywhere. Nobody knows where it all ends.

What is clear is that whenever political debate turns to Mr. Bush's actual record in office, his popularity sinks. Only by doing whatever it takes to change the subject to the war on terror - not to what he's actually doing about terrorist threats, but to his "leadership," whatever that means - can he get a bump in the polls.

Last week's convention made it clear that Mr. Bush intends to use what's left of his heroic image to win the election, and early polls suggest that the strategy may be working. What can John Kerry do?

Campaigning exclusively on domestic issues won't work. Mr. Bush must be held to account for his dismal record on jobs, health care and the environment. But as Mr. Hedges writes, when war psychology makes a public yearn to believe in its leaders, "there is little that logic or fact or truth can do to alter the experience."

To win, the Kerry campaign has to convince a significant number of voters that the self-proclaimed "war president" isn't an effective war leader - he only plays one on TV.

This charge has the virtue of being true. It's hard to find a nonpartisan national security analyst with a good word for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Iraq, in particular, is a slow-motion disaster brought on by wishful thinking, cronyism and epic incompetence.

If I were running the Kerry campaign, I'd remind people frequently about Mr. Bush's flight-suit photo-op, when he declared the end of major combat. In fact, the war goes on unabated. News coverage of Iraq dropped off sharply after the supposed transfer of sovereignty on June 28, but as many American soldiers have died since the transfer as in the original invasion.

And I'd point out that while Mr. Bush spared no effort preparing for his carrier landing - he even received underwater survival training in the White House pool - he didn't prepare for things that actually mattered, like securing and rebuilding Iraq after Baghdad fell.

Will it work? I don't know. But to win, Mr. Kerry must try to puncture the myth that Mr. Bush's handlers have so assiduously created.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

We are still trying the purge the myth that the Pligrims landed at Plymouth rock to establish freedom of religon/democracy so that all men could be equal and free. I don't have much faith that we are going to purge the mythology of the Bush administration.

yup

Don't miss .....



Feel the buzz. Contrary to what I had originally understood, the Ben Barnes interview is running Wednesday evening. But, I'm told by several sources that the Barnes' interview is only a relatively small part of the package 60 Minutes is running. There's other stuff that CBS has -- newly discovered, or at least newly-revealed, documents that shed light on Bush's guard service or lack thereof.
-- Josh Marshall

Barnes helpd get Bush into the guard.

Thanks Gel.

dys...you got it. Minus the mythologies so assiduously worked up by marketing techniques, and minus all the deceits and misrepresentations, this boy and his crowd would not be welcome in very many homes.

Excuses?

I posted none.

I posted my questions.

I posted my inferences.

I posted my reasoning process. I assumed certain assertions you made were true. Then I asked myself if the truth of your assertions could be coroborated by relevant facts. I was unable to corroborate any of those assumptions with the truth. So I concluded my assumptions were probably wrong.

Your reponse was essentially a set of maybes for which you offered zero evidence.

I agree I am probably unable to convince you of the truth of anything you do not already believe may be true, or which is implicit in what you already believe maybe true.

Why do you believe this fellow? Is it because you too are unable to tell the difference between what is possible (i.e., may be true) and what is probable (i.e., what is more likely true)?

Among the necessary conditions for the Iraqi people to save themselves from another regime that terrorizes them and sponsors the terrorizing of others:

1. We in the US must trust the Iraqi people to accomplish their goal.

2. We in the US must trust ourselves to help the Iraqi people to accomplish their goal.

3. The Iraqi people must trust the Iraqi people to accomplish their goal.


What do you think are the consequences of a failure to meet any one or more of these necessary conditions to:

North Americans?
South Americans?
Australians?
Europeans?
Asians?

"What you mean, we, paleface?"

Does that we include you?



"One small step for [a woman], but one giant step for [human kind]."

I quess it isn't Bush's fault afterall because it occurred on his watch

I look to you for truth .....if you say it is false I know it is true..

Brilliant![/color]

If I shall say it is false, will you say it is true?

and if he says he always lies?

Brilliant![/color]


What if he neither says he always lies or he never lies?

well he says he lies sometimes, which brings us no closer to the truth

ican, I would no more blame Bush for what happened on 9/11 than I would blame President Kerry if a terror attack occurred on his watch, Commandant Cheney to the contrary.

Most definitely so. Although I did everything short of chaining myself to the gates of the White House to protest this war, I did not do enough because I did not stop it. No matter what rationale you put forth in defense of this war, you as well as every other American has the blood of 1,000 US soldiers, many troops of other nationalities and 10,000 Iraqis on our hands.

I infer you are saying that if one never says whether or not one lies, then one is saying one lies sometimes.



Yes, this brings us no closer to the truth!

Using your logic, I must confess to far more blood on my hands.

Alas, from the age of 8, I supported various wars to end terror and tyranny, and to secure liberty, and did not even attempt to prevent them from occuring. The most notable, but by no means my only, example is the blood from over 100,000,000 people, friend and foe alike, during WWII. Of course, to have actually succeeded in preventing those wars by chaining myself to the White House front door, or even flying a small plane to my death into the White Rose Garden, I would now have the blood of far more people on my dead hands.

Kara, the sooner tyranny of any kind in any form is neutralized the less blood we all will have on our hands. I infer that you think that passive resistance will produce less bloodshed as it did in Ghandi's case, regardless who or what is resisted. I think there is a preponderance of evidence to show that passive resistance produces less blood shed only when that which is resisted chooses out of its own sense of decency to limit its blood sheding. Those we currently are resisting give increasing evidence that they have no sense of decency or are suppressing their sense of decency.

So I tell you this. It is my determination that in the event you and those who are thinking and acting like you succeed, you will haved caused much more blood on all our hands than would otherwise be there. Your mere attempts to succeed in this endeavor have already caused much more additional blood to be on our hands than would otherwise be there: yours for trying to succeed, ours for our failure to convince you to stop trying.

I bet that when and if you recognize your error, as so many like you in the past, your excuse will be,

[size=8]But no body told me! [/size]

Our excuse is that we have no excuse, either.