Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Robert Scheer: Bush in Free Fall. At what point will President Bush finally grasp the enormous disaster that the neoconservatives, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, have visited upon his presidency? Or, to put it numerically, just how does a president descend from a 92 percent approval rating one month after 9/11 -- the highest of any president since modern polling began -- to the two-thirds disapproval score that has stalked him through the last year, thanks to the Iraq debacle, without getting the message? Two major polls released this week show that the vast majority of Americans grasp the salient lesson of the Iraq misadventure: "Winning" this war has nothing to do with winning the war on terrorism. Thus, the public overwhelmingly supports the congressional Democratic leadership's demand that the administration begin concrete steps to extract U.S. troops from Iraq. This week's New York Times/CBS poll found that two-thirds of those polled said that the war is "going badly" and that "the United States should reduce its forces in Iraq, or remove them altogether." Meanwhile, a Washington Post/ABC survey reported that, "by a large margin, Americans trust the Democrats rather than the president to find a solution to a conflict that remains enormously unpopular." According to the Post poll, more than six in 10 Americans want Congress to make the final decision about when our troops come home. Even a majority of Republicans judge Bush to be too rigid to change course and, significantly, among those who either served in Iraq or had a close friend or relative who did, only 38 percent approve of Bush's handling of the war. In an important rebuke to those Democrat "centrists" afraid to vigorously challenge Bush on the war, about half of those polled criticized the Democrats for doing "too little" to challenge Bush's war policy. How much courage will it take for wavering Democrats and Republicans to come out forthrightly in favor of ending a war that the majority of Americans believe is not worth fighting? At first, the public, driven by false claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida manufactured by the neocon cabal that dominated the administration, bought into Bush's claims that the Iraq war was an essential battle in the war on terrorism. At a time when even respectable news organizations were spreading such falsehoods as unquestioned truths and most Democrats in Congress displayed the independence of mind of cheerleaders, it was no wonder that initial support for the Iraq war was nearly unanimous. Fully 90 percent of Americans backed Bush one week after the first bombs fell in a "shock and awe" campaign that neocon ideologues at the Pentagon were convinced would lead a terrorized population to embrace democracy and other purported Western values. As Winston Churchill once observed, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. But the truth eventually does catch up, and that is the specter that now haunts our president. There is simply no plausible national security argument for the United States' ongoing occupation of Iraq. That fact was driven home Tuesday when American and Iranian negotiators met for the second time in Baghdad at the insistence of Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was quite clear that peace will not come without the Iranian government's cooperation. The harsh reality that the United States must now enlist the support of Iran, the "rogue nation" that Bush claims threatens us with nukes, which this very week was once again accused by the U.S. ambassador of supplying arms to Iraq's anti-American Shiite militias, underscores the folly of this disastrous escapade. The regime change engineered by the neocons vastly extended the power of the regime housed in Tehran and will only intensify with each additional day of the U.S. occupation. Yet, communication with Iran is a good thing, because Iranians at least have to live with the consequences of increased violence -- as opposed to American politicians, who feel required only to muddle through to the next election. The Democrats and the few Republican dissidents are quite happy to make a show of their reservations about the war without actually ending it. The Democratic leadership in Congress is playing a risky game of pretending to be the party of peace without actually pursuing the budget-cutting measures that would force an end to the war. While this opportunistic strategy may produce a temporary political advantage, it will be of slight comfort to the families of American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq over the next 18 months, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of future Iraqi victims. Nor will it con a public that has turned solidly against this war and is determined to hold politicians responsible for ending it. Originally posted at TruthDig.com [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed] 7:55:03 AM    comment []

Congress Wants Answers on Tillman Death. Scott Lindlaw reports for the Associated Press: "Congressional investigators told the White House on Tuesday that they intend to question several former Bush administration officials about their knowledge of Pat Tillman's death, escalating their inquiry into the high-profile friendly fire case ... Congressional investigators are interested in what White House staff members knew because Tillman's family and others believe officials at the highest levels of government hid facts to limit public-relations damage." [t r u t h o u t] 7:06:46 AM    comment []

What to Say to Those Who Think Nuclear Power Will Save Us. As the energy crisis heats up, you may need a refresher on the evidence against nukes. [AlterNet.org] 7:00:05 AM    comment []

Harry Shearer: New Orleans: the Health Care Story. Leslie Eaton, in Tuesday's NYT, front-pages a long piece on the state of health care in New Orleans. My first thought on reading it was that Michael Moore should have come to the Crescent City, because the post-disaster state of the health-care system is a worst-case scenario of what's happening, in milder terms, nationwide. Eaton gets the numbers right, in terms of the medical and mental health personnel who have fled the city at the time of its greatest need, but fails to interview those who departed--some 80% of the mental health professionals, according to a story published some time ago in the Times-Picayune. But Eaton brushes lightly past the heart of the story: the continued impasse between the state and the feds--the two entities with any money to put behind their opinions--on the fate of Charity Hospital. Like the shuttered public housing units, the delay in reviving or replacing Charity is, at bottom, the playing out of an ideological struggle between old-style liberalism and the Bush administration's flavor of conservatism. Charity was born in the Huey Long era, when the point was to build a full-spectrum facility to care for the poor and educate the state's doctors. The feds instead want to pay poor people to buy insurance with which to patronize private doctors and hospitals. The economics are debatable, but what's clear is that the recovery of New Orleans is being sacrificed to this ideological struggle. A complicating factor is the desire of LSU, the university that ran Charity, for a showplace new medical center. (But similarly, the feds insist on shutting perfectly habitable public housing in the interest of building mixed-use, and mixed-income, units. While perhaps laudable in the abstract, the dogged pursuit of this policy means people who had leases on the old public housing units not only can't return home, they can't even retrieve their possessions) A look at the ideological struggle behind the health-care and affordable-housing crises would have been a useful addition to Eaton's reporting. [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed] 6:57:06 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Patricia Thurston.