Paul Wolfowitz, the people's friend

The BBC's Ian Pannell in Washington says that although Mr Wolfowitz's remarks will be seized upon by critics who claim there was little justification for the war in Iraq, it is unlikely to have any political consequences in the US.

All opinion polls show most Americans are unconcerned about the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Speaking earlier this week, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed Iraq may have destroyed them before the US-led invasion.

my mom's still a british citizen ... so, british citizenship laws pending (gareth? tom? suzy?), i have an out!

...but wait, i thought the Onion was satirical in nature?

</doe-eyed faux incredulity>

1. No one will notice
2. No one will care
3. Anyone who does care can't/won't do anything bout it
4. Four more in 2004!

so many fucking problems; where to begin???

*muscles bulge, clothes rip & tear, flesh turns green*

"HULK SMASH!!!!"

*hulk proceeds to smash*

actually, i used to have a recurring nightmare feat. the Hulk when i was a little kid. sorry. :)

back on topic, a friend of mine has often wondered what it's going to take for people to just up and revolt. any other country would have by now. so actually, probably the most immediate problem is apathy---if more people were angry enough, more might have a chance of being changed. but not enough people care, and those who do can't do anything about it and just end up beating their heads against walls, which ultimately serves no one and just gives them gigantic headaches and exhaustion.

*tries to forget about impending unemployment*

"Luck" is a damn strange word for getting landed with a Tory government for five years (angry and betrayed and powerless though much of New Labour's record so far makes me feel), and I don't really see any other alternative to Blair happening, unfortunately. Convince me otherwise and I'll be a great deal happier, of course...

a friend of mine has often wondered what it's going to take for people to just up and revolt.

Worse, so many of these people believe that the powers that be are working on their direct behalf.

1. People need leaders. Why isn't your friend rising up if he feels so strongly about it?

2. Mass unemployment and poverty often causes revolts. Oh, and widespread imprisonment. Therefore: Wait for it.

Why are the people running the government so opposed to the government actually being able to accomplish anything besides explicity repressive police functions? Maybe we are seeing the triumph of Libertarianism.

Millar: difficult to rise up by oneself, mostly because it's more easy to pound one person (or a marginalised subset of people) into the ground than it is a larger group. she's doing what she can (and yes, legally---this is not a coded message).

(and wow, the words "she's doing what she can" just don't seem grammatically right...XD)

I understand the source of idly wishing for a revolution, but it seems a rather stupid (not to mention pointless) thing to actually advocate. I don't even agree with Slutsky, either: I think revolt has lead to better societies in many cases. But revolt is still a scary thing, and I suspect that if such a thing were successful it would be forfeiting many of the privileges I have enjoyed all my life (whether from chaos or redistribution of wealth) and I am not prepared to do this.

I mean this is all silly talk since any American revolt would likely resemble Tianenmen Square more than the Winter Palace.

Meh. Fucking pathetic.

no, i recognise that it probably wouldn't get us anywhere, but i suppose the reason the idea of revolt is even brought up is sort of kneejerkily responding to the complete sense of happy apathy that seems to foster this situation. there is no simple solution, and since this is the case, it seems that a lot of people aren't willing to try. i can't remember if i said it on this thread or on another, but there are so many problems with our current administration that it's nearly impossible to know where to begin.

one of these problems, i think, is the idea of the two (main) parties---what good is this if they aren't really separate at all anymore? :P

i also sort of like edwards because he's positioning himself as a rural champion, which from what i've read he really IS, at least moreso than anyone else in the picture; his trial-lawyer past will be tough to shake at first, tho

http://www.quinnell.us/politics/2004/dean.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/colby02222003.html

http://ontheissues.org/Howard_Dean.htm

There was a good (and somewhat sympathetic) interview with Dean in this month's Progressive, in which he actually said that Bush as a governor "governed from the center", which wasn't true at all.

Dean's just being more politically savvy in his ostensible "left" turn. His platform is pretty coy about lots of things, though.

I may end up voting for him just because he seems hell-bent on beating Bush, but I'm not going to idealize him.

Lieberman: 85% (ADA)/20% (ACU)
Graham: 75%(ADA)/20% (ACU)
Kerry: 85% (ADA)/20% (ACU)
Gephardt: 90% (ADA)/8% (ACU)
Edwards: 70% (ADA)/30% (ACU)
Kucinich: 80% (ADA)/0% (ACU)

(Cynthia McKinney's numbers [should she run as a Green] are 85% (ADA)/8% (ACU). Cynthia Moseley-Braun's lifetime ADA number is 88% [could't retrieve her lifetime ACU numbers]).

It should also be noted that: (a) 6 Democratic Senators (Mikulski, Sarbanes, Kennedy, Wellstone, Corzine, and J. Reed) and 37 Democratic Representatives have 100% ADA ratings, with most from both Houses coming out somewhere between 80%-95%; (b) the lowest ADA rating for any Democratic Senator is 30% (Zell Miller), with the next lowest being 65% (Breaux); (c) the highest ADA rating that any Republican Senator has is 45% (Sen. Chaffee), with 19 Republican Senators (Kyl, Hutchinson, Allard, Lugar, Brownback, Roberts, Bunning, McConnell, Lott, Helms, Voinovich, Nickles, Santorum, Frist, Graham, Hutchison, Gramm, Bennett, and Hatch) having ADA ratings b/w 0%-5% and 122 Republican Representatives having ADA ratings of 0%.

So please, no more of this "there's no difference b/w the Democrats and the GOP" nonsense -- that's so 2000, and we don't have that luxury anymore.

(which isn't to say that i'd vote for Lieberman in the primary, but that's what primaries are for -- voting for the person you support most, and hoping that he/she wins the party's nomination. shit, i voted for Jerry Brown in the 1992 primary but still voted for Clinton in the election!)

It might be better to ask what the difference is between Clinton and McKinney, or Kucinich, or even Dean for that matter, or what was the difference between Clinton and moderate Republicans. Or are you going to deny that the DLC strategy was to court Republicans?

Tad - obviously, IMO, the "moderate" is better than Bush. The problem is that a lot of people thought that Bush II was going to be like Bush I. Shit, I'd vote for Bush I over Bush II - maybe I'd even vote for Reagan over Bush II.

Do you reckon he is really dim and thus keeps straying off-message, or is he so confident in the power of the OVERLORDS that he sees no obligation to hide their evil?

Fletrejet to thread!

i mean as far as the political arena is concerned, they can all go fuck themselves and hopefully they'll never have public office again soon enough. but if we're actually wondering why they are how they are i don't think simple uncle scrooge comparisons are useful.

ok, everyone please recoil in fear at once:

http://a.abcnews.com/images/autowirestory/AP/SIN105053101.jpeg

TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON—Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has directly linked the war on Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, signalling another shift in Washington's defence of a conflict that continues to claim American lives.

Wolfowitz, in a series of interviews on U.S. television networks yesterday, appeared to ignore intelligence reports, which have discredited links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism.

He sought to defend President George W. Bush's administration against charges that it had misled Americans on the threat posed by deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, saying the government cannot wait for "murky" intelligence to crystallize because it may be too late.

"The battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle on the war on terrorism," Wolfowitz said on Meet the Press.

"Stop and think, if in 2001, or in 2000, or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden, and we had tried to say it's because he's planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, you don't have any proof of that," he said.

"I think the lesson of Sept. 11 is that you can't wait until proof after the fact.

``It surprises me sometimes that people have forgotten so soon what Sept. 11, I think, should have taught us about terrorism," he added.

"And that's what this is all about," he said.

Wolfowitz would put no timetable on the capture or death of Saddam. He said there was no reason to be confident that would put an end to guerrilla attacks against American troops, but added it "would have more effect than any single thing we can do."

Wolfowitz said an American priority now is to have Iraqis performing guard duties in front of hospitals, banks or power plants.

At least 10 U.S. soldiers have been killed while performing guard duty and the American command in Iraq have trained 8,700 local civilians to take over their duties.

Still, hundreds of Americans are stationed outside key installations and are increasingly becoming targets.

One U.S. Marine was killed and another wounded early yesterday in a grenade attack south of Baghdad, after one of the bloodiest weeks in the guerrilla war against U.S. forces since Bush declared major combat in Iraq was over on May 1.

The military said the attack occurred at 2:35 a.m. in the region controlled by the Marines south of the capital.

On Saturday, four American soldiers were killed in two separate attacks.

Three of them died when a grenade was tossed into their midst while they were playing cards and doing their laundry outside a children's hospital northeast of Baghdad.

The other soldier was killed later in the afternoon when a convoy came under attack west of the capital, bringing to 14 the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq in the past week, most of them following the Tuesday killings of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay.

The deaths brought to 48 the number of U.S. forces killed in combat in Iraq since May 1 when Bush said the major combat phase of the Iraq war had ended. So far 163 U.S. soldiers have died in the war.

Wolfowitz, who just returned from Iraq, said the deaths of Saddam's sons, has increased the amount of information being brought to U.S. officials.

"This is a war that's going to be won not by smothering the country with individual guard posts, it's going to be won by better and better intelligence, and the intelligence was improving even before the killings, and I think it's improved since then," Wolfowitz told Fox News Sunday

Wolfowitz did not respond directly when asked if he was specifically linking the Iraqi invasion to the war against Al Qaeda.

"I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you're not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you're going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country," he said.

Additional articles by Tim Harper

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=1&hp

CIA vs. Wolfie and friends at the Pentagon in 2001

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

those guys couldn't even get vigilant paranoia right