Paul Krugman is 100% right

The Right have gone mad with rage at Paul Krugman's 9/11 post.  It's far too honest.

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

The most specious complaint is the disrespect card, like Krugman I would argue its far more disrespectful to those who died that day and in the Neo-con wars of choice since to perpetuate the mythology that allowed them.

I have no time for the 9/11 'Truthers'.  I believe 9/11 happened because 19 pissed off Muslims with x-acto knives made it happen, where we agree is that the Neo-con regime in the White House did leap on the terrible events of that day to perpetuate their own ideological agenda at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives since that day.

9/11 was used to perpetuate lies and death and torture and vanished freedoms.  It baffles me that there can even be any argument about any of this.

Someday...

...when the elites currently rattling sabers look back at a gigantic disaster in the rear-view mirror again and once again claim that 'no one could have known that attacking Iran would be such an utter disaster, so they should still be respected as wise experts on foreign policy' ... come back and re-read this New York Times article explaining why attacking Iran would be an act of criminal insanity.

Iran is not Syria, with no immediate capacity to retaliate against a surprise attack on its nuclear sites. Iran is a country of 70 million people, and its commanders, battle-hardened by a brutal eight-year stand-off with Iraq, have the ability and will to engage in a long, protracted war against Israel and American interests. Iran maintains a large military equipped with Russian-made weapons systems, surface-to-surface missiles, combat aircraft, unmanned drones and high-speed torpedo boats capable of destroying large warships.

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard has extended its reach from southern Lebanon to South America and maintains proxy forces — again, Hezbollah and Hamas — positioned in Israel’s back yard. They’ll force Israel to fight a war of attrition on multiple fronts.

Israel would likely be compelled to extend its military operations to include Lebanon. That would instantly plunge the entire region into war, likely bring a new intifada onto Jerusalem’s streets and place enormous pressure on leaders in Cairo and Amman to renounce their peace treaties with Israel. If Israeli planes use Saudi airspace, Iran has threatened to attack the kingdom, too.

The United States, for its part, could forget about the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq and the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. There are up to 30,000 Iranian operatives in Iraq ready to do Iran’s bidding. And Iran enjoys significant loyalty from Afghan officials and warlords, particularly those in the trouble-prone region of Herat.

Iran has repeatedly said that it would, in the case of an attack, shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 17 million barrels of oil pass every day, spiking oil prices and devastating America’s financial recovery.

All of this could engender a serious diplomatic crisis between the United States and Russia — respectively Israel’s and Iran’s patrons — at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are improving.

Netanyahu says Iran is led by “a messianic apocalyptic cult” and that failure to attack is appeasement. But surely not every year is 1938, not every statesman who fears the nemesis of war is Chamberlain.

Born Free

M.I.A.'s controversial new video, directed by Romain Garvas is bleak and uncompromising. It has the same basic plot as South Park's Ginger hate episode, just taken completely literally. Stir in Arizona's new immigration law and insurgency warfare's ugliness brought home and you have a provocative and heady brew.

NSFW. Extremely NSFW.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Bounty

Spotted at Thwap's Schoolyard, George Monbiot suggests the only recourse we have left against elite war criminals is citizen's arrest:

This site offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against peace. Anyone attempting an arrest which meets the rules laid down here will be entitled to one quarter of the money collected at the time of his or her application.

Money donated to this site will be used for no other purpose than to pay bounties for attempts to arrest Tony Blair. All the costs of administering this site will be paid by the site’s founder.*

The intention is to encourage repeated attempts to arrest the former prime minister. We have four purposes:

- To remind people that justice has not yet been done.

- To show Mr Blair that, despite his requests for people to “move on” from Iraq, the mass murder he committed will not be forgotten.

- To put pressure on the authorities of the United Kingdom and the countries he travels through to prosecute him for a crime against peace, or to deliver him for prosecution to the International Criminal Court.

- To discourage other people from repeating his crime.

The Final Scene

With Bush finally gone and the horrifying truth beginning to dribble out about how far gone the US was the last eight years, particularly Sy Hersh pointing out pieces in the New York Times about an organization reporting only to the Vice President's office that was basically Dick Cheney's personal wetwork team, I feel like this apropo scene from the astoundingly prophetic 1975 movie 3 Days of the Condor is worth running.

The Last Hundred Days

As of midnight tonight George W. Bush has only 100 days left in The White House.

He destroyed his country's standing in the world, destroyed his country's economy, very probably destroyed his party and tried very hard to destroy the legal protections and traditions of the American constitution. He will be remembered in history books alongside Nixon and Hoover for a record of incompetence, corruption and belligerence that the world can only hope we will never see the like of again.

We can only hope that Bush and his glowering, sneering consigliari Vice President Cheney will not attempt to roll the dice and redeem their vicious worldview with an all out attack on Iran before being evicted from the White House.

These aren't just supporters of bad ideas and bad policies, these are bad people and the world will be repairing the damage they've done for years to come.

Let them huddle in their bunker under the rubble as their long night approaches. When they're gone may we never see their faces again unless its from the dock.

America: Learn from this, learn from the drooling hatred and loathing we're seeing now in the crowds at McCain and Palin's Nuremberg style rallies. Banish these inclinations from your system and rejoin the wider world.

We're waiting for you.

Here we go again...

Serial liar Amir Taheri is at it again. You may remember him from the infamous National Post front page false story about how Iran planned to force it's Jewish population to wear yellow badges JUST LIKE THE NAZIS DID! Now he's spreading lies about Barack Obama refuted even by Bush administration members:

Earlier this week, the campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., seized upon a column in the New York Post that described Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as having urged Iraqi leaders in a private meeting to delay coming to an agreement with the Bush administration on the status of U.S. troops.
"Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a drawdown of the American military presence," Post columnist Amir Taheri wrote, quoting Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who told the Post that Obama, during his meeting with Iraqi leaders in July, "asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the U.S. elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington."
The charge -- that Obama asked the Iraqis to delay signing off on a "Status of Forces Agreement," thus delaying U.S. troop withdrawal and interfering in U.S. foreign policy -- has been picked up on the Internet, talk radio and by Republicans, including the McCain campaign, which seized on the story as possible evidence of duplicity.
The Obama campaign said that the Post report consisted of "outright distortions." Lending significant credence to Obama's response is the fact that -- though it's absent from the Post story and other retellings -- in addition to Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, this July meeting was also attended by Bush administration officials, such as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and the Baghdad embassy's legislative affairs advisor Rich Haughton, as well as a Republican senator, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
Attendees of the meeting back Obama's account, including not just Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., but Hagel, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers from both parties. Officials of the Bush administration who were briefed on the meeting by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad also support Obama's account and dispute the Post story and McCain attack.
The Post story is "absolutely not true," Hagel spokesman Mike Buttry told ABC News. "Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations," said Obama campaign national security spokesperson Wendy Morigi, "nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades."

UPDATE: It turns out that it's the Bush Administration taking positions in the negotiations based on domestic political concerns.

Proof that Bush and Blair knew Iraq had no WMDs

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying with $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger). The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists with Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting CIA from conduction disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

Iraqi PM kneecaps John McCain

Hudson: 'That's it man, game over man, game over!'
-Aliens, 1986

Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq just endorsed Barack Obama's 16 month timeline for American troops to leave Iraq.

From Reuters:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

I agree with Josh Marshall, this basically firebombs the McCain campaign for the presidency. The economy is an across the board disaster as a campaign issue for the Republicans and McCain was banking on his old white POW cred carrying him across the finish line with the traditional Republican advantage on security.

But it was always up against a headwind of anti-war sentiment and now McCain's neo-con determination to pursue long term occupation of the Middle East has been renounced by the Democratic government of Iraq the Republicans have lauded so highly.

He's been left with a limply deliberate misrepresentation of Obama's position and Maliki's statement:

ARLINGTON, VA -- Today, McCain 2008 Senior Foreign Policy Advisor Randy Scheunemann issued the following statement:

"The difference between John McCain and Barack Obama is that Barack Obama advocates an unconditional withdrawal that ignores the facts on the ground and the advice of our top military commanders. John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground. Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view, and did so again today. Timing is not as important as whether we leave with victory and honor, which is of no apparent concern to Barack Obama. The fundamental truth remains that Senator McCain was right about the surge and Senator Obama was wrong. We would not be in the position to discuss a responsible withdrawal today if Senator Obama's views had prevailed."

Shrill, disingenuous and more than a little desperate. We may be about to watch one of the truly epic political meltdowns in American political history.

UPDATE: From a Republican Party McCain advisor: "We're fucked."

Senator McClueless

No matter how often it's explained to him, no matter how often he's corrected on it John McCain seems utterly unable to grasp that Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization - or more accurately a Sunni meme - violently opposed to Shiites.

Or is it that acknowledging that the American right wing's premier Islamic bogeyman has nothing to do with Iran, is in fact an inimical foe of Iran's Shia state doesn't fit the narrative? To the extent that any state actor is linked to Al Qaeda as an organization or ideology it's Saudi Arabia, in terms of money, personnel and theology Al Qaeda is a Saudi entity.

But Saudi Arabia and it's deeply corrupt royal elite the House of Saud are allies - most specifically with the House of Bush - while Iran is the preferred threat du jour of the American Republican hawks. McCain may be having a 'senior moment' - or multiple, repeated senior moments - or this repeated falsehood may be entirely deliberate.

Peacenik Defence

If you haven't already, check out Dr Dawg's excellent post from Friday with it's point by point refutation of the standard deceptive right wing tropes about progressives and the peace movement. Antisemitism, common cause with Islamist hatemongers, naivete, feminist abandonment of principals, all the usual bullshit the right tries to tar the left with to avoid actually engaging our positions all get a thorough trouncing.

Cutting through the Spin

If you want to figure out what's really happening in Iraq right now the American mass media is worse than useless. Here's Alternet with a good starting point.

Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to "crack down" -- with coalition air support -- on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad's Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra's main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday. Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra.

Spotted at Crooks and Liars

"It's just rude to keep harping on how utterly wrong we were."

Glenn Geenwald has been marveling at the fifth anniversary self justification and hurt reproach at their critics of those who supported the war with Iraq.

Anne-Marie Slaughter -- a supporter of the Iraq invasion, a member of the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party Foreign Policy Community, and the Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs -- has written an amazingly petulant and self-pitying piece at The Huffington Post that is worth looking at because her mindset is now the norm for our political and media elite.

Petulant and self pitying were the words that came to mind when Michael Ignatieff wrote his 'OK I was wrong, but at least I wasn't a dirty fucking hippie' mea culpa for his Iraq war support. The operating premise of the Bush cheer-leaders, Neocons and Neolibs is that yes, they fucked up massively, but gee, it wasn't actually their fault, and of course they're the only ones who can be trusted with the situation now and harping on how utterly wrong they were then just isn't helpful. Plus all the people who were right, were right for the wrong reasons - so that's almost the same as saying they were wrong...er...yeah that's the ticket...

And that's the point. This plea that we all just forget about the unpleasant past -- stop trying to figure out who was responsible for the Iraq War -- has become the principal self-defense weapon of the pro-war political establishment. That's their only hope for evading responsibility for what they've done. It's also the central hope on which the entire McCain campaign rests -- that we should just all forget about the painfully wrong and misleading things John McCain said and did in making himself into the prime cheerleader for the most disastrous and unpopular war in American history, and focus instead on how he (somehow) has the experience and judgment to lead us to glorious Victory.

But why would we, and why should we, just ignore the question of who spawned this disaster? In trying to determine what to do now, isn't it rather important to know whose judgment and knowledge can be trusted and whose should be considered worthless? From the perspective of their own-self interest, the demand by war advocates like Slaughter and McCain that everyone forget about what they said and did in the past is understandable -- it's natural to hope that one's own wretched and destructive conduct would be forgotten -- but for the country, doing that would be completely irrational.

Imagine if you went to a hospital to have an operation on your knee, and your surgeon completely botched it, permanently shattering your knee instead of fixing it and, in the process, needlessly removed your healthy kidney and recklessly damaged your heart and lungs. Then, as you tried to decide what you should do to rectify the damage -- and you sought out the advice of doctors who presciently warned you not to have that doctor operate -- the guilty surgeon insisted that he be allowed to operate again to fix it and that you listen to him regarding what should be done.

And when you screamed at the guilty surgeon -- as every sane person would -- to stay as far away from you as possible and that he was the last person from whom you wanted advice, he kept telling you: "Oh, forget about the past. This isn't about assigning blame. What matters is figuring out what to do now, how to fix this." You would think such a person insane for that line of thought. But that's exactly what war advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter -- and John McCain -- are insisting that we do. That's how the establishment can insist that the Iraq War is an asset for John McCain even though Americans overwhelmingly think that his support for it was a grave mistake. "Forget the past."

Some of the war advocates have been a bit more humble in their apologias, Andrew Sullivan deserves credit for recognizing that he was 'unspeakably condescending' in his attitude and behavior towards the people who turned out to be right. In response to Sullivan's more recent follow up to this theme, John Cole goes even further:

I thought I would list what I got wrong:

Everything.

And I don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but I do sort of have to face facts. I was wrong about everything.

I was wrong about the Doctrine of Pre-emptive warfare.
I was wrong about Iraq possessing WMD.
I was wrong about Scott Ritter and the inspections.
I was wrong about the UN involvement in weapons inspections.
I was wrong about the containment sanctions.
I was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the Middle East.
I was wrong about this making us more safe.
I was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq.
I was wrong when I stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath.
I was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps.
I was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the Middle East.
I was wrong about dissolving the Iraqi army.
I was wrong about the looting being unimportant.
I was wrong that Bush/Cheney were competent.
I was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators.
I was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protesters.
I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies.

I mean, I could go down the list and continue on, but you get the point. I was wrong about EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. THING. It is amazing I could tie my shoes in 2001-2004

Now is the time to toss the so called 'serious people' who still blindly follow the same operating premises and unexamined assumptions over the side and start listening to those who were right from the beginning or have acknowledged how completely wrong they were from the beginning without defensiveness or excuse. That means the 'dirty fucking hippies' who were saying 'this is a spectacularly bad idea' in 2002/2003, that means the people who have repudiated not just their decisions then, but the ideas underpinning them, and yes, that means the single remaining contender for the Office of the Presidency who opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, not, like Hillary Clinton, just as a tactical decision in the last year when she was running for the office in an anti-war polling environment.

We're all of us, the whole damn world, in a huge mess here. The people who got us into it deserve to be mocked, shunned and ultimately ignored. What they do not deserve, what the rest of us emphatically do not deserve, is for them to get yet another chance to fuck things up even worse.

By the numbers

Five years, four thousand dead soldiers, a million dead Iraqis.

306 days before Bush is out of office

Wargasm

The warmongers need a bunch of scruffy religious fanatics hiding in caves to be an existential threat to all that is decent and good. They really, really need it.

There is nothing more psychologically invigorating than the belief that you are staring down the Greatest and Most Evil Enemy Ever in History, courageously waging glorious war for all that is Good and Just in the world. Nothing produces more pulsating feelings of excitement and nobility like convincing yourself that you are a Warrior defending Western Civilization from the greatest threat it has ever faced, following in -- even surpassing -- the mighty footsteps of the Greatest Generation and the Warrior-Crusaders who came before them.

For those who crave and glorify (though in their lives completely lack) acts of warrior courage, play-acting the role of the intrepid Warrior is uniquely satisfying. That's why nothing can fill the bottomless spare time of bored, aimless adolescents like sitting in front of a computer commanding vast armies and destructive military weapons, deployed against cunning, scary and evil enemies. That's why the Mark Steyns of every generation create such Enemies, because they are purposeless and aimless without them.

Iran in the sights

Despite all the evidence that there is overwhelmingly more support for Sunni insurgents by Saudi Arabia then of Shia insurgents by Iran, the administration continues to agitate for support for widening their Middle East disaster to Iran.

Now much like what happened in the buildup to the Iraq war, the US intelligence community is poised to release three different reports, apparently designed to undercut the administration's case for war and slow the drumbeats.

The drumbeats have gotten loud enough to force the administration to issue denials that they intend to launch attacks, of course they said they were relying on diplomacy when the Iraq invasion was already a foregone conclusion.

Question

Here's a joke: What do you call an eight-year-old Iraqi kid with no arms, surviving family members, or unblackened skin below his waist? I don't know. I was shouting at the TV and I didn't catch his name. Don't worry if you don't get it. We'll no doubt be telling it again in another dozen years or so. And still not getting it.

-So begins Alan Moore's Rolling Commentary, an essay originally published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)
and recently re-printed in Yuggoth Cultures.

In this furious but rigorously precise run-down of the historical interaction between the Western and Islamic worlds, Moore lays out the thuggery, deception and slaughter that has been the two cultures preferred means of conversing with each other. Its as good a run down of the whole sorry mess as you'll find anywhere and only months after the 'shock and awe' Moore predicts the pinned down insurgency war of years and decades the 'serious' thinkers among western policy makers insisted couldn't happen.

He also wrote a Swamp Thing comic back in the mid-eighties that featured an evil corporation made up of damned souls who had escaped from the bowels of Hell called, wait for it, Blackwater.

Appropo of nothing:

The rest of Yuggoth Cultures is some previously under-collected short works by Moore, some interviews and some visual adaptations of Moore prose that was never intended to be so adapted, but fair warning: More than half the thick trade paperback volume is a competent but uninspired Lovecraft pastiche written by someone named Antony Johnston. Competent but uninspired work really doesn't belong between the same covers with the work of Mr Moore. It can only suffer by comparison.

Still worth getting the book though.

Iraq government expels Blackwater

After an incident where Blackwater operatives sprayed a Baghdad street with automatic fire killing eleven people, including one policeman, and wounding 13, the Iraq government has revoked the secretive private mercenary army's license to operate in the country and ordered them to leave. The shooters may even face charges, although some commentators claim they have complete immunity.

There was some doubt whether the order was still in effect, or that the Iraq government would even be allowed to expel Blackwater, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to personally apologize for the incident.

Blackwater currently run all security for western officials and most visitors to the country. They are widely despised by Iraqis as arrogant and violent mercenaries. They've also been used domestically, notably in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Their tactics have led to controversy before as in this video.

``They're famous for being very aggressive. They use their machine guns like car horns. But it's not the goal to kill people.''said Robert Young Pelton, an independent military analyst and author of the book ``Licensed to Kill.''

Of course it was about the oil

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,”

-Alan Greenspan

So what changed?