First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one.  Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President.  Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.”  Well,  that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq.  He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague.  (Unlikely to happen…  Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…)  This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.

My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.”   You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you.  No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity.  Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)

Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”

She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook.  Who said there’s no honor among thieves?

As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting.  As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly.  That’s why they call it fiction.”  Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.

Former President George Bush lying, uncontestedly, to Oprah Winfrey.

Behaving as though he might have a future in the Democratic party, Kanye West today apologized to George Bush for calling him a racist, even though he never did.  Back in 2005 he said, watching the Katrina debacle unfold and the Bush Administration’s shockingly indifferent response, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”  Bush, who received less than ten percent of the black vote (proving that African-Americans are considerably smarter than the white kind), also headed a political operation that deliberately suppressed the black vote in several key states, and ruthlessly attacked, at least rhetorically, all programs for the poor, nonetheless was never called a racist for these things, at least by Kanye West.  Though Bush conspicuously never race-baited the way so many of his Republican colleagues have, and continue to do, the idea that he did not, politically at least, “care about black people,” is just a fact, and West happened to say so.   The thin-skinned and ever-calculating Bush never got over such uppity effrontery, as he made revealingly clear in his unwatched and unwatchable “interview” with NBC’s Matt Lauer touting his new ghost-written “book.”

Facts, of course, have a liberal bias, so Bush had to substitute a plausible lie that turned him from perpetrator to victim, unsurprisingly enough. “He called me a racist,” the still-angry overgrown toddler whined, though he appears today quite hale and hearty compared to the hundreds of (mostly black) Katrina victims who lost their lives, and thousands more who lost their homes and livelihoods.  I don’t believe, nor does West, that Bush is a racist, personally, at least since he met Clarence Thomas.  He is what he is; another puppet for a plutocratic right-wing movement that does what it has to do to fool stupid people into supporting it, and sometimes lots of other people end up on the short end of this Republican stick, whether they be black, gay, Muslim, Mexican, or what have you.  It’s not hate, it’s just politics, and it’s equal opportunity, you know.

What’s depressing about this, which Bush’s petulant grudge-holding and Kanye West’s pathetically abject apology illustrates, is how successful the right has been with separating words from deeds through this now-trite ritual of false victimhood.  In New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and yes, if only through negligence, New York and Washington, Bush has been responsible for a great deal of death and suffering, but people are supposed to be apologizing to him, because at least they weren’t all darker-hued.  He may have always had an astonishing and well-documented indifference to human suffering in general, but dammit, Karla Faye Tucker was white, and he killed her just the same.  He may be a lot of appalling things, but racist is way down on the list.  Calling someone a racist, in Bush’s eyes, is the real sin, which comes as pretty good news to racists everywhere, as you can imagine.

Bush probably first hit upon this neat trick with lying, and simply branched out when it worked so well.  Throughout his (losing) 2000 campaign, he told a series of flat-out whoppers about everything from tax cuts to climate plans, and when they all proved to be lies, he relied on the fact that members of the media are hesitant to call (Republican) Presidential candidates liars, especially when they’re too busy calling Al Gore just that.  Lying is one thing; calling someone a liar is evidently quite another, at least in the American media, and Bush rode this embarrassingly naive reticence all the way into Iraq and reelection.  Paul Krugman finally broke the ice in 2003, in a hilarious NYT column entitled “Dead Parrot Society” that tallied up the many tortured (no pun intended…) euphemisms for Bush’s serial lying that had recently turned up in the media, and Al Franken’s 2004 book, “Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” with Bush, Cheney, and Bill O’Reilly prominently featured on the cover, felt as though someone opened a window and turned on a fan in a locked roomful of Chili Eating Contest winners.

Sadly, this calling things by their real names movement never much caught on, and Bush as well as his (to this day!) Republican water-carriers learned their lesson all too well.  If calling a famous liar a liar was worse than being one, then certainly calling an admitted war criminal a war criminal was also worse than being one, calling a bloodthirsty Imperialist an Imperialist was worse than being one, calling a complete dumbshit a dumbshit was much worse, because it drips with that hated elitism, than being one, and on and on.  An incentive has thus now been created to behave as dreadfully as possible, thereby to attract the sort of inflammatory epithets one can then handily, and apparently for years afterward, use to tar their opponents as cruel, unhinged slanderers of one’s good name.

The rest of the world, fortunately, doesn’t fall for such inane claptrap about flagrant miscreants;  high officials in Britain and Germany have already responded to the many self-serving lies in Bush’s book by more or less directly calling him a liar, even as courts around the world are finally delving into the many international crimes of his infamous tenure in office.  He, of course, doesn’t care a whit about his horrendous legacy, and has repeatedly said so, even as he so desperately tries to duct-tape it together.  By the time he hits the history books, he blithely tells “interviewers” like Lauer, “I’ll be dead,” while hundreds of thousands of his victims already are.  He needn’t fear the history books; he ought to fear the dictionary, which never lies, unlike him.

The point was, of course, to kick Moveon.org to the curb in passing while spraying perfume on the many piles of shit left behind by the Decider, neatly condensed into a twenty-second sound bite; but usually the material isn’t quite as hilariously outlandish as this; I sense a little fear under the outward overconfidence.  Whenever Republicans have several elephants, fittingly enough, in the living room that put their corruption and incompetence on vivid display, they do one of two things.  First, they explain that that animal in question isn’t an elephant at all, but merely a mouse with a thyroid condition, and when that doesn’t work, they explain that having elephants in the living room is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should have more of them.  Wars, tax cuts, deficits, you name it, this always works, until it doesn’t, and Republicans must be aware that a lot of people have caught on to this.  So, they have two choices:  Pretend, like the media and Washington establishment, that the wars, though in the end unfortunate and utterly unnecessary,  seemed like good ideas at the time; or just go whole hog and glorify them as great and historic triumphs, medals rather than stains on the record of their heroes.  I have to hand it to them; choosing option two takes balls, if not brains.

Last time I checked, huge majorities of Americans, and even a plurality of Republicans, are resigned to the fact that Bush, the War(s), Petraeus, the Neocons and on and on were horrible mistakes that damaged the country, and have been saying that to pollsters since 2005 or so, and the media-hyped Republican sweep of 2010 will require the non-insane 75% of Americans to weigh in, too.  Endlessly repeating, and getting people to sort of believe that The Surge Worked, Republicans are ignoring the fact that most people are sick to death of war, and they associate it, rightly, with them.  But they can’t help it; Bush’s belligerence and chest-thumping defiance of the dreaded “International Law” aroused a deep vein of old-fashioned xenophobia and tribalism that has clearly proven too intoxicating to the right to let go of it now, even when it risks alienating more and more voters, particularly in the longer term.  To the authoritarian mind, which is the only kind left on the right these days, the truth must never be accepted when a lie would sound better, and unbelievers simply have to be eliminated.  Again, this strategy works wonders with a certain very committed sliver of the population, on policy matters both domestic and international, but the catastrophic failures it inevitably produces turns off the majority time and again.

After last night, when I got to hear the purported anti-Bush President even mildly praise our country’s worst President in a dishearteningly Neocon-ish speech, I dreaded the Democrat’s prospects in November, but then I heard today what may well be the Republicans’ new talking point for the fall (one doesn’t introduce new products in August, you know…) and my heart leapt. If the Republicans intend to roll out Bush and Iraq as the party’s signature success stories, Bring It On.   And if they think Iraq looks like victory, I’d hate to see what they think defeat looks like.   Let’s hope voters refresh their memories in November.

You see, it would be too “political” to yammer as usual about “wealth redistribution,” ACORN, The New Black Panthers, and whatnot, although this is the real message of the teabagger’s wealthy sponsors, so they settled on the awesomeness of war, no matter which, much less why.    Palin is the perfect messenger for this twisted and destructive bloodlust; she bragged about sending one of her many children into the military meatgrinder, and the crowd went wild.  Still, the studied blandness of her obviously ghost-written words that followed, with banal and insultingly shallow allusions to Washington, Lincoln, and of course Martin Luther King, belied their darker meaning: Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and their many imitators and followers have decided that from here on out, America will forever be at war, and they’re, for once, probably right.

Land of the free and home of the brave, my ass….  this bunch of armchair “warriors” want nothing more than to watch their country go bankrupt cheering “USA!” as trillions of taxpayer dollars are permanently diverted from urgent domestic needs to pointless and expensive wars hither and yon.  Small Government and less spending?  You can forget that.  The ‘baggers are either too dumb or too psychotic to do the math on this subject, and  Queen Sarah obligingly gave them a little of both, as you’d expect.

Of course, Martin Luther King deplored war, fought for what Glenn Beck sneeringly derides as “social justice,” and probably rolled over in his grave when he heard Beck describe the first African American President of the United States a a racist , but never mind all that.  For America’s Honor to be Restored, all we have to do is keep fighting in, dying in, and paying for wars, while Sarah Palin “pals around” with sterling civil rights activists like, say, Dr. Laura.  What would Dr. King have thought of Palin telling that racist harridan to “reload?”

Despite the guarded words and the wounded vets trotted out as props, the noticeable drops in the crowd’s enthusiasm when she said something insufficiently bellicose was telling:  the teabaggers are itching for war, at home and abroad, and they have found it in Sarah, looking fetching as ever dressed as War President Barbie.

The teabaggers have a dream, alright, and it isn’t a pleasant one.

It turns out that the left-wing commentator Glenn Greenwald doesn’t like me (who knew?). In a rather long posting, he accuses me of many different sins, mainly, though not exclusively, having to do with my early support for the Iraq war, and for my reporting from pre-invasion Iraqi Kuridstan. (Greenwald has always been vehemently opposed to the invasion.)

So he starts right off obtusely saying, like a four-year old, that that “left-wing,”  long-winded Greenwald, for no apparent reason, just “doesn’t like me.”  Well, boo f*ucking hoo.  You say obnoxious, false, and asinine things in print; what’s to like?  And he manages, unconvincingly, to imply that Greenwald is some nobody anyway, even though he’s clearly smarter, much more highly regarded, and, well, more in touch with reality than ol’ Goldberg, and also lacks Goldberg’s lengthy and unblemished record of wrongness.

As it happens, I was e-mailing yesterday with the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Barham Salih, and I mentioned Greenwald’s critique. I explained that Greenwald believes the invasion was a criminal act, to which Salih responded by asking if Greenwald had ever visited Iraqi Kurdistan. I said I didn’t know, not having too much contact with him, on account of him hating me. So Salih asked me to extend an invitation to Greenwald to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. So, Glenn, you are hereby invited to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. I’m happy to go with you (I’m actually a  pretty good travel companion — even Matt Yglesias says that I can be both “funny” and “charming,” though, to be fair, he also says I can be “dangerous” and “inaccurate”). But if you didn’t want to go with me, I’m sure I can find someone to go with you.

This paragraph smells so strongly of ass that I would only recommend it to the constipated, to be read on the toilet.  First, the bragging:  ”I emailed real Iraqis, nyeah nyeah.”  Then the fake best friend speaks up, then the completely fabricated offer, and then the insulting remark that Greenwald supposedly couldn’t find a traveling companion with the unfortunate but telling accidental admission that it’s Goldberg who has to beg people to ride with him on an elevator.  Glenn has a husband, fatso, and by the way, the Iraq invasion was illegal, and is seen as such by the majority of humanity.

The prime minister said we could invite Kurds from different political parties and media outlets to  a big, public forum, and Glenn could explain to them his position that the invasion was immoral, and the Kurds could explain why they supported the invasion. (Of course, we would try to find some Kurds who opposed the invasion, and there are, indeed, some out there, to meet with Greenwald as well).  We would also be able to visit Halabja, and the other towns and villages affected by Saddam’s genocide, and I’m sure we could arrange meetings with other Kurdish leaders and dissidents.

It’s funny how righties always try to pose as humanitarians, when they will gladly toss humans into the meat grinder, and money down the toilet, for their pet wars, which kind of makes life crappy or over for many more people that it “helps.”  Remember Laura Bush and the plight of Afghan Women?  Me neither.  Goldberg is just a cynical piece of shit who cares less about Kurds that he does about any other brown-skinned human;  Saddam was indeed a monster, but he never managed to kill as many Americans as, say, George W. Bush, who was, back in the day, Goldberg’s hero.

Obviously, I think this is a good idea, because I view the subject of Iraq as a complicated one, and I think that Greenwald has an overly simplistic, black-and-white view of the situation.  If he were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. Also, as a bonus, I’m reasonably sure we could meet with Kurdish intelligence officials who could explain to him why they believe Saddam was secretly supporting an al Qaeda-affiliated Kurdish extremist group, and, if we have time, I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.

This is where just being an ass descends into being a complete idiot with a lampshade on your head and a wet spot on the front of your trousers.  The bouncers are assuredly coming to get you when you, in 2010, claim that Saddam was involved with Al Qaeda.  Better yet, in Goldberg’s world, the rise of the Shi’a, which brought with it the rise of religious extremism in Iraq and directly led to the triumph of Shiite Iran in the region was all good, too.  Can a person be dumber and more self-contradictory than that and still be, pardon the expression, “toilet trained?”  As for the usual straw man arguments the pervade Goldberg’s thin and embarrassing tirade, saying Greenwald somehow fails to see how “complicated” the Iraq situation is is perhaps the most pathetic.  Greenwald, like every other sentient, “simplistic” human on earth, knew that Iraq would be a costly, pointless disaster, and it is, in spades, whether the Kurds are marginally and temporarily happier at the moment or not.

This is a sincere offer from a very important Kurdish official, and I hope Glenn Greenwald takes it seriously.

Why?  It isn’t serious.  The worst thing for the portly and pampered Goldberg would be that Greenwald takes him up on it, which I’m pretty sure he will.  That’s when Goldberg will pull a Sarah Palin (minus the cute) and back out and blame Greenwald.  I’ve seen this movie many, many, times.

American Arrogance not only leads us into unnecessary wars and other international disasters it also means our execution of these failed-from-the-start missions is woefully inadequate. That’s because Americans continue to insist that they are superior to everyone else in the world. When you are superior that means you know better than those inferiors you are trying to help. That means you don’t have to bother with understanding their culture and current situation. Just convert them to your culture and they will be forever grateful. See what I mean about arrogance and our addiction?

Even with the most recent horrendous failure examples of Iraq and Afghanistan only minute cracks are developing in the denial wall of those suffering from AA. One NYT article published yesterday shows the consequence of misguided development projects due to AA and another in WaPo hints that there is a slim chance AA can be brought under control. I will leave the question of whether a cure will ever be found for readers to ponder. It will probably come down to living one day at a time.

The Times article says the U.S. fears Iraq development projects to the tune of $53 billion may go to waste. It says that, “there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.” (Not sure how $53 billion may go to waste tracks with wasting hundreds of millions, but that’s the quality of “journalism” we get from our M$M today.)

First we destroy Iraq on lies and a desire to steal their oil, then in our attempts to help Iraqis reconstruct their country our officials who are investigating the failures say American authorities have, “repeatedly failed to ask Iraqis what sort of projects they needed and have not followed up with adequate training.” See why we need immediate treatment for AA?

It’s not as if the addicted weren’t warned as the idiocy progressed. Stuart W. Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said his watchdog agency had “regularly raised concerns about the potential waste of U.S. taxpayer money resulting from reconstruction projects that were poorly planned, badly transferred, or insufficiently sustained by the Iraqi government.”

I know its painful, but I have to continue to build my case for a serious intervention. The Times article reported:

In hundreds of cases during the past two years, the Iraqi government has refused or delayed the transfer of American-built projects because it cannot staff or maintain them, Iraqi and American government officials say. Other facilities, including hospitals, schools and prisons built with American funds, have remained empty long after they were completed because there were not enough Iraqis trained to operate them.

“As large-scale construction projects — power plants, water-treatment systems and oil facilities — have been completed, there has been concern regarding the ability of Iraqis to maintain and fund their operations once they are handed over to the Iraqi authorities,” said a recent analysis prepared for Congress by the Congressional Research Service. The Government Accountability Office and the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction have also issued reports in the past several months about the potential failure of American-financed projects once they are transferred to Iraq.

We haven’t done any better in Afghanistan and the waste would be just as bad as Iraq, but Iraq kept only a trickle of money flowing to Afghanistan where civilian economic projects could have been far more successful than enlarged military operations that have mostly made things worse.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the moment she started her job has been saying the right things about changing the priorities. Those in the Obama administration who have been fighting a military surge, have been emphasizing projects that will help the Afghanistan government and its people to take charge of their own destiny. Both military and non-military assistance are very long-term projects. If Obama can’t see which of the two would get much longer support from the American voter and cost far less than one million per troop per year during our severe economic crisis then he is not as smart as people, including me, believe he is.

While the 2010 Defense budget for the first time calls for higher expenditures for Afghanistan over Iraq, the State Department has a paltry six billion to spend combined for 2009 and 2010. Ambassador Eikenberry has asked for at least 300 more civilians over the next three years to oversea the execution of non-military projects. The WaPo article I mentioned that hints at doing something about these repeated AA failures involves training of those civilians in Indiana. Training them in how to understand and work with different cultures. How novel.

As proof of how valid this training may be, the article said, “The State Department hopes that this kind of role-playing will prepare hundreds of new “civilian surge” recruits to deal with two foreign cultures — the U.S. military and Afghanistan.” The Post reported:

When President Obama announced what the White House called a “comprehensive new strategy” for the Afghanistan war last March, he called for a “dramatic increase in our civilian effort” that included additional diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country. Despite early difficulties finding and clearing sufficient numbers of volunteers, Deputy Secretary Jacob L. Lew said during a visit to Indiana on Thursday that the State Department was “on track” to triple the number of civilians, to 974, by early next year.

My hope is that when Obama announces his military decisions on the mission and exit strategy, he will also ask for a realistic amount of civilian resources and personnel to allow our military to exit ASAP. Even though this makes simple common sense, to wonder if it will happen shows the degree of AA addiction America must overcome.

]]> http://www.cocktailhag.com/blog/uncategorized/america-needs-immediate-treatment-for-its-aa-addiction-to-itself/feed/ 19 http://www.cocktailhag.com/blog/wtf/good-money-after-bad/ http://www.cocktailhag.com/blog/wtf/good-money-after-bad/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:42:55 +0000 cocktailhag http://www.cocktailhag.com/blog/?p=2484 Several items in the news both here and nationwide remind me that in today’s America, we will only throw good money after bad; spending precious funds and actually getting something for them in return is considered risky, wasteful, and a woefully inappropriate response to our straitened circumstances.  And how, pray, did our circumstances become so straitened?  Big, dumb, expensive and futile groupthink, which has saddled us with a plethora of expensively unfolding debacles both at home and abroad, that’s how.

Of course, the largest mistake that can only be papered over with massive doses of Guilt Money is Afghanistan.  Shocked into a futile “war” by an act of terrorism rooted elsewhere, here it is eight years later, and the American people are rightly asking the nincompoops whose stupid idea this was, “Well?”  ”Well, what?” they say.  The answer is inevitably that the reason Afghanistan looks like a waste and a defeat is that we simply haven’t spent enough on it yet; this curious logic is based on the new axiom that it isn’t what you got that counts, but what you paid.  Accomplishing nothing except temporarily making Americans think war was was not only fun but easy was the point…  A great pep rally for the big game to come, not some boring, endless quagmire that drags on and on for no apparent purpose.  And now the bait and switch is being dragged out again, with a nagging whiff of desperation that escapes no one.

Then came the big game, Iraq.  This time, we wouldn’t just win, we’d kick their ass and take their gas!  The dang thing would not only pay for itself, but be a lot more exciting to those watching at home because, as Rumsfeld noticed, their were many more picturesque targets there.   They’d show those video game makers how it was done, whether or not the extras posing for this spectacle might have preferred a different approach.  Nearly six years later the balance of the region has tipped further against us, oil prices have risen and remain high, nearly 5000 Americans have been killed, and a trillion or so has gone down the toilet.  Never mind about that.  We’re told, lamely, that as disheartening and frustrating as it all is, it would have been much worse without the surge, and thus we need to… wait for it:  Spend More Money.  Nothing covers up a genocidal blunder like bricks and bricks of greenbacks.

This mentality has trickled down to the local level as well….  Just because some busy beaver at the Army Corps of Engineers once got the neat idea that Lewiston, Idaho ought to be a seaport, we’re now saddled with four dams on the lower Snake River that have fully converted the Columbia River and one of its largest tributaries into a slackwater barge canal that can literally be raised and lowered like a bathtub, and not incidentally, several iconic species of salmon and other anadromous fish are rapidly going extinct, rail traffic in the corridor has collapsed, and with it maintenance and improvements, and factory farms growing export crops have blossomed on the free federal water.  Kind of a mess, right?  So big, even, that the only answer is more money?  You’re catching on.  A billion dollars and more have been spent on such innovative ideas as trucking the fish back and forth on the freeway (I swear I am not making this up…), predator control (PETA loves it when you blame the seals…), fine tuning the level of the bathtub here and there, and just as with the wars, avoiding the elephant in the room, which is that wasteful, delusional, and predictably disastrous “mistakes were made” that have led us to this pass, and reversal of said mistake, in this case dam removal, can’t be considered because it would force us to admit such a heresy.  The only mistakes made are the ones admitted to, you know.  Now we are being told, by the usually rational Rep. Peter DeFazio that the dams are, get this, crucial providers of “green power” that can help fight Climate Change, evidently by getting a few extinctions out of the way early.

Sometimes it works out differently, though.  For several years, we’ve been listening to politicians talk about what has of late been named the “Columbia Crossing,” an envisioned replacement for the I-5 bridges between Portland and Vancouver, the only drawbridges in the Interstate system, whose homely green trusswork spans carry a mere six lanes of traffic.  Federal dollars provided the catnip for local politicians to quickly begin rolling around on the carpet crazily, and pretty soon the thing had blossomed into a 12-lane behemoth carrying light rail, bike lanes, and some fetching concrete plinths at a bargain price tag of at least $4 billion.  Trouble is, that’s a heck of a lot of money, requiring high tolls, both to Portlanders who wouldn’t be caught dead in “Vantucky,” and Vancouverites who only visit Portland to avoid the sales tax in Washington.  Of course, it was the Vancouverites who wanted all those lanes, and Portland that wanted the light rail it had generously extended almost to the bridgehead, only to be repeatedly spurned by Clark County voters, who reliably voted down light rail whenever it came up.

Now, a right winger is opposing Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard in the next election on the issue of the bridge and its proposed tolls, and as a result, the bridge will be drastically scaled back, Portland Mayor Sam Adams has belatedly said we’ll have to cut lanes, and we’ve averted a $4 billion, obsolete disaster, basically because one city wants everything for free and the other simply doesn’t give a damn.  Think of the money we’ll save later, when this thing starts making its predictable mess.

Thanks (for once), Vancouver.  Maybe if somebody had proposed tolls to pay for the wars…..

The photo question was applied this way. When are you going to stop helping the enemy and endangering the troops by releasing more damning photos after you released the torture memos which you never should have done? The implication, you released the torture memos and gave the world and al-Qaeda proof of how piss poor a job was done in applying legal, advanced interrogation techniques. We tried very hard to not break the law and as can happen, some guys went beyond the very specific guidance they were given. The interrogators did their best to serve the country under very trying circumstances because they just wanted to prevent another 9/11.

Gen. Odierno and President al-Maliki along with CIA boss Panetta all said the photos would inflame al-Qaeda and terrorists throughout the world and bring down a reign of terror in Iraq. On May 16, I posted an article on this blog that attempted to make a case that releasing the photos would be a framing blame disaster for Obama and if released, all subsequent violence in Iraq would be blamed on Obama- he would thus own the war and so what if it was entirely unnecessary in the first place. I did not say and did not believe that the photos would inflame the terrorists because they were more than sufficiently inflamed already thanks to the Bush Administration’s invasion and mistake after mistake in war operations. ESPECIALLY STUPID operations when instead of realizing from the beginning that winning the hearts and minds was more important than winning battles, we became an occupation force that deserved to be tossed out almost every time we went into the streets.

The most recent and egregious use of the “beat your wife” question occurred this week. According to McClatchy reporter Nancy A. Youssef, Defense Department officials are debating whether to ignore an earlier promise and squelch the release of an investigation into a U.S. air strike last month, out of fear that its findings would further enrage the Afghan public. The military promised to release the report shortly after the May 4 air attack, which killed dozens of Afghans, and the Pentagon reiterated that last week. Youssef reported, “Pentagon leaders are divided about whether releasing the report would reflect a renewed push for openness and transparency about civilian casualties or whether it would only fan Afghan outrage and become a Taliban recruiting tool just as Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal takes command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Any guess as to which option will be chosen? Not much chance the report will be released. Somehow, the truth doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as perception. That poor husband who wasn’t beating or cheating on his wife, finds the truth very inadequate as long as he accepts the question.

Just because the chief investigator has briefed Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the report, and other top defense officials, including Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, doesn’t mean the Afghan President and his citizens deserve the truth too. Youssef said, “The air strike, in western Farah province, has drawn the ire of local and national leaders angered that U.S. forces may have killed as many as 140 civilians in pursuit of a band of Taliban fighters. Shortly after the attack, U.S. military officials told McClatchy that they thought the death toll had been roughly 50, some of them militants.”

Two U.S. military officials told McClatchy that the video shows that no one checked to see whether any women or children were in the building before it was bombed. The report acknowledges that mistakes were made and that U.S. forces didn’t always follow proper procedures, but it does little to reassure Afghans that the U.S. has done enough to avoid repeating those mistakes. According to Youssef’s story, “Lacking sufficient forces to patrol the vast Afghan countryside, the U.S. has relied heavily on airstrikes. The seven-hour incident on May 4 began when Afghan police were ambushed while they were patrolling a road. Some officers were killed, prompting the police to call in the Afghan army. The army then came under attack, too, and the provincial governor called in U.S. forces. The U.S. forces eventually called in air support, military officials said, and after the airstrike began, the Taliban moved into two remote villages separated by poppy fields that were a source of heavy enemy fire, and the fight continued into the night. The U.S. dropped 13 bombs on some buildings, military officials in Afghanistan have said. The report found that an Air Force B-1 bomber had to circle overhead before dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on a site where suspected Taliban fighters had fled. While it was circling, civilians could’ve entered the building or Taliban could’ve left, but the military had no one in a position to observe that.”

It is beyond common sense to believe hiding the truth would be better than admitting and apologizing. Not only does the “beating your wife” question trap a president, it can do the same to SECDEF Gates and other military leaders. The old adage “tell the truth and you won’t have to remember what you said,” is the only solution to keep off the slippery slope of telling half-truths, lies or hiding the truth. It can trap both the question giver and the recipient.

President Karzai has said over and over, stop the air attacks. Yet, we don’t stop and then we make a colossal error and kill 140 innocents and now we are seriously considering refusing to admit our tactics are tragically flawed. Winning hearts and minds is the primary aim of a successful counterinsurgency. It is 8 years since we invaded Afghanistan and only this year, are we going to seriously apply proven counterinsurgency tactics. That is beyond incompetent.

Regardless of what you may think about Gen. McChrystal, who took over Monday as the top commander in Afghanistan, regarding his role in torture or covering up the death in Afghanistan of an NFL football star, he is an expert on counterinsurgency and indications are he understands the importance of winning hearts and minds. His beliefs on the value of truth can certainly be questioned. A WaPo story this week by Greg Jaffe said, “The general also said he wants to revamp the way U.S. forces investigate and respond to civilian casualties, which have produced a tremendous amount of resentment and anger throughout the country. He said he might assemble a team that would fly to an area on only a few hours’ notice to investigate allegations of civilian deaths. And he pledged that the United States will try to be more culturally sensitive in how it responded to mistakes.”

If he really believes his words, he should insist that the report be released immediately. That would put him on a very good footing for the rest of his tour in Afghanistan. If he doesn’t do that, his tour will be even longer and more arduous, and his chance of succeeding in his mission will be significantly diminished.

I’m trying to think of a place where American bombs have resulted in anything but an embarrassing disaster for those who financed it, usually on credit, and I can’t.  When the bill comes, it’s nicer to have at least the unaffordable purchase to comfort the unwise spender.  ”I can’t afford heat, so it’s a good thing I got this mink coat.”  ”I just lost my health insurance, but at least I have a TV so big that Bill O’Reilly’s mouth looks like Lake Erie.”  Instead, we have wingnuts previously and subsequently utterly hostile to such ideas suddenly turning into feminists for Afghani women, ACT UP activists for Iranian gays, and “Fair Election” zealots who nonetheless helped Bush steal two elections and govern as though he’d won a landslide.  Bombing is good for this bunch, since it minimizes American casualties, which are the only ones that even slightly matter, looks good on TV, and makes a lot of defense contractors generous come election time.  Still, its popularity with the public remains a mystery.

Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Mogadishu, Iraq, Afghanistan…..  the list is long of pointless bombing campaigns that cost us dearly in terms of both money and moral standing, and delivered the precise opposite of their many shifting “goals.”  The last two are still costing us billions, slaughtering (albeit unimportant) things a sane person might call “people,” and doing exactly jack shit to help us, even if our only goals are grabbing power and money, which of course they are.

What’s the answer to this dilemma?  Bomb Iran.  The neocons are bored with their old war porn and need something else; we all know the feeling, but is Bill Kristol’s boner really enough to start a war for?  Sadly, a lot of dimwitted and dehumanized people seem to think so, and maybe they have a point.

By spending all our money bombing things, we won’t have any money for schools, roads, clean water and air, healthcare, or prosperity, and that immigrant problem will be solved in a big hurry.  Hell, some of the places we bombed might start to look good.  Mission Accomplished.

That’s the best I can come up with.