Trump is Crumbling

 May 26,2026

Bt Marc Cooper

Donald J. Trump has been a disaster so often with such regularity that it has become difficult to distinguish between bad weeks and very bad weeks. This last week has been downright catastrophic for The Boss, his enablers and acolytes and possibly for the immediate future of the republic.

Bad for Trump. Bad for MAGA. Bad for whatever normie Republicans are still out there and threatening to our democracy not to speak of the rest of the world. 

Appearances can be misleading and often contradict reality. Flexing his sagging muscles, Trump appeared as strong as ever in influencing recent GOP primaries by financing and dragging across the finish line a number of retro-MAGA screwballs against somewhat more rational Republicans (this is actually good for the rest of us as the flying monkeys are easier to beat in the November general elections).

This is against a more ominous background of his poll numbers continuing to node dive, now into Bush 08 territory and heading quickly toward the dark hole of Nixonland, the high 20’s. It’s a pity Trump is not running for a third term as he would be crashed by Democratic dog cathcher of East Jesus, Missourri in 2028. Trump has never ben stronger with MAGA, but MAGA has never been weaker or more fragmented. And decomposing. 

As is president Trump -- as both his official policies and his late night Truth Farts, not to mention his public speaking descend ever deeper into MADNESS. The Trump-MAGA train crash took on consequential proportions when a handful of Senate Republicans, including high-profile MAGAS refused to give him the 51 Senate votes to finally fund ICE, essentially aping the position of the Democrats.

Yes, you heard that right, Republicans denied Trump the votes he needs to keep funding ICE. The rather meek Senate leader John Thune dealt him the humiliating blow of sending the Senate off for a two week vacation, perhaps cutting short the chance of eventually approving the funding before the early voting in the midterms. 

That’s after the Republicans were forced to pull the $1.8b heinous slush fascist fund out of the big reconciliation bill aimed at aggrieved Trumpanzees who claim the Biden Justice Department was weaponozed against them. B;these fine patriots to plead guilty. As the DOJ also convinced 100% of the judges involved in hunfreds odtrial Translation: Trump want to hand loads of cash to the 1600 convicted hooligans a,omg whom not a single conviction was overturned. 

First, he pardoned them. Now he wants to give them 100 grad reward each. Madness?Yes. But there’s a more sinister motive In play here. Yjey may be what some analysts like Ruth Ben-Ghiat call “retatiners.”

” Such retainers are common in organized crime and autocratic corruption around the world. I agree with former national security operative Steven Cash’s assessment that the “settlement” “resembles the kind of state-funded loyalty network or private militia support system often seen under rising authoritarian regimes overseas.” The idea of MAGA as a revolution that continues the energies of 1776 was integral to the Stop the Steal movement that fueled January 6 and served as a recruiting and radicalization ground for those who assaulted the Capitol and wanted to harm Republicans and Democrats alike. 1776 rhetoric and images run through in the January 6 documentary Fight Like Hell (Jon Long, 2024) which follows the flow from Stop the Steal to the tragic events of that day (I consulted on the film)… 

While the U.S. armed forces is to all appearances doing Trump’s bidding, and ICE is developing in the direction of being a state-funded revolutionary guards operation, there is nothing like having a private militia that is loyal to you personally. With this slush fund, Trump signals to violent extremists that their service to him has not ended. “America could evolve into a national brand of electoral autocracy in which election subversion is backed up by grassroots violence,” I wrote in the fall of 2021. The 2026 midterms could present an opportunity for this militia in the making to serve the leader again.” 

One day, Signore Bomgiorno, I mighi call on you some day for a favor,” Vito Corleone said to a small time supplicant mortician who needed The Godfather’s help in getting a suitore of his daughter busted up. 

Republians, and everybody else, previously rasied enough hell over Trump’s jaw dropping movr to pay himself $10b dollars for psychological damage by Biden. That one never sood a chance. Congress, neither seems very excited, about provding the extra $100b in taxpayer funding for his Marie Anoinette ball room, Ain’t gonna happen—at least at nowwhere that level. 

And now we have more, not a lot, but more MAGAS saying they will no longer go ahead with funding the collapsing war on Iran and are ready to join Democrats in approving the restrictive war powers act. Trump can’t wait to get free of that Booby Trap that Netanyahu and Hegseth lured him into. But there’s a problem: there is no exit accept a humiliating retreat which Trump could likely precede with one more massive bombardment so he can claim Mission Accomplished.

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/thecoopscoop/p/trump-is-slowly-crumbling?

War and AI; Bernie Sanders

 

Choosing Democracy.blogspot.com

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Has Trump Started World War III ?

 

Apparently Mr. Trump does not know how World War II started.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/opinion/trump-putin-europe.html?

Neville Chamberlain

posted by Duane Campbell

 

War is a Racket !

The last week has been a roller coaster.

Many of us have breathed a slight sigh of relief as things deescalate a bit around Iran. But this doesn’t mean it’s over. Far from it. The need for a broad based, working-class anti-war movement, led by the communities most affected, has become yet more clear. The bipartisan drumbeat for war in Washington and in the capitalist media, the surveillance rhetoric coming from Democratic mayors, and the way Republicans labeled any debate as traitorous, were immediate and could be revived at any time. And the silent war against civilians, of sanctions, will continue and will disproportionately hurt the poor. We have seen that civilians always suffer in the war zone.

Besides the catastrophic results of even a proxy war in the Middle East for Iranians, Iraqis and others in the region, including undocumented, displaced Afghans in Iran, the domestic impact here can’t be overstated. Medicare for All would be off the table. Abolishing student debt would be off the table. Disaster response for Puerto Rico, rocked by their worst earthquakes in a century, would be off the table. A Green New Deal, our only hope for stopping the kind of climate change induced extreme weather that has led to massive fires in Australia and massive floods in Indonesia (mirroring our own fires and floods in 2019), would be off the table. A federal housing guarantee, which would directly benefit the tens of thousands of homeless veterans that the U.S. capitalist class has discarded after using their bodies for war, would be off the table.

Investment in public programs that benefit us all would be cut so that poor and working class people could be sent abroad to kill other poor and working class people.

And, those that would see us divided would continue to drive deeper wedges. Here in New York, there has been a string of violent antisemitic attacks. Many of us responded with solidarity. But the media and the politicians are using the opportunity to call for repeal of a hard-fought bail reform law which took effect January 1st. Internet trolls pit black people and Jews against each other, a project which would only be strengthened by war, along with Islamophobia and xenophobia.

Yet, as always, I have hope.

Prior to Trump’s assassination play, Iran was rocked by working class protests against the rising cost of fuel. 

India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi faces widespread protests over draconian measures targeting India’s Muslim minority, the latest a mass strike of 250 million people just yesterday.

And here in the U.S., DSA and our allies in struggle are in the streets and building our power.

Bernie Sanders Remarks on Iran following Suleimani Asassination

U.S. Falls Further Behind

Does the U.S. government’s priority for military spending explain, at least partially, the discrepancy between the worldwide preeminence of the U.S. armed forces and the feeble global standing of major American domestic institutions?




Maybe those delirious crowds chanting “USA, USA” have got something. When it comes to military power, the United States reigns supreme. Newsweek reported in March 2018: “The United States has the strongest military in the world,” with over 2 million military personnel and vast numbers of the most advanced nuclear missiles, military aircraft, warships, tanks, and other modern weapons of war. Furthermore, as the New York Times noted, “the United States also has a global presence unlike any other nation, with about 200,000 active duty troops deployed in more than 170 countries.” This presence includes some 800 overseas U.S. military bases.

In 2017 (the last year for which global figures are available), the U.S. government accounted for over a third of the world’s military expenditures―more than the next 7 highest-spending countries combined. Not satisfied, however, President Trump and Congress pushed through a mammoth increase in the annual U.S. military budget in August 2018, raising it to $717 billion. Maintaining the U.S. status as “No. 1” in war and war preparations comes at a very high price.

That price is not only paid in dollars—plus massive death and suffering in warfare―but in the impoverishment of other key sectors of American life. After all, this lavish outlay on the military now constitutes about two-thirds of the U.S. government’s discretionary spending. And these other sectors of American life are in big trouble.

Let’s consider education. The gold standard for evaluation seems to be the Program for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which tests 15-year old students every few years. The last test, which occurred in 2015 and involved 540,000 students in 72 nations and regions, found that U.S. students ranked 24th in reading, 25th in science, and 41st in mathematics. When the scores in these three areas were combined, U.S. students ranked 31st―behind the students of Slovenia, Poland, Russia, and Vietnam.

M.L. King on War in Vietnam

The March and the War: Tom Englehart

The Bureaucracy, the March, and the War

American Disengagement
By Tom Engelhardt
As I was heading out into a dark, drippingly wet, appropriately dispiriting New York City day, on my way to the "Fall Out Against the War" march -- one of 11 regional antiwar demonstrations held this Saturday -- I was thinking: then and now, Vietnam and Iraq. Since the Bush administration had Vietnam on the brain while planning to take down Saddam Hussein's regime for the home team, it's hardly surprising that, from the moment its invasion was launched in March 2003, the Vietnam analogy has been on the American brain -- and, even domestically, there's something to be said for it.

As John Mueller, an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) -- initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American casualties rose. "The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq," Mueller wrote, "is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War." He added, quite correctly, as it turned out: "And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."

Where the Vietnam analogy distinctly breaks down, however, is in the streets. In the Vietnam era, the demonstrations started small and built slowly over the years toward the massive -- in Washington, in cities around the country, and then on campuses nationwide. In those years, as anger, anxiety, and outrage mounted, militancy rose, and yet the range of antiwar demonstrators grew to include groups as diverse as "businessmen against the war" and large numbers of ever more vociferous Vietnam vets, often just back from the war itself. Almost exactly the opposite pattern -- the vets aside -- has occurred with Iraq. The prewar demonstrations were monstrous, instantaneously gigantic, at home and abroad. Millions of people grasped just where we were going in late 2002 and early 2003, and grasped as well that the Bush dream of an American-occupied Iraq would lead to disaster and death galore. The New York Times, usually notoriously unimpressed with demonstrations, referred to the massed demonstrators then as the second "superpower" on a previously one superpower planet. And it did look, as the Times headline went, as if there were "a new power in the streets."

But here was the strange thing, as the "lone superpower" faltered, as the Bush administration and the Pentagon came to look ever less super, ever less victorious, ever less powerful, so did that other superpower. Discouragement of a special sort seemed to set in -- initially perhaps that the invasion had not been stopped and that, in Washington, no one in a tone-deaf administration even seemed to be listening. Still, through the first years of the war, on occasion, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators could be gathered in one spot to march massively, even cheerfully; these were crowds filled with "first timers" (who were proud to tell you so); and, increasingly, with the families of soldiers stationed in Iraq (or Afghanistan), or of soldiers who had died there, and even, sometimes, with some of the soldiers themselves, as well as contingents of vets from the Vietnam era, now older, greyer, but still vociferously antiwar.

However, over the years, unlike in the Vietnam era, the demonstrations shrank, and somehow the anxiety, the anger -- though it remained suspended somewhere in the American ether -- stopped manifesting itself so publicly, even as the war went on and on. Or put another way, perhaps the anger went deeper and turned inward, like a scouring agent. Perhaps it went all the way into what was left of an American belief system, into despair about the unresponsiveness of the government -- with paralyzing effect. As another potentially more disastrous war with Iran edges into sight, the response has been limited largely to what might be called the professional demonstrators. The surge of hope, of visual creativity, of spontaneous interaction, of the urge to turn out, that arose in those prewar demonstrations now seemed so long gone, replaced by a far more powerful sense that nothing anyone could do mattered in the least.

When it comes to the Vietnam analogy domestically, the question that still hangs in the air is whether, as in the latter years of the Vietnam era, the soldiers, in Iraq (and Afghanistan) as well as here at home, will take matters into their own hands; whether, as with Vietnam, in the end Iraq (and Iran) will be left to the vets of this war and their families and friends -- or to no one at all.

The Consensus Gap

Here's the strange thing: As we all know, the Washington Consensus -- Democrats as well as Republicans, in Congress as in the Oval Office -– has been settling ever deeper into the Iraqi imperial project. As a town, official Washington, it seems, has come to terms with a post-surge occupation strategy that will give new meaning to what, in the days after the 2003 invasion, quickly came to be known as the Q-word (for the Vietnam-era "quagmire"). The President has made it all too clear that he will fight his war in Iraq to the last second of his administration -- and, if he has anything to say about it (as indeed he might), well beyond. In their "classified campaign strategy for the country," our ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and the President's surge commander, Gen. David Petraeus, are reportedly already planning their war-fighting and occupation policy through the summer of 2009, and so into the next presidency. The three leading Democratic candidates for president, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, have refused to guarantee that American troops will even be totally out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office -- as essentially has every Republican candidate except Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas. In fact, in Washington, the ongoing war is now such a given that it's hardly being discussed at the moment (as the one in Afghanistan has never been). The focus has instead shifted to the next possible administration monstrosity -- a possible air assault on Iran that would essentially guarantee a global recession or depression.

Meanwhile, the American people -- having formed their own Iraq Study Group as early as 2005 -- have moved in another direction entirely. On this, the opinion polls have been, and remain (as Mueller suggested they would), unanimous. When Americans are asked how the President is handling the war in Iraq, disapproval figures run 67% to 26% in the most recent CBS News poll; 68% to 30% in the ABC News/Washington Post poll; and, according to CNN's pollsters, opposition to the war itself runs at a 65% to 34% clip. As for "staying" some course in Iraq to 2013 or beyond, that CBS News poll, typically, has 45% of Americans wanting all troops out in "less than a year" and 72% in "one to two years" -- in other words, not by the end of, but the beginning of, the next presidential term in office. (The ABC News/Washington Post poll indicates, among other things, that, by 55% to 40%, Americans feel the Democrats in Congress have not gone "far enough in opposing the war in Iraq"; and that they want Congress to rein in the administration's soaring, off-the-books war financing requests.)

In other words, the Washington elite are settling ever deeper, ever less responsively, into the Big Muddy, while the American Consensus has come down quite decisively elsewhere. For all intents and purposes, it seems that most Americans are acting as if some policy page had already been turned, as if Iraq was so been-there, done-that. Perhaps many are also assuming that the present administration is beyond unreachable and that any successor will be certain to fix the problem; or, alternately, that nothing the public can do in relation to the Washington Consensus, including voting, matters one whit; or some helpless, hopeless combination of the two and who knows what else.

As I sat in that rumbling subway car on my way to the march in lower Manhattan, I kept wondering who, between the Iraq-forever-and-a-day crowd and the been-there/done-that folks might think it worth the bother to turn out at an antiwar rally on such a lousy day. And it was then that a brief encounter from the summer came to mind.

I'm now 63 years old and increasingly feel as if my 1950s childhood came out of another universe. Sometime in August, I ran into a "kid" -- maybe in his early thirties -- employed by a consulting firm to do what once would have been the work of a federal government employee. He gamely tried to explain the sinews of his privatized world to me. As he spoke, I began to wonder whether he was interested in working in the federal government, not just as a consultant to it. To ask the question, I began explaining how I had grown up dreaming about being part of the government -- the State Department, actually. It seemed to me then like an honorable, if not downright glorious, destiny to represent your country to others. It was a feeling that left me deep into the 1960s when I had, in fact, already been accepted into the United States Information Agency (from which I would have, a good deal less gloriously, propagandized for my country). It was only then that anger over the Vietnam War swept me elsewhere.

I told the young consultant that, when young, I had dreamed of doing my "civic duty" and his eyes promptly widened in visible disbelief. He rolled that phrase around for a moment, then said (all dialogue recreated from my faulty memory): "Civic duty? No one in my world thinks about it that way any more." He paused and added, hesitantly, "But I might actually like to be in the bureaucracy for a while."

That was my moment to widen my eyes. What I once thought of as "the government" had, in the space of mere decades, become "the bureaucracy," even to someone who would consider joining it -- and, the worst of it was, I knew he was right. This was one genuine accomplishment of a quarter-century-plus of the Republican "revolution" (and the Clinton interregnum). All those presidential candidates, running as small-government outsiders ready to bring Washington big spenders to heel, had, on coming to power, only fed that government mercilessly, throwing untold numbers of tax dollars at the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, ensuring that they would become ever more bloated, powerful, and labyrinthine, ever more focused on their own well-being, and ever less civic; ensuring that the government as a whole would be ever more "bureaucratic," ever less "ept," and -- always -- ever more oppressive, with ever more police-state-like powers.

All that had been strangled in the process -- made smaller, if you will -- was the federal government's ability to deliver actual services to the population that paid for it. All that was made smaller in the world beyond Washington was whatever residual faith existed that this was "your" government, that it actually represented you in any way. As the state's bureaucratic, military, and policing powers bloated, so, too, did the electoral process -- and lost as well was the belief that your vote could determine anything much at all.

Looking back, this was, in a sense, what 9/11 really meant in America. The one thing that a government, which had long reinforced its own powers, should have been able to deliver was intelligence and protection. So it wasn't, I suspect, just those towers that crumbled on that day. What also crumbled was a residual faith in "we, the people." This was actually what the Bush administration played on when it urged Americans not to mobilize for its Global War on Terror, but simply to go about their business, to -- as the President famously put it 16 days after 9/11 -- "get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." In a sense, Bush and his top officials were just doing what came naturally -- further sidelining the American people so they could fight their private wars in peace (so to speak).

The "bureaucracy" had strangled the very idea of the "civic." Who would even think about entering such a world today as a "civic duty," rather than as a career move; or imagine Washington as "our" government; or that anyone inside the famed Beltway, or near the K-Street hive of lobbyists, or in Congress or the Oval Office would give a damn about you? This is why, at a deeper level, the Washington Consensus today has next to nothing to do with the American one.

American Disengagement

When people look back on the Vietnam era, few comment on how connected the size and vigor of demonstrations were to a conception of government in Washington as responsible to the American people. Even the youthful radicals of the time, in their outrage, still generally believed that Washington was not living up to some ideal they had absorbed in their younger years. Whatever they were denouncing, the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in their Port Huron Statement, for instance, spoke without irony or discomfort of "[f]reedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men."

Though they may not have known it, they were still believers, after a fashion. By and large, the demonstrators of that moment not only believed that Washington should listen, but when, for instance, they chanted angrily, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?", that President Lyndon Baines Johnson would be listening. (And, in fact, he was. He called it "that horrible song.") Which young people today would believe that in their gut? Who would believe such a thing of "the bureaucracy"?

Don't forget, demonstrating is another kind of civic duty -- but perhaps a waning one. I was struck this weekend that, even among people I know, many of whom had demonstrated in the Vietnam era and had turned out again in the early years of this war, next to none were on the streets this Saturday. Most were simply going about their business with other, better things to do.

The fact is: Attending a march like Saturday's is still, for me, something like an ingrained civic habit, like.... gulp.... voting, which I can't imagine not doing -- even when it has little meaning to me -- or keeping informed by reading a newspaper daily in print (something that, it seems, just about no one under 25 does any more). These are the habits of a lifetime and they don't disappear quickly. But when they're gone, or if they don't make it to the next generation intact, it's hard, if not impossible, to get them back.

If you need another point of comparison, consider TV comic Stephen Colbert's joke (or is it?) race for the presidency in his home state of South Carolina (or the fact that, in a Rasmussen Report telephone poll, he garnered 13% support in the Republican field just days after announcing his run). Again, I'm old enough to remember the last time something like this happened. Sometime in the late 1950s -- the details escape me -- a few fans of the cartoon strip Pogo decided to launch a "Pogo for President" campaign in election season. (Mind you, that strip, about a talking opossum and his pals in Okefenokee Swamp, was a classic with a critical, political edge. Who could forget the moment when Howland Owl and the turtle, Churchy LaFemme, decided to enter the nuclear age by creating uranium from a combination of a Yew tree and a geranium.) In the strip, Pogo did indeed run for president and its creator, Walt Kelly, used that hook to promote perfectly real voter-registration campaigns. But -- as I remember it -- he was horrified by the real-life campaign for his character and insisted that it be stopped. You didn't, after all, make a mockery of American democracy that way. It just wasn't funny.

No longer. Now, the "character" is launched onto the field of electoral play by the creator himself, who also happens to be promoting a book in need of publicity; and Colbert's ploy is hailed as a kind of transcendent reality, not simply a mockery of it, even on that most mainstream of Sunday yak shows, Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Of course, the joke -- and it's a grim one indeed -- is on what's left of American democracy, which, as Colbert obviously means to prove, is the real mockery of our moment.

Perhaps we all have to hope that, when he's done with the election, he'll turn his attention to demonstrations in a world increasingly uncongenial to "civic duty" of any sort. It seems that we've entered a time in which even demonstrating can be outsourced, privatized, left to the pros, or simply dismissed (like so much else) as hopeless, a waste of time. So I was heading toward this demonstration, wondering not why more people wouldn't be there, but why anyone would be.

Penned in on the Streets

And here's how it felt:


"From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and 'no war' on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the 50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself event."
Oops! Sorry, that was my description of the first moments of a massive antiwar march -- half a million or more people took part -- in New York City on February 15, 2003, just over a month before the invasion of Iraq was launched.

On my subway car Saturday, there were no obvious demonstrators carrying signs; no eager faces or hands ready to give a thumbs-up sign; no one who even looked like he or she was heading for a demonstration. (Of course, I had no handmade sign and didn't look that way either.)

A signature aspect of this era's antiwar demonstrations, from the first prewar giants on, has been the spontaneous, personal signage, often a literal sea of waving individual expressions of indignation, sardonic humor, hope, despair, absurdity, you name it.

On Saturday, most of the signs were printed and clearly organizationally inspired; not all, however, as the shots by Tam Turse, the young photojournalist who accompanied me, eloquently indicate.

As for the police, well, here's how it felt with them:


"They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up to Second [Avenue] where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or bus."
Uh-oh, my mistake again! That, too, was the February 15, 2003 demo. This time, I came out of the subway at 23rd Street and was promptly accosted by a confused young German woman, postcards clutched in one hand. She pointed at two blue mailboxes on the corner and asked, in charmingly accented English, how you put the cards in. "Oh," I said, "let me show you." And I promptly pulled on each mailbox handle, only to find them locked. The police had undoubtedly done this as an anti-terror measure. The woman was relieved, she told me, that she wasn't "mad." No, I assured her, it was the world that was mad, not her.

The rest of the march was, in essence, a police event, the demonstrators penned in by moveable metal barricades, "guarded" often by more police personnel than on-lookers. From the moment we began to march in the rain, the police presence was overwhelming, starting with a well-marked NYPD "Sky Watch" tower, a mobile tower that can be raised anywhere in which police observers can spy on you from behind a Darth Vader-style darkened window. In fact, we marchers were penned in by the police as we headed south for Foley Square, cut off, for instance, from the large cross street at 14th by a row of dismounted police using their motorcycles as a barricade. Police vehicles and police on foot moved slowly in front of the demonstration as well as behind it. Police even marched in the demonstration (though not as demonstrators). Essentially, it was, as all rallies and demonstrations now seem to be in our growing Homeland Security state-let, a police march.

Led by a sizeable contingent of soldiers, vets, and military families, there were perhaps 10,000 marchers -- a rare occasion when my own rough estimate fit the normal police undercount -- on a dreary, rainy day, which is no small thing. Each of them left his or her life for a few hours to take a walk (or, in the case of one elderly lady, to be wheeled, encased in plastic, or for two "grannies for peace" to be peddled in a volunteer pedicab) in mild discomfort, to chant, to call out, even in a few creative cases, to display feelings on individual placards or constructions or in group tableaux. Each of them, for his or her own reason, was civic, even global. Add up all the people who did this in 11 cities nationwide, and the numbers aren't unimpressive. But with unending war, as well as perpetual death and destruction on the Bush administration menu, with the horizon darkened by the possibility of a strike against Iran, and a population which has turned its back on most of the above, it was, nonetheless, clearly underwhelming.

Meanwhile, in Iraq on Saturday, according to news reports, it was just an ordinary day, the usual harvest of decomposing corpses, deadly roadside blasts, assassinations, kidnappings, U.S. raids, and, bizarrely, the breakfast poisoning of 100 Iraqi soldiers. One American death was announced on Saturday. We don't yet know who the soldier was, only that he died "when he sustained small arms fire while conducting operations in Salah ad Din [Province]." He could, of course, have come from New York City, but the odds are that he came from a small town somewhere in the American hinterlands, from perhaps Latta, South Carolina or Lone Pine, California.

He might, or might not, have ever visited Disney World. He might have joined the overstretched U.S. armed forces for the increasingly massive bonuses the military is now offering to bind the poor and futureless close in a war that has been rejected by the American people; or perhaps he simply signed on with some of that residual sense of civic duty that's fast fleeing the land; or, possibly, both of the above. Perhaps, if he hadn't died, he would, like 12 former captains who recently wrote "The Real Iraq We Knew" for the Washington Post op-ed page and called our "best option… to leave Iraq immediately," have returned to speak out against the war. Who knows. Already, for 3,839 Americans in Iraq and 451 Americans in Afghanistan, we will never have a way of knowing.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Tam Turse is a photojournalist working in New York City. Her photos of the demonstration discussed in this piece can be viewed by clicking here.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

The War in Iraq and NCLB

Hold on… Wait a minute!!!
Lets have some accountability here.
National news is filled with the reports of General Petraeus and Ambassador
,
Bush Administration spokespersons can not and will not state what they will do to improve the war situation in Iraq. They will not state what is the cost and what will be the result. We are asked to support this.

What about No Child Left Behind?
The Bush Regime and the California legislature demands that schools be held accountable. We must show progress in the schools. Even though NCLB was under funded by $25 billion per year.
Well- if you spend $50 million a month in Iraq with no measures and no accountability, but the Bush Regime refuses to fund NCLB, where is the accountability?
Why do we under fund our schools and demand accountability, but fund the war in Iraq and not demand accountability?
It seems that we value imperialist intervention more than our own children.
The Bush Administration has gotten us into a war that will continue for at least ten years. The Middle East is in turmoil. The wars involving Iran, the Kurds, Saudi Arabia, and others is in a downward spiral. Many more U.S. soldiers will die.
Why do we support imperialist intervention and not public education for our children?
Duane Campbell
What can you do? See prior posts. Call, write, e mail, Congressman George Miller about NCLB changes.
see: http://www.cta.org/issues/esea/__ESEA_NCLB+Overview.htm

MIchael Moore Takes on CNN over Sicko

moore on cnn
Uploaded by dollarsandsense123

Myths on the war

Also: see the following:

The Democratic Party Debate : the war

Cindy Sheehan takes a break.

she says things we should all do more then just think about, remember this next time you vote


From The Nation --

John Nichols

Monday May 28, 2007

The decision of Congressional Democrats to hand George Bush a blank check to maintain a war they were elected to end has frustrated a lot of Americans -- even the until-now indefatigable Cindy Sheehan.

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of slain soldier Casey Sheehan whose 2005 decision to camp out in Crawford, Texas, until George Bush heard her complaints about the war made her a hero to activists around the world, is one of them.

Here is what Sheehan, one of the most self-less campaigners this reporter has had the privilege of covering, wrote on her website after another Memorial Day with no end in sight to a war that should never has started:

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don't find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don't see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person's heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an "attention whore" then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey's brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won't work with that group; he won't attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children's children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Camp Casey has served its purpose. It's for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too...which makes the property even more valuable.

This is my resignation letter as the "face" of the American anti-war movement. This is not my "Checkers" moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it. I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it.

It's up to you now.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

John Nichols' new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"

The decline of the pro-war party

IRAQ: "HANDWRITING IS ON THE WALL"

This time the admission came from a senior military official of Washington's only remaining major ally:

"The evidence does not suggest that the surge is actually working," said Alastair Campbell, the outgoing defense attache at the British Embassy in Baghdad May 20. According to Britain's Sunday Telegraph, Campbell also disclosed that U.S. commanders had decided that the criteria for "success" would be only a reduction in violence to the level prior to last year's bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra. That means 800 dead Iraqis a month - a figure that the Telegraph admits "few would regard as anything remotely approaching peace."

The administration's utter failure in Iraq is the driving force behind Bush's loss of public support and the fracturing of his right-wing coalition. The latest poll (May 24) shows opposition to the Iraq war at an all-time high: 60% say the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq; 76% - including a majority of Republicans - say that the additional U.S. troops sent this year have had no impact or are making things worse. Bush's overall approval level is just 30% compared to 63% disapproval.

Bush won some breathing space when the majority of House and Senate Democrats caved in to "don't-stab-our-troops-in-the-back" demagogy and approved Iraq war funding. But defeat in Iraq and popular disgust with the war are here to stay. Even Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell predicted a change: "I think the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall." He added the Republican spin that Bush "is going to lead" this policy shift and the White House leaked its standard scam that Bush is "considering major troop reductions next year." But the President will be even weaker in September than he is now.

Indeed, the main trend this last month was one setback after another for the beleaguered White House. Paul Wolfowitz was forced out at the World Bank (because of Iraq and the Neocon agenda, not favoritism toward his female companion). British Prime Minister Tony Blair - "Bush's poodle" - had to step down before he planned. Alberto Gonzales is skewered daily - he's now a symbol of the drive to make the Justice Department a Stop-People-of-Color-From-Voting arm of the Republican Party.

The London Times decided that it would stick a thorn in Bush's eye by choosing one-time leftist turned war hawk Christopher Hitchens to make its point about U.S. politics today:

"The main noise in Washington right now is that of collapsing scenery. The Republican party is in total disarray. They've been dropping their most intelligent people over the side while the presidential candidates are all outbidding each other to be nice about the revolting carcass of (Jerry) Falwell."

Bush and the right are not surrendering any ground without fighting and fear-mongering. But dramatic shifts in the public mood over the last year provide huge openings for the antiwar and other progressive movements to expand our reach, become a force in mainstream debate, and exert independent leverage as the guardians of empire grapple with over-reach and crisis on almost every front.

THE DESPARATE "SECOND SURGE"

The crisis in Iraq is already out of Washington's control. Even to maintain a figleaf of progress the administration keeps sending more troops to kill and be killed. According to a Hearst Newspapers analysis May 22, "The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year... The little-noticed second surge... is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there... the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 - a record-high number - by the end of the year.

"'It doesn't surprise me that they're not talking about it,' said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, a former U.S. commander of NATO troops in Bosnia. 'I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this.'"

But it's too late. Bush can escalate, but he can't hide.

TAKE IT OUT ON THE PALESTINIANS

With Iraq a lost cause, a desperate-for-success U.S. administration is unleashing its fury on the long-demonized Palestinians. It is an open secret throughout the Middle East that the latest intra-Palestinian violence in Gaza has the hand of Israel and Washington all over it. Even the Washington Post reported (May 17) that "Israel this week allowed the Palestinian party Fatah to bring into the Gaza Strip as many as 500 fresh troops trained under a U.S.-coordinated program to counter Hamas... The troops' deployment illustrates the increasingly partisan role that Israel and the Bush administration are taking in the volatile Palestinian political situation."

Veteran South African journalist and TIME.com senior editor Tony Karon cut to the heart of what's happening under the headline "Palestinian Pinochet Makes His Move":

"The Fatah gunmen who are reported to have initiated the breakdown of the Palestinian unity government may profess fealty to President Abbas, but it's not from him that they get their orders. They answer is Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza warlord who has long been Washington's anointed favorite to play the role of a Palestinian Pinochet. Needless to say, only a U.S. administration as deluded about its ability to reorder Arab political realities in line with its own fantasies - and also, frankly, as utterly contemptuous of Arab life and of Arab democracy - as the current one would imagine that the Palestinians could be starved, battered and manipulated into choosing a Washington-approved political leadership."

Israeli government officials say outright that their own bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza (combined with support for Dahlan) is designed to destroy the Palestinian unity government and any Palestinian faction resistant to Israeli political demands. (Against this backdrop, the June 10 "The World Says No to Israeli Occupation" Mobilization - go to http://www.endtheoccupation.org/ for full information - is more important than ever.)

Palestinian civilians are also the main victims of the current fighting at Palestinian refugee camps in northern Lebanon. The U.S.-supplied Lebanese army is bombarding civilian areas in its fight with the Al-Qaeda-linked militant Sunni group Fatah al-Islam. Thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee to other camps where they are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

Ironically, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told CNN International, it is U.S. policy that nurtured Fatah al-Islam in the first place:

"The current situation is much like that during the conflict in Afghanistan in the 1980s - which gave rise to al Qaeda - with the same people involved in both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and the same pattern of the U.S. using jihadists that the Saudis assure us they can control. Since the Israelis lost the war with [the Shia-based] Hezbollah last summer, the fear of Hezbollah in the White House, is acute. As a result... we're in the business of supporting the Sunnis anywhere we can against the Shia... We're in the business of creating... sectarian violence."

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS VS. RACIST INDENTURED SERVITUDE

Another area where major damage is being done to human lives and human rights is so-called "immigration reform." The Republican-Democrat "compromise" bill announced last week includes a few concessions to the immigrant rights movement but overall is a formula for placing millions in a form of racist indentured servitude. It includes a temporary worker program where the "guest workers'" status is tied to approval by their employers and where these workers to not have any meaningful pathway to permanent legal residence. The League of United Latin American Citizens declares: "If enacted, the temporary worker provision alone would create a new underclass of easily exploited workers who would be forbidden from realizing the American Dream. This bill will dehumanize workers... "

The bill's future is uncertain. Opposition from immigrant communities, labor and the progressive movement is growing as more and more of the bill's specifics are revealed to the public. The bill is also coming under furious attack from the extreme nativist right. This battle is taking place as divisions on the right are increasing, the Bush administration (which supports this legislation) is losing leverage, and progressive activists are feeling new energy and momentum. This means there is a definite chance to defeat this anti-immigrant attack - provided the broad peace and justice movement acts on the principle that "an injury to one is an injury to all."

KEY PRIORITY: INDEPENDENT LEVERAGE

With the 2008 presidential race already underway, struggles on every front inter-mesh in complicated ways with candidates' calculations and electoral dynamics. On the pivotal issue of Iraq, for instance, the Democratic hopefuls are all scrambling to burnish their antiwar credentials. This is a telling comment on how these ambitious figures read opinion within the Democratic Party's mass constituencies, and it provides both a huge challenge and a huge opportunity to the antiwar movement. So do the unmistakable signs that congressional Republicans are anxiety-ridden that continuing the disaster in Iraq will end their careers in 2008.

The challenge is to create such a powerful wave of popular antiwar sentiment that every candidate for office is forced to bow to it or pay a huge political price. Attempts to turn this relationship on its head - to subordinate the grassroots movement to a candidate's agenda instead of the other way around - will come from foe and "friend" alike. To resist this dynamic - which is buttressed by the very structure of the U.S. electoral system - the antiwar movement needs to aggressively reach into every corner of political and social life and substantially strengthen its independent infrastructure.

A number of important gatherings and initiatives are already in motion toward those ends, from next month's U.S. Social Forum and United for Peace and Justice National Assembly to the Iraq Summer effort initiated by Americans Against Escalation and the proposals being discussed in ever-wider circles for an Iraq Moratorium beginning in September and a "No War/No Warming" mobilization in October. A great deal rests on the capacity of some or all of these efforts to gain large-scale traction and make a dent among the millions of people whose thinking and actions will determine the next phase of U.S. politics.


War Times/Tiempo de Guerras is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Third World Organizing. Donations to War Times are tax-deductible; you can donate on-line at http://www.war-times.org or send a check to War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, c/o P.O. Box 99096, Emeryville, CA 94662.

The bloody war continues

Can You Believe This War Is Still Going On?

By Jim Hightower,

Hightower Lowdown


* 3,300 American troops and hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis are dead.

* Rumsfeld said the Iraq attack would cost $50 billion.
The tab so far exceeds $500 billion.

* Almost two million Iraqis have fled the country and
only 30% of kids can go to school.

On Easter Morning, George W. made another of his
periodic shows of Standing With The Troops. He attended
church services in the chapel at Fort Hood in Kileen,
Texas, after which he offered to the assembled media
this pious little announcement: "I had a chance to
reflect on the great sacrifice that our military and
their families are making. I prayed for their safety. I
prayed for their strength and comfort. And I pray for
peace."

He prayed for our troops' safety? How clueless is he?
George, you have the troops stuck in another country's
vicious civil war. They're under attack from every
direction by every faction, every hour of every day,
hit by car bombs, roadside bombs, chlorine bombs, IEDs,
suicide bombs, rocket fire, mortar rounds, snipers, and
assassins. There is no safety in Iraq.

He prayed for peace? George, YOU made this war. Don't
put it on God! The ONLY reason that America is in Iraq
is because you, "Buckshot" Cheney, Rummy, and the rest
rode us into an invasion and occupation on a pack of
lies.

God didn't do this, YOU did. Praying won't get it done.
God helps those who help themselves. You have peace in
your own hands.

Yet the war goes on

Only three days after George the Pious told us about
his prayers for safety, strength, comfort, and peace,
his Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, announced that all
active-duty soldiers already in Iraq or going there
will have their tours of duty extended from 12 months
to 15. "Our forces are stretched," Gates admitted, but
he said that this added burden is "necessary" in order
to carry out Bush's latest war strategy, his "surge"
scheme. The extension order affects 100,000 soldiers.
Plus their families. Bear in mind that many of these
families have already gone through two or three tours
in Iraq.

Back at Fort Hood, where Bush prayed, families were
angry. "A year is so long apart you hardly know your
husband," said Nichol Spencer. "Now they're making it
longer?"

Theresa White said, "To a civilian, three months is 12
weeks. To an army wife, three months is the straw that
broke the camel's back."

Of course, that's three more months in hell that Bush
is committing these people to endure (this from a guy
who could not even complete an Easy Street tour of duty
stateside in the "champagne unit" of the Air National
Guard during the Vietnam War). To add insult to injury,
after saying that he had prayed for the "comfort" of
these soldiers and their families, Bush didn't even
have the courtesy to inform them in advance that the
extension was coming. "It was disrespectful," said
Mindy Shanahan, also from Fort Hood. Her husband is in
Iraq and will now be stuck there an extra three months,
assuming he survives. "We should have had at least 48
hours notice, instead of having to see this on CNN,"
she said.

Prolonging the time soldiers must spend in Iraq hides
one of the military's other little problems: Very few
Americans want to join Bush's war. Not even those young
Republicans who say they so enthusiastically support
the war are willing to bet their lives on it. So, in a
country of 300 million citizens, recruiters are
straining to meet a quota of roughly 80,000 new
soldiers a year, much less find more troops to cycle
into Bush's surge. The military has already raised the
maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42, which means that
if you and your wife had kids when you were 20 and
you're now 40, the whole family could go to war.
Wow--the Brady Bunch does Iraq!

Despite doubling the number of felons permitted to
enlist and lowering the minimum standards so more
high-school dropouts and people with low
mental-aptitude scores can be taken, the Pentagon still
is not getting enough volunteers. Even recent West
Point graduates, the Army's elite, are saying "no
thanks" to Iraq, choosing to leave active-duty service
at the highest rate in more than three decades.

Yet, the war goes on

Bush's war, now in its fifth year, has already lasted
longer than World War II. On Easter Sunday, as George
was saying his prayers, the number of American military
deaths in Iraq was approaching 3,300. And now, with his
surge, the rate of U.S. deaths is on the rise. All this
killing has prompted more eloquence from the
commander-in-chief: "Make no mistake about it. I
understand how tough it is. I talk to families who
die."

Then there are some 24,000 soldiers who haven't died
but instead have come home maimed and traumatized,
including more than 1,300 who've lost arms and/or legs,
and more than 4,600 who've suffered severe head or
brain injuries. Many of them have been sent to the
"comfort" of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, just a
short hop from Bush's hangout at the White House. There
they have been greeted with horrific conditions and
cold indifference.

When news of this scandal broke, Bush feigned surprise
and expressed obligatory outrage. But, wait, George --
you're the president, you're in charge of this
disgrace! It's your Pentagon budget (now above
half-a-trillion dollars a year) that has been lavishing
money on favored contractors while quietly snipping
away at funding for Walter Reed. A review panel
concluded last month that your Pentagon was aware of
this neglect, yet it still cut funds even as the
hospital was being inundated with thousands of severely
maimed soldiers returning from Iraq. The panel said the
hospital is now beyond repair.

It's not just Walter Reed, either. The nationwide VA
system is overwhelmed with patients and experiencing
crucial shortages in staff and facilities. As of
January, there was a backlog of 600,000 vets awaiting
care--nearly a third of whom have been waiting six
months or longer. All this on your watch, George--while
you've been demanding that war critics "support our
troops." Meanwhile, your current budget proposal
reduces funding for veterans' care in 2009 and
2010--just when the military expects that the influx of
wounded will peak.

Yet, the war goes on

Asked in January 2003 what the price tag was for the
Bushites' upcoming Iraq attack and occupation, Donny
Rumsfeld said that the budget office forecast "a number
that's something under $50 billion."

Not quite right. Iraq is now costing us $6 billion a
month (the surge will be extra), and total direct costs
through this year will top $500 billion. Included in
that is $12 billion that was airlifted in 2003 to the
interim Iraqi government in shrinkwrapped stacks of
$100 bills (the load weighed 363 tons) and promptly
disappeared. Poof...gone!

Add in such indirect costs as veterans' long-term
health care and replacement of the military hardware
consumed by the war, and the tab runs to $1.2 trillion
or more. David Leonhardt, a New York Times economic
analyst, has itemized some other things we could've
bought with that sum instead of the mess in Iraq. His
list includes:

* TEN YEARS of universal health care, covering every
American who is now without it. * DOUBLING the cancer
research budget. * GLOBAL IMMUNIZATION of the world's
children against measles, whooping cough, tetanus, TB,
polio, and diptheria. * UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL for every
3- and 4-year-old child in America. * RECONSTRUCTION of
New Orleans. * IMPLEMENTATION of all of the 9/11
Commission's recommendations.

Yet, the war goes on

Being positive is one thing, but George W has gone from
positive to delusional. Last year, in a rhetorical
reach to claim that things were looking up in Iraq, he
offered this: "I think--tide turning. See, as I
remember--I was raised in the desert, but tides kind
of--it's easy to see the tide turn."

He might ask the Iraqi people about tide-turning
progress in his war. Outside of Baghdad's
four-square-mile fortress known as the Green Zone,
where the U.S. brass and Iraqi political elite reside,
life is miserable. Violence erupts constantly and
unpredictably, fear is everyone's companion, jobs are
scarce, going anywhere is dangerous, basic services are
practically nonexistent, and distrust, frustration, and
anger rule.

An official UN count puts last year's death toll of
innocent Iraqi civilians at 34,452--three times higher
than the U.S. had admitted. Another 36,685 were
wounded. One analysis puts the civilian death toll much
higher--a total of 655,000 since the invasion.

Some 2 million Iraqis (16% of the population) have fled
the country, including 40% of professionals (one third
of doctors fled, 2,000 have been murdered). Three
thousand people a day are fleeing--so many that Saudi
Arabia (Bush's superrich ally in his war) is building a
560-mile fence to keep them out. By the way, the U.S.
allowed only 202 Iraqi refugees into our country last
year.

Another 1.6 million Iraqis are displaced within their
country, forced from their homes by various factions in
the civil/religious war. Many of these are children.
Only 30% of Iraqi children attended school last year
(pre-war, nearly 100% percent were in school). Children
routinely witness violence and killings that are often
gruesome, including seeing family and friend die. A
recent study of 2,500 grade school children in Baghdad
found that 70% showed symptoms of trauma.

While Bush brags that his war has liberated women, in
reality there has been an explosion of violence against
them, including widespread abductions, public beatings,
rapes, "honor killings," torture, beheadings, and
public hangings. The president of the Iraqi National
Council of Women goes nowhere without a bodyguard. "I
started with 6," she said, "then I increased to 12, and
then to 20, and then to 30." One of the women in Iraq's
parliament said bluntly, "This is the worst time ever
in Iraqi women's lives."

Yet, the war goes on

Lest we forget in the foggy mist of Bush's rationales
for his war (WMDs! al Qaeda connections! Democracy for
the people!), Iraq sits atop the world's second-largest
oil reserve. The proven reserves are 112 billion
barrels, with a probable pool in excess of 400 billion
barrels. At current prices, that's about $25 trillion
worth of crude.

When certain outrageous commentators (like me)
suggested at the start of the war's build-up that an
oil grab could be involved, Rumsfeld barked to the
media, "It has nothing to do with oil, literally
nothing to do with oil." Could that have been another
Bushite lie?

Yes. Big Oil has long wanted to get its hands on Iraq's
vast reserves. In a 1998 speech, Chevron's CEO said,
"I'd love Chevron to have access." Big Oil's wish is
Bush's command, and as early as December 2002, just
before the invasion, the state department's
oil-and-energy working group was saying that Iraq
"should be opened to international oil companies as
quickly as possible after the war."

In 2004 Bush & Company drafted a secret legislative
proposal to deliver this national treasure to the oil
giants. This February, the proposal was introduced to
the Iraqi parliament, and now the Bushites, oil
lobbyists, and a handful of Iraqi pols are urgently
trying to pass it.

This law would transform Iraq's oil reserves from a
nationally owned resource to a privatization model,
opening two thirds of the known oil fields (and all
fields discovered in the future) to control by Big Oil.
Instead of having Iraq's parliament make the major
decisions over oil, an unelected authority called the
Federal Oil and Gas Council would take charge. And
guess who would have seats on the council? The major
oil corporations!

This autocratic group would then decide who gets the
contracts to extract the nation's oil. That means Big
Oil would be approving its own bids! Also, the
corporations would not have to hire Iraqis, reinvest
profits in Iraq, or share new technologies. Foreign
interests would even be allowed to divvy up the
territory now, hold their pieces of the action until
after the current civil war settles down, and then move
in to grab profits.

Yet, the war goes on

If you think that maybe our selfannointed "war
president" is in over his head, ponder this bit of
strategic insight from George: "No question that the
enemy has tried to spread sectarian violence. They use
violence as a tool to do that."

Uh, yeah...and it seems to be working. Bush's surge
strategy is intended to concentrate our forces in
Baghdad to rid the capital of violence. But since the
surge began, residents have not noticed any lull in the
carnage, instead experiencing a record number of car
bombings. On April 12, the Green Zone itself got a
wake-up call when a suicide bomber detonated himself in
the parliament's cafeteria, killing three lawmakers and
five others.

Meanwhile, knowing that the U.S. surge was coming and
would last for only a few months, the deadly Shiite
militias based in Baghdad have simply stood down to
wait out Bush. With U.S. and Iraqi forces surging in
Baghdad, the bloodshed has spread to the countryside.
In late March, for example, two massive truck bombs
ripped through the town market in Tal Afar, killing 48.
In response, Shiite militia went on a revenge spree
against Sunni residents, killing some 60 of them.

Then there's the Kurdish zone in the north, which had
been rather calm...until now. The Iraqi constitution
cobbled together by the Bushites a couple of years ago
contains a provision requiring a referendum on the
future of the region's capital city, Kirkuk. Now,
because two sides want to control this wealthy city, a
new front has opened in the Iraq war.

On one side are the Kurds, who have set up their own
essentially autonomous government in the north and have
well-armed, battleseasoned militias ready to fight for
the land they claim as their own. Opposing them are the
Arabs, who were moved into the Kurdish zone by Saddam
Hussein years ago but now consider it to be theirs.
They are also heavily armed and--follow the bouncing
ball here--they are backed by the government of
neighboring Turkey, which is fighting a Kurdish
independence movement inside its own borders.

Literally underlying this explosive ethnic imbroglio is
one of the world's largest oil reserves, which means
Big Oil also has a keen interest in "winning"--whatever
that involves. To add to the nasty potential, Iran
cares very much about this fight and has deployed
security forces to the border it shares with the
Kurdish zone.

The government in Baghdad, under enormous pressure (aka
blackmail) from Kurdish legislators, has just decided
to back the Kurds' claim--and the Arab side in Kirkuk
is already setting off bombs in Kurdish neighborhoods.

Yet, the war goes on

In a tragi-comic bit of presidential posturing, Bush
assembled a dozen or so veterans, soldiers, and family
members in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White
House for a media show on March 23. With these human
"stage props" lined up behind him, George lashed out at
congressional Democrats for passing a bill requiring
withdrawal from Iraq next year. Without even a smile of
irony, Bush called the Democrats' effort "an act of
political theater."

Well, this particular withdrawal bill won't get the job
done, but it's a reflection of the broad public demand
to stop this horrible folly. Roughly two thirds of
Americans want out of Iraq by next year, and 54%
support a cutoff of funds for Bush's surge. Even the
troops in Iraq want a withdrawal, for only 35% of those
polled by Military Timeslast December said that they
approve of George W's handling of the war.

Still, some progressives despair. They say that last
year's elections were a clear mandate for withdrawal,
but the Democrats have been weak and the killing
continues, so what's the use? That's right on the
facts, but totally wrong on the attitude. We made great
strides last year, and we've changed the national
debate on the war. Yes, Bush and Cheney are boneheads,
and the Democratic leadership has Jello in its spine,
but what did you expect? Popular movements have always
had to muster the tenacity to overcome
disappointments-- and ours is no different. Come
on--we've got 'em on the run! Far from being down, take
energy from the gains we've made--and keep pushing on.
No one is going to stop the war but us.

From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower
and Phillip Frazer, May 2007. Jim Hightower is a
national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and
author of "Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our
Country And It's Time to Take It Back."
(c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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