"Mainstream Democrats ought to wake up and smell the coffee. Their party has been compromised by the extreme left."

            Approve      Disapprove


Republicans    84            12

Independents   17            75

Democrats      18            77

A candidate for North Carolina Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court has announced on her campaign's blog that she is leaving the Republican Party and denounced the Bush administration's policy on troop withdrawal from Iraq. Rachel Lea Hunter, a Republican and a candidate for Chief Justice, likens Bush’s administration to the "Nazis" and says that all who disagree with the administration are being branded as "traitors".

The top American commander in the Persian Gulf told Congress on Thursday that the Iraqi insurgency has not grown weaker over the past six months, despite a claim by Vice President
Dick Cheney that it was in its "last throes."

There appears to be a big gap in attitudes in Iraq between the generals and the subaltern officers and servicemen. An academic sent me this:

"Yesterday I talked with a 2nd Lt and West Point grad who has just come back from Iraq. He says flat out that the war is lost, that "we" only control territory when the troops are there in massive numbers and that "they" take over as soon as the troops leave, that the army is over-extended and morale is terrible -- drug use is escalating -- that there still isn't enough armor, that the Iraqi army and police are worse than useless, and that senior officers are convinced that it is Vietnam redux. One of his classmates a 23-year old was killed last week -- for nothing. There are signs that this story is belatedly beginning to sink in across the country, but he, and I, fears that it is too late."

We saw this sort of thing in Vietnam, too. The Generals are the last to know, and they always think victory is around the corner if only they can convince the US public to commit "blood and treasure" for a few decades.

It's been going on for years now. Almost daily we read that another child, another parent.. is killed in Afghanistan or Iraq by U.S. weaponry in Mr. Bush's "war on terror." Sometimes it's a wedding party, or a bunch of kids, or a family of six.. who may even be killed on camera in real time for all the world to see and hear.

But no matter how bad it gets, nothing seems to change.. among Christian supporters of the Bush administration. "Stuff happens in a war zone.".. I've been reassured by countless pro-war Christians that, as long as civilians aren't intentionally targeted, taking their lives is okay, maybe even predestined, God's will many Christians in America will blindly support whichever war their president promotes, with the assumption that his much-advertised praying guarantees us that God approves of all those bombs and missiles, and even the inevitable collateral damage... [But not] all Christians in the U.S. find civilian deaths an acceptable price to ..pay for Mr. Bush's ultimate goals

(keep reading...)

* U.S. support for Israel that keeps Palestinians in the Israelis’ thrall.
* U.S. and other Western troops on the Arabian Peninsula.
* U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
* Support for Russia, India, and China against their Muslim militants.
* U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.
* U.S. support for apostate, corrupt, and tyrannical Muslim governments.

* DSM
* propaganda
* Coingate
* Delay
* Gitmo, torture
* Schools
* and so on… feel free to add in the comments.

I don't usually bother to reply at any length to my Neocon critics. Mostly this is because they are simply insincere, and say what they say maliciously and in knowledge of its falsehood. In some instances they have quite unethically subjected their opponents to harassment of a sort that is illegal in some states. They are purely political beasts, for whom all statements are instrumental, and therefore they can never engage in useful dialogue.

...

Iraqi?s justice minister said Tuesday that U.S. officials are trying to delay interrogations of Saddam Hussein.

...

"It seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide," he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

"There should be transparency and there should be frankness, but there are secrets that if revealed, won?t be in the interest of many countries," he said. "Who was helping Saddam all those years?"

Shandal also said Saddam?s trial would be over by the end of the year. "This trial will be accomplished within 2005 ? and this will only be in Iraqi courts," he said.

In one memo, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war. "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."

Eighty two Iraqi lawmakers from across the political spectrum have pressed for the withdrawal of the US-led occupation troops from their country.

The Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni Arab, Christian and communist legislators made the call in a letter sent by Falah Hassan Shanshal of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the largest bloc in parliament, to speaker Hajem Al-Hassani, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

?“We have asked in several sessions for occupation troops to withdraw. Our request was ignored,?” read the latter, made public on Sunday, June 19.

...

Under the glare of a midmorning sun, Staff Sgt. Jody Hayes stands sweating in the hatch of his M-113 armored vehicle, scanning for insurgents. Hayes and his Iowa National Guard crew have been stalled for nearly 30 minutes on a risky, slow-moving mission to clear road bombs, and he's getting nervous.

Suddenly he hears the snap of a sniper's bullet flying past his head. The round pierces the neck of the soldier next to him, Spec. John Miller, entering the two-inch gap between his Kevlar vest collar and helmet.

"Get down!" Hayes yells. Miller falls heavily against Hayes's leg, and at first Hayes believes his friend is taking cover. "Man, he got down pretty quick," he recalls thinking. Then he glances down and sees Miller bleeding at his feet.

Sgt. Ty Dermer, who is manning a .50-caliber machine gun within arm's reach of Miller, radios for help: "We got a man down! We need a medic, ASAP!"

Hayes drops down and cradles Miller's head in his lap, while Dermer rips open a pressure dressing and places it on the neck wound. Each man grabs one of Miller's hands and feels for a pulse. They still haven't found one when medic Spec. Jaymie Holschlag pulls open the back door of the M-113 and rushes, breathless, to Miller's side.

Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."

We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the 'execute' orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.

President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

A former Pentagon official, journalist, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, a man with considerable political and military knowledge, came back from a fact-finding trip in Iraq talking about the "gap between those who work there, who were really careful of every word they uttered of prediction or analysis, and the expansive, sometimes, I think, totally unrealistic optimism you hear from people back in Washington."

In a report to the council, Gelb was scathing about America efforts to train an Iraqi army. "If you ask any Iraqi leader, they will tell you these people can't fight. They just aren't trained. And yet we're cranking them out like rabbits." As for plans to train a 10 division Iraqi army by next year, Gelb was scathing. "It became very apparent to me that these 10 divisions were to fight some future war against Iran. It had nothing to do, nothing to do," with taking Iraq over from the Americans and fighting the insurgents.

Americans have statistics for everything in Iraq, yet little of it reflects reality. "The information seeps in, and you wonder about its reliability," Gelb said. "You wonder if you really know what's going on, because essentially what you have are the statistics. It reminds me so of the Vietnam days."

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry. He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its "last throes." "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

That's strikingly blunt talk from a member of the president's party, even one cast as something of a pariah in the GOP because of his early skepticism about the war. "I got beat up pretty good by my own party and the White House that I was not a loyal Republican," he says. Today, he notes, things are changing: "More and more of my colleagues up here are concerned."