US Illusions Die With Benazir Bhutto
by Christian Parenti
The ad hoc and shortsighted nature of US policy toward Pakistan is on display once again. Benazir Bhutto has been murdered, most likely by religious fanatics. In the West, pundits and diplomats now wring their hands and lament: “Oh no. All our eggs in one basket.”

But let's step back for a second to look at how thoroughly bankrupt US policy in that region has become, and recognize the desperate need for a New Diplomacy toward the Muslim world in general.

by Andrew Bard Schmookler,

A FUTILE AND IRRATIONAL COURSE

Let me start with my two premises:

First, I am assuming that the stories are true that Bush is going to call for an escalation of troop levels in Iraq, for the “surge” and “sacrifice” news about which news reports have spoken this week.

Second, I am assuming that there is no realistic chance that such a “surge” will accomplish anything of practical value, even assuming the Bushites’ goals as the standard of value. This assumption may or may not be true –it is, indeed, one of the matters that I believe the Democrats would be wise to hold hearings on, bringing in experts not in any way beholden to the administration– but I’m betting that this policy of escalation will be futile (and worse). As Keith Olbermann says in his most recent “Special Comment,” with this proposal Bush “has settled on the only solution all the true experts agree cannot possibly work…”

Given those premises, the question arises: Why, after the report of the Iraq Study Group and all this dramatized presidential pondering, is THIS foolish surge –this throwing of good money after bad, as the poker expression has it– the decision our self-proclaimed Decider has arrived at?

A 6-year-old child, Blake Pendergrass, was struck and killed by an automobile in Escatawpa the other day. Escatawpa is about 20 miles from my home in Ocean Springs. I didn't know him. I would imagine something like that happens somewhere in America every day -- at least every week.

But this one hurt me. Hurt me bad. You see, the little boy lived in a FEMA trailer park -- a Katrina FEMA trailer park in Escatawpa.

The woman on the six o'clock news was indignant. She was speaking from the site of the horrendous collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis.

The bridge had fallen during afternoon rush hour yesterday; fallen into the Mississippi River. So far, the C.B.C. reports authorities confirm seven people dead, but there are dozens of cars at the bottom of the river, their occupants too certainly dead.

Canada's CTV reports on a study recently released by the U. S. Geological Survey placing in the earthquake crosshairs two of Canada's most desirable addresses.

"Two British Columbia fault lines running south of Abbotsford and south of Victoria could potentially cause earthquakes measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale, according to a new study released by U.S. seismologists."

In a surprise move, Iran has announced it will release, on the strength of a presidential amnesty, the 15 British sailors and marines captured last week in the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway. The seizing of the Britons has played across the front pages of every European and North American newspaper, with some speculating it could provoke a broader war in the region.

Meanwhile, oil prices on world markets tumbled with news of the release. 

by Chris Floyd   

US plans last big push in Iraq (Guardian)

Did anyone really imagine it would be any different? The Guardian reports that Bush has already decided on his "new" strategy for Iraq, ahead of the recommendations of the "Iraq Study Group" he appointed – and ahead of the internal government review of strategy which he ordered only this week. And what is the strategy? More of the same. How could it be otherwise? The Decider-in-Chief cannot admit, not even to himself, that any of his decisions have ever been wrong. How can they be, when they are dictated by his "gut," and his gut is guided by God Almighty?

Yet no man rises to such a position – even with the enormous, endless help of his elitist family and friends – without some animal cunning. Bush knows that he cannot do what he would have to do to "win" the war on his terms: send in hundreds of thousands of more troops in a brutal, no-holds-barred campaign to eradicate all active opposition to the imposition of a docile Iraqi regime and the permanent installation of American bases. He knows there is no political will, even among his own party and most of his "base," to take this route. (Barring, of course, another convenient terrorist attack on American soil, this time blamed on the Iraqi insurgents. Then there would be no limit to Bush's "justifiable retaliation." This scenario, although unlikely at present, is certainly not to be discounted altogether.)

And so he is going to intensify the war as much as politically possible, push the envelope of further brutality and repression as far as he can, for as long as he can, and hope that this will finally do the trick. It won't, of course, but as the Guardian notes, quoting a former top Bush official, "He is in a state of denial about Iraq. Nobody else is anymore. But he is." He believes that his willfuly ignorant "gut feelings" – formed, of course, out of the malevolent whisperings of his handlers, especially those who most assidiuously flatter his prejudices and his enormous, infantile ego – must be correct and will win through in the end.

Thus he is now planning to send at least 20,000 more troops to Iraq, to "secure Baghdad" and free up the U.S. forces currently tied down there to spread out and "pacify" the rest of the country. There will be a stab at securing "regional cooperation" for the "successful rehabilitation" of Iraq. The Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families – longtime business partners of the Bush Family – will be hit up for "reconstruction" money: more fodder for Bush-connected contractors and the bottomless corruption of the Bush-backed Iraqi government. How then will this be different from the epic of waste and corruption we have already seen in the "reconstruction" process?

by Chris Floyd     
It is not exactly news that the Western world's fetishized "free market" is actually a mixed economy, combining cradle-to-the-grave socialism for the rich with ball-breaking, bomb's-away capitalism for everyone else.

This truism was on naked display once again this week as the central banks of the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Canada and the Eurozone announced plans to provide almost $100 billion in taxpayer money to save their banking brethren from the consequences of their own greed and stupidity.

by Chris Floyd

I am now writing a piece for Truthout.org on the wider ramifications of the Bush Administration's lunatic dumping of a nuclear weapons "cookbook" on the Internet and leaving it posted up for months: a pearl beyond price for any government, militia, terrorist group, religious cult or criminal mafia hoping to wield some of the nuclear terror that has hitherto been the sole province of the world's "most developed" nations.

As we all know, the reason for this data-dump was purely and solely partisan politics: the Bush Faction wanted their little bootlickers in the rightwing blogosphere to cherry-pick the raw data from millions of Saddam-era documents in hopes of finding something that would goose a couple of news cycles here and there with stories of "revelations" that "justify" one or more of the Bush Regime's warmongering lies. They've been disappointed in this propaganda gambit, however – namely because there can be no data of WMD programs that didn't exist (or links to al Qaeda that never were). However, there was plenty of data on the almost-successful nuclear weapons program that Saddam had built before 1991 – with a mighty assist from a former U.S. president named George Bush. It was this data that the gormless son of Saddam's former accomplice and benefactor released for all the world to see.

All of this is bad enough; however, late-breaking news in the UK today has given a truly disturbing new dimension to the possible uses of Bush's gift to nuclear proliferators: six Arab nations h ave formally announced that they are now launching nuclear programs of their own. The potential dangers of this move in the powerderkeg of the Middle East are almost unfathomable. My Truthout piece will have more on this, and how the Bush nuke dump plays into it.

Below is a companion piece that I'd written to go with an earlier column for Truthout dealing solely with the Bush dump. The news today has superceded that original article, so I'm rewriting furiously; however, the companion piece – providing some of the long-range background to the situation – is still valid, so I'm putting it up now.

Prelude to a Quagmire

The Bush Party were eager for their acolytes to exhume damning nuggets from the history of Saddam's regime. But even here their idiocy showed itself. For a truly thorough and objective analysis of the rise and rule of the Iraqi roughneck would have indeed unearthed damning revelations –about generations of American leadership that helped create and sustain Saddam's brutal regime. This history gives the lie to everything the Bush Faction has said about Iraq and why we are there – yet it is virtually unknown to the general public and is almost never mentioned by the mainstream media, except in brief flashes, like shooting stars, that appear briefly then disappear into the darkness.

By Chris Floyd

The picture below (from the New York Times) speaks most eloquently on the essence of the Bush Regime's brutal, grubby Babylonian Conquest: fat mercenaries guarding the construction of yet another prison.

The picture comes from a story on the "overhead costs" of reconstruction projects, based on a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who found astonishing amounts of waste and cost overruns by the crony contractors who came to feast on the carcass that Bush killed for them. Two main points emerge from the report.

First, that the IG's catalogue of gouging, feather-bedding and other profitable forms of war-profiteering is by no means complete, because "the United States has not properly tracked how much such expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction approved by Congress two years ago." In fact, the IG's office was only able to examine only $1.3 billion of the contracts. 

In other words, as oft reported here (and here and here), much of that money has simply disappeared -- into corporate coffers, into copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert ops (including perhaps the Bushists' deliberate formenting of terrorism and arming of militias) and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing the fruits of some of this blood money wash up on American screens at this very moment, as the GOP's last-ditch "Smear and Fear" campaign goes into hyperdrive.

by Chris Floyd

Israel admits it used phosphorus weapons (Guardian)

Israel Adds Far-Right Party to Coalition (NY Times)