Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 151             Today’s News and Views         Sunday, May 28, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2464

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 296

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                                May 25, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq are Near:

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis on the day that the 2500^th American is reported killed to mark this tragic occurrence. The target date at the current rate of KIAs is on or about Sunday, June 11^th, seventeen (17) days from today.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. If the number is reached on a weekday (Mon.- Fri.) the group will gather at 6 P.M and if the number is reached on a weekend the group will gather at 4 P.M. at Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis. At that time, the assembled will move north along Meridian Street, planting a flag every two to four feet until they reach Veterans Memorial Plaza. They will continue to North St., turning east and continuing to plant flags, they will turn south on Pennsylvania St. and continue with the planting of the flags until they reach Michigan St., then they will turn west planting flags until they reach Meridian St. again, thereby encircling the entire Plaza.  Then the group will gather at the center of the Plaza and plant 64 flags around the base of the obelisk in memory of the 64 Hoosiers who have lost their lives in Iraq. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

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Today's News and Views

May 27, 2006, 8:15PM

Neocon folly and the irony of Iraq

They've come to embody what they once despised

By HAROLD MEYERSON

In the beginning, neoconservatism was a movement of onetime liberals enraged at the wave of violence and disorder that overtook the cities in the 1960s. Riots convulsed urban America in that stormy decade, crime rates soared, student radicals seized campuses. How could anyone see all this, the first generation of neocons inquired, and still remain a liberal?

For it was all the liberals' fault. Wafted along by their vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos caricatured them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle class vanished with it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative, the movement's founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives argued first and foremost for more cops.

Fast-forward four decades and we've come full circle. The neocons have refocused their attention on foreign policy and, in championing the Iraq war, have come to embody everything they once mocked and despised in '60s liberals.

Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Saddam landscape, they conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.

The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's foremost neocon, and quickly put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq's police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq's cities after Saddam's fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, "Stuff happens" — a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq.

And now, just as middle-class Americans fled the cities in the wake of urban disorder, so middle-class Iraqis are fleeing, too — not just the cities but the nation. In a signally important and devastating dispatch from Baghdad that ran May 19 in The New York Times, correspondent Sabrina Tavernise reports that fully 7 percent of the country's population, and an estimated quarter of the nation's middle class, has been issued passports in the past 10 months alone. Tavernise documents the sectarian savagery that is directed at the world of Iraqi professionals — the murders in their offices, their neighborhood stores, their children's schools, their homes — and that has already turned a number of Baghdad's once-thriving upscale neighborhoods into ghost towns.

Slaughter is the order of the day, and the police are nowhere to be found. "I have no protection from my government," Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni who has decided to emigrate, told Tavernise. "Anyone can come into my house, take me, kill me and throw me into the trash."

Irving Kristol initiated neoconservatism at least partly in revulsion at the disorder of John Lindsay's New York. Now his son William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the single leading proponent (going back to the mid-1990s) of invading Iraq, has helped convert neoconservatism into a source of a disorder infinitely more violent than anything that once disquieted his dad. To do so, he and his fellow war proponents ignored all credible information on the actual Iraq and promised an Eden more improbable than anything that '60s liberals ever imagined. "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America," he told National Public Radio listeners in the war's opening weeks, "that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all," he continued. "Iraq's always been very secular."

He wasn't entirely wrong. Iraqi professionals were disproportionately secular. Now they are packing up their secularism and taking it to other lands. The war, and the failure to establish order that led to the barbarism that's driving Iraqis away, can't be laid solely on the neocons' doorstep, of course. These second-generation neos needed a trio of arrogant, onetime CEOs — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld — to actualize their vision. But actualize it they did, and the ideologues whose forebears once argued that the drugged-out Bronx was a monument to liberal folly have now made blood-drenched and depopulating Baghdad the monument to their own neocon obsessions.

Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly. This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.

Political Amnesia Is the Enemy

By Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org
Posted on May 27, 2006, Printed on May 28, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36743/

We all know, all of us in America anyway, that Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer. It's about the downtime ahead, the vacation that's coming, the shutting down of the serious in anticipation of fun in the sun.

Officially, it is also about honoring the dead, and there will be parades by veterans and flags flying on TV newscasts. Most of it is set in the present with little referencing of the past or memory itself.

Memories work on us on every level, especially when they slip out of mind. A memory exhibit at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum touches on the usual: "You get to school and realize you forgot your lunch at home. You take a test, and you can't remember half the answers. You see the new kid who just joined your class, and you can't remember his name. Some days, it seems like your brain is taking a holiday -- you can't remember anything!"

But memories are not just individual properties. Societies have memories, or should. And our news world and information technologies could or should have the capacity to keep us in touch with our collective memory, our recent history, the only context in which new facts find meaning.

I like to joke about my own "senior moments," but cultures have them too -- and often, not always by accident. In our culture, it is often by design. The frequent references we hear to "political amnesia" is not just commentary but an allusion to a social pathology, a deliberate process of actually disconnecting us from our past and history.

The blogger Billmon writes: "I don't know if it's a byproduct of decades of excessive exposure to television, the state of America's educational system, or something in the water, but the ability of the average journalist -- not to mention the average voter -- to remember things that happened just a few short months ago appears to be slipping into the abyss. "If this keeps up, we're going to end up like the villagers in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," who all contracted a rare form of jungle amnesia, so virulent they were reduced to posting signs on various objects -- 'I AM A COW. MILK ME' or 'I AM A GATE. OPEN ME' -- just so they could get on with their daily lives."

A 1991 science fiction film called Total Recall pictured political amnesia, in the words of Michael Rogin as "an essential aspect of the 'postmodern American empire.'"

A book by Andreas Huyssen takes another tack, arguing, "Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, "Twilight Memories" argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions with cultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive, and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality."

But whatever the causes, the consequences are truly frightening. When 63 percent of young people can't find Iraq on a map after three years of war and coverage, you know that the institutions that claim to be informing us are doing everything but.

Our amnesia about recent developments seems to be induced and reinforced by the very fast-paced entertainment-oriented formats that we have become addicted to as sources of news and knowledge. They keep us in the present, in the now, disconnected from any larger ideas or analytical framework. No wonder some studies find that news viewers rapidly forget what they have just seen. That is what is intended to happen. No wonder, as Jay Leno shows when he contrasts a photo of a cultural icon with an elected official, that the public recognizes the former, not the latter. We recognize Mr. Peanut, not Jimmy Carter. More people vote for the best performer on American Idol than for our presidents.

The architects of TV news know this from their market surveys and studies. It is this very media effect that they hype to lure advertisers to their real business: selling our eyeballs to sponsors, not deepening our awareness. Depoliticizing our culture is a media necessity in a society driven by consumerism. Every programmer knows the drill. It's a market logic called KISS: Keep It Simple and Stupid.

A national curriculum, "Lessons From History," on the teaching of the past realizes that this phenomenon threatens democracy, warning, "Citizens without a common memory, based on common historical studies, may lapse into political amnesia, and be unable to protect freedom, justice, and self-government during times of national crisis. Citizens must understand that democracy is a process -- not a finished product -- and that controversy and conflict are essential to its success."

So even as this dialectic is deplored, it is, sadly, quite functional.

"We're forgetting the past," says historian Howard Zinn, "because neither our educational system nor our media inform us about the past. For instance, the history of the Vietnam War has been very much forgotten. I believe this amnesia is useful to those conducting our present foreign policy. It would be embarrassing if the story of the Vietnam War were told at a time when we are engaged in a war which has some of the same characteristics: government deception, the killing of civilians through bombing, scaring the American people (world communism in that case, terrorism in this one)."

So on Memorial Day and in the season ahead, think of how to encourage remembering, not just about the dead but for the living. Our future depends on how we understand the past. Political amnesia is the enemy in our ADD culture.

Please don't forget. Oh, too bad, you already have …

Danny Schechter writes a blog for MediaChannel.org. He is the author of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq" (Prometheus).

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

    Friday 26 May 2006

    Let's give credit where credit is due. George W. Bush finally admitted some mistakes last night. For instance, he noted that tough talk, such as challenging the Iraqi insurgents with the retort, "bring 'em on," sent the wrong signal and was counterproductive. The road to recovery, whether from addiction or failed policy, starts with admitting one has a problem. It is time for the President to do more than admit rhetorical mistakes. It is time to call a halt to our mistaken policy in Iraq.

    It is becoming increasingly clear that when it comes to Iraq, President George W. Bush is the Wrong Way Riegels of the 21st Century. Wrong Way Riegels was a football player who became infamous for running the wrong way and scoring a safety for the opposing team. During the 1929 Rose Bowl game between Georgia Tech and California, Riegels, the center of the California Bears, grabbed a fumble, was hit and spun around, and proceeded to run 64 yards to the wrong end zone. Riegels' mistake gave the championship to Georgia Tech.

    Like Riegels, George Bush is an amiable, enthusiastic player. Unlike Riegels, however, Bush's actions have weakened the military, damaged our nation's prestige, and unleashed forces in the Middle East that pose long term threats to the United States. Let's face it: Bush has scored a touchdown for Iran, our nemesis.

    As we enter Memorial Day weekend it is time to take stock of the progress, or lack of progress, in bringing peace to Iraq. The "new" government is one in name only. The Iraqi factions have failed to agree on who will control the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior. While Iraq politicians squabble, Iraqis with close ties to Iran are moving forward. Moqtada al Sadr, for example, is working quietly behind the scenes to infiltrate and seize de facto control of the police, the intelligence services, and the military. It appears he has made significant progress in this regard.

    The bottom line: Iran is consolidating control of critical parts of Iraq through its surrogate, Moqtada al Sadr. The civil war now under way consists largely of surreptitious group murders and retaliatory bombings. Since January of this year, the number of daily attacks has surged from 72 a day to 135 per day. Most of this violence is directed against civilians - Shia and Sunni. Yet US soldiers continue to pay a costly, bitter price. Our men and women are being killed at a rate approaching three per day. The wounded are triple that.

    Baghdad remains without a consistent supply of electricity, gasoline, and potable water. Electricity production, for example, hovers between two to six hours per day. Friends who have recently returned from Iraq tell me that much of the disruption in the electricity and oil pipelines is actually caused by the Iraqis assigned to repair these systems. In other words, the local Iraqis with a vested financial interest in repairing these systems are also sabotaging them - think of it as a guaranteed jobs program.

    There are two significant dangers for the United States based on our current operations tempo (ops tempo) and force deployment: (1) We are degrading the quality of the force, and (2) we are leaving the force vulnerable to a disruption of the logistics supply line if we decide to attack Iran.

    The decline of the quality of the US military - the Army, the Marines, and the Navy - is a middle to long term problem. An officer who works in military intelligence recently sent me the following after reading the email exchange between Joe Galloway and DOD press spokesman, Larry Dirita (Note, the term "O-3" refers to a Navy Lieutenant or a Major in the Army and Marines; an "0-4" is either a Lieutenant Commander or Lieutenant Colonel.)

    Through the scuttlebutt of my buddies in the community, a military intelligence unit alone hemorrhaged 27 out of 35 O-3's. The community is not large enough for losses like that, and thus those up for promotion soon should not be overly proud they made it to O-4; it is nearly automatic now. The promotion rate is at 80% plus or minus a few points. I respect what Joe Galloway wrote recently. It is unfortunate that the sycophants have the run of the place in the OSD.

    These trends mean that we will lose nearly a quarter of our potential O-4's before they have even been boarded. Military and civilian leaders are trying to solve this personnel loss by offering more money for folks to stay in and lowering standards for both those recruited and those promoted.

    The United States' ability to stay the course in Iraq is threatened by a fragile re-supply line, which runs from Kuwait north to Baghdad. This road runs through the heart of Shia-controlled territory. Everything we need to keep our Army fed and fueled comes up that road.

    We face a dilemma if we decide to attack the neighboring country of Iran because of its nuclear ambitions. Iran is not a passive observer. Iran is providing extensive, covert support to Shia militia in Iraq. US military planners must assume that it is highly likely that insurgents backed by Iran will attack and cut the re-supply line. Truck convoys will be captured and destroyed. Re-opening these roads would require significant military ground forces - forces that are not in the area and probably could not be deployed in any significant numbers for at least several weeks, if not months.

    Our options in Iraq are shrinking with each passing day. The Shia forces are slowly consolidating their power. These are not secular Shia. They are religious fundamentalists bent on imposing their vision of sharia on Iraq. The secular Iraqis - Shia and Sunni alike - are fleeing Iraq. This brain drain further undermines the ability of Iraq to form an effective, competent Government.

    The Shia backed by Iran are biding their time and moving methodically forward. The challenge for the United States will be to decide what level of support to provide to this emerging government. To the extent we are perceived as facilitating or supporting the Shia consolidation of power, we will also be perceived as an enemy of the Sunnis. While the Sunnis are a minority within Iraq, they have powerful ties to Sunnis in neighboring countries and will retain a robust ability to conduct insurgent operations against Shias (and their allies) for the foreseeable future.

    Memorial Day 2004 was commemorated when almost 1100 American soldiers and sailors had died in Iraq. Two years later, the number is rapidly approaching 2600. It is time for the president and Congress to get serious about how long we will continue to sacrifice our young men and women in a cause that will ultimately strengthen Iran's control of critical Middle East oil reserves. That, in my view, is not a policy worth dying for.

    Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and US State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC's Nightline, NBC's Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world.

© : t r u t h o u t 2006

Is GOP losing grip on power?

For the Republican Party, 1994 is the year that was.

The "Republican Revolution" that year gave the GOP its first taste in more than 40 years of being the majority party in both houses of Congress. On that one election day, Republicans gained 54 seats in the House, 8 in the Senate and 12 in governors' mansions around the country.

Now, 12 years later, Republican power -- majorities of 10 seats in the Senate and 20 in the House -- could unravel, or at least begin to, with this year's elections. Already, Pennsylvania's primary showed an anti-Republican incumbent mood. Of 17 incumbent state legislators who lost, 13 were Republicans, including the party's two top state senators.

Polls show that for the first time since 1994, Americans have more faith in Democrats than in Republicans to govern and to guarantee national security. If that attitude persists through the November general elections, Republican power could decline.

"If everything goes bad, Republicans could lose three or four Senate seats and 10 to 20 House seats," said former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich, a native Pennsylvanian from a small town near Harrisburg who later served as a House member from Georgia, was the principal architect of the "Contract with America," a policy declaration that propelled Republicans to victory in 1994. Eight years after retiring from the House, he has become the conservative movement's surrogate spokesman for the party.

Is it possible for Democrats to win control of the House?

"Barely," Gingrich said. "They might win a very narrow majority. It is more likely that the Democrats will gain some seats, but Republicans will retain control of both the House and Senate."

He believes Democrats will "focus on being negative and obstructionist, and then they will try to wear a mask of being moderate, even though their leadership is the most left-wing in history."

The Democrats' Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, says his party offers a lot more than negativity.

"The American people are tired of Republican incompetence, they're tired of a Congress that just rubber-stamps President Bush's failed policies," Reid said.

Long-time Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, of Delaware, says Democrats must "come forward with real ideas -- but it is up to the individual candidate to do that, not the party."

Biden says his party must send an affirmative message, and spell out "who is going to protect you better, who is going to solve the energy crisis and who is better to handle escalating health care costs.

"They are the big national issues."

It's important for Democrats to make clear where the party stands on Iraq, Biden said.

"People don't want to hear what went wrong (in Iraq); they already know that things are not going well," he said. "They want to hear, what we are going to do about it?"

Dick Morris, a Fox News political analyst and former Clinton strategist who created campaign messages for Democrats, believes the party that delivers a message and gets out the vote will win the mid-term elections. Republicans kept control in the 2004 elections, Morris said, because of concern about terrorism.

"As that fear fades, which it shouldn't, voters turn to issues which are primarily Democratic historically -- energy, climate change, environment, health care and Social Security," he said.

"Republicans need to take over some of these issues with bold presidential leadership. Look how Bush took away the education issue in 2000, and Clinton used gun control and 100,000 extra cops to take the crime issue" in 1996.

Morris says Republicans have been weakened by the immigration debate, giving an impression that they are confused and divided, much like the Democrats in 1994.

"The Republican Party has worked itself out of a job -- terrorism is at bay, taxes are cut, crime is way down, communism is gone -- all of the GOP issues have gone away because of their own success," he said. "I think that the Democratic trend will continue."

He ticks off a list of possibly vulnerable Republican senators -- Rick Santorum of Penn Hills, Ohio's Mike DeWine, Missouri's Jim Talent, Montana's Conrad Burns, and even Tennessee's Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader.

If those Republicans fall in November, he said, Democrats will "most likely win" Congress and the White House in 2008.

Democratic strategist Steve McMahon sees potential gains for Democrats if they stick to concerns that hit home.

"The domestic gas price issue eclipses every issue," said McMahon, a regular political commentator on Fox News and CNN. "It is going to drown out everything else; there is no relief in sight for the GOP on this issue."

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said his party is "making progress on our goals" to reverse the decline.

In February, fellow Republicans elected Boehner -- an original member of the "Gang of Seven" conservative, first-term Republicans who preceded the 1994 sweeps -- as House majority leader, replacing the king of gerrymandering, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

"November's a long way away," Boehner said, and "our job between now and then is to act on the issues Americans want us to act on."

What voters should remember is that "replacing one party with the other only changes the priority of programs on which the government spends money," said John McIntyre, co-founder of RealClearPolitics, a political Web site that condenses Beltway commentary.

McIntyre believes one problem Republicans have is the "inability to control spending, undercutting their tax-cut message. That gives the Democrats leverage to claim that increased spending is tied to power."

GOP strategists David Carney, in Washington, and Kent Gates, a former Pennsylvanian now in San Diego, said Republicans have the upper hand on one crucial factor in November: a comprehensive, get-out-the-vote machine that traditionally has done a superior job to the Democratic machine. The party's challenge is to excite its base enough so that those voters show up.

The best way to do that is to "remind voters what will happen if Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy are running Congress," Gates said.

"Republicans need to promote a more populist agenda and appeal to the middle-class angst about high gas prices and stagnant-to-declining disposable income. High gas prices, in a peculiar way, are a great opportunity for Republicans to win back a populist message."

If GOP icon Teddy Roosevelt were alive, he "would go after big-oil profits, eliminate the gas tax and promote alternative fuels -- a lesson for today's Republican leaders," Gates said.

Carney agrees, but takes that a step further: "From fiscal restraint to values, to security issues, we could easily retake the offensive -- but we need the national party leaders to begin to communicate their intent on these important middle-class issues."

Yet Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., makes clear his party understands the importance of those efforts, too. The former Clinton policy point-man, now chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said "much is at stake for both parties."

Both parties are going to concentrate on raising money, tightening their agendas and energizing their base to get out the vote, he said.

Salena Zito can be reached at szito@tribweb.com or .

Images and text copyright © 2006 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.

Senate Democratic Vote on Hayden CIA Nomination 05-26-06

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 109^th Congress - 2^nd Session

as compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate Bill Clerk under the direction of the Secretary of the Senate

Vote Summary

Alphabetical by Senator Name

Grouped By Vote Position

Grouped by Home State