Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 164               Today’s News and Views             Saturday, June 10, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2492

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 299

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                                June 10, 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 at the south side of Veterans Memorial Plaza  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 Tuesday, June 13^th, three (3) 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 Veterans Memorial Plaza  in downtown Indianapolis. (The Plaza is bounded by Michigan to the south, Meridian to the west, North Street to the north, and Pennsylvania to the west.) At that time, the assembled will create a field of flags on Veterans Memorial Plaza. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

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

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

7pm

Reilley Room

Atherton Hall

Suggested Donation is $5.00

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Today's News and Views

Colorado Republican senator Wayne Allard says marriage is under assault. You could say this is true. Marriage IS under assault by divorce. Marriage is under assault by birth control, which one might argue takes the pressure off and thus the glue out of marriage. Marriage is under assault by a culture which offers a thousand distractions from spending time as a couple, as a family. Marriage is under assault by technology, like cell phones and the internet, which make it so much easier to find partners to cheat with and then stay in contact with them secretly. But there are advocacy organizations which fight for each of these "assaulters" of marriage-- divorce lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, women's groups, TV industries, manufacturers of cell phones and computers... so the right wingers who would stop change can't go there. Instead, they attack a group that is really not challenging marriage at all.

But the people who respond to gay bashing are xenophobics-- people primed to fear differences, to fear... all kinds of things. They're the same ones who respond to ploys to keep fears of terrorism up too. They're the people who want to ban abortions. They are the abortion opponents who really want to ban contraception. Our May OpEdNews /Zogby People's poll shows that they are the 37% of Cathollics,the 25% of Protestants, 38% of Born-Agains, the 46% of Fox News viewers, and though the number of people in the following demographic categories were not enough to be significant, the 70% of people who listen to religious talk radio and the 61% of voters who were not born in the us who who believe health insurance should not cover birth control. (Compare that to opponents to abortion: Catholic 44%, Protestant 41%, Born-agains 72.5%.)

I believe that people who would oppose the use of a technology that could prevent abortion are the most extreme members of the religious right. Their agenda is not about being pro-life or anti-abortion, not about being anti same-sex marriage. They are trying to regress our culture back to another era. The anti- same sex marriage "bait" is is the tip of the cultural iceberg. The people who want to ban same sex marriage want to take us back to pre-revolutionary war times. They want a patriarchal, feudal society in which obedient serfs obey religious tyrants-- kings who claim they get their power from God. This may seem like an extreme claim. But it is a slippery slope that gets steeper and steeper as you look closer at where successes along this nasty path would take us.

The mainstream media are characterizing Bush's enevitably unsuccessful effort to change the constitution as cynical. It may be, but it is also a way for Bush and the right wing extremist Republicans to send a signal to this regressive portion of the voting population -- about 22%-- according to our poll of Pennsylvania voters, that they are still with them even in these tough times for right wing extremists. A vote for a same-sex marriage ban is a vote for the Catholic Church, for the right wing extremist Evangelical's or Catholic's favorite priest, minister or Bishop. A vote for banning same sex marriage is a vote for taking away women's rights, for putting women back in the home, under the dominion of the man of the house, cooking, darning clothes, barefoot and pregnant, serving her man.

Let's be clear. About 17% of the women in our poll opposed health insurance coverage of contraceptives. These are the most extreme right wing religious extremists. They are the ones who will put church before nation, before kindness, before just about anything. I have to wonder how many of these women were abused, how many are unstable. I must confess, I only know a few of these and they are all emotionally damaged-- abused as children, mentally ill, recovering from addiction...

Now the men are different. Our poll found that 28% of PA male registered voters would oppose insurance reimbursement of contraceptives. Again, I see these as the most extreme of the right wing religious zealots. We know that more men are born-agains than women. I see these men as the most likely to respond to the anti same-sex marriage laws. They are more likely to be xenophobes. They are more likely to be enamored with the patriarchal messages about women staying at home, women's role being the bearing of children, men being in control. I've written about these men before. They are small, fearful, insecure men, though they sometimes become powerful in their churches and communities. They are a small minority of the people of America. They are throwbacks-- archaic, backward throwbacks, amazingly similar to the mullahs of the Taliban they so intensely revile.

The legislators in congress serve the majority of Americans badly when they serve these cultural neanderthals.

The media, when they say Bush is being cynical, is being dishonest. Bush is earnestly reaching out to the neanderthal part of his most loyal base. He is sending them a message that, along with appointing neanderthal supreme court justices who will do their best to destroy the nation's contemporary culture, he continues to share their vision of a nation that diminishes freedom and democracy in the name of Jesus. This is not how most Christians think or feel. it is a distorted, twisted view that was fine tuned and developed by feudal lords, kings and the jaded popes of centuries long past. It is a "Christianity" tailored for building and holding power among an elite few. Call it Monarchristianity. It is something that should not be rearing its ugly head again.


The question is not, will Bush's anti- same sex marriage constituents buy Bush's constitutional amendment as a serious action. The question is, will they be satisfied with a symbolic message that Bush is still with them? Will they look at this sham effort that is doomed to failure as just a positive message in the conversation? Or will they take a fresh look and decide that they're not going to get the return to the dark ages that is what they really want from the Republican party.

We on the left need to figure out how to pry away as many people from this cult-like group of feudal neanderthals as we can. 57% of Catholics and 69% of Protestants support health insurance reimbursement of contraceptives. How do we build those numbers? How do we get these fearful, xenophobic, men and women to feel safe enough in a world with women as powerful and strong as men? How do we enable these people to feel safe in a world where people think differently and have different beliefs? One place to start is public schools. And why can't the enlightened religions of the world work together to support a vision of spirituality and religion that respects other faiths, that is based upon embracing the diversity that "God" created upon this earth? The anti-abortion extremists have a nibble-away strategy for wearing down the protections on women's rights. We need to start nibbling away at the 27% of the population who feel the need to take away women's rights, in spite of the positive effect it would have on reducing abortion. We can do it by educating their children, by resisting the oblique arguments they use to take money from public schools to basically give to religious schools. We can do it by doing expose's on the megachurches. We can do it by shining light on the extremism, the connections to the Catholic church. We can do it with entertainment-- movies, TV-- that puts these neanderthal perspectives in a negative light. We can do it by taking back the media, by treating the proponents and most vocal leaders of these groups not as respected members of the community, but as extremist, disloyal, anti-democratic as they actually are.

We must respond to the current move in congress with contempt and not let them get away with their extremism. Our poll, of a swing state that is fairly reflective of most of America showed that 73% of voters support insurance reimbursement for contraceptives and 66% support the right to an abortion. These are wedge issues that Democrats and progressives of all parties can get behind to expose the extremist Republicans posing as moderates, posing as representing the majority. Let's take the high road back to power.

Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on a wide range of subjects. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.

Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2006

posted by Rozius | 11:44 AM

The killing of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq and the arrest of 17 suspects in an alleged terror plot in Canada have buoyed George W. Bush’s political prospects by refocusing America’s attention again on the terror threat, much as the orange color-coded warnings did from 2002 until Election 2004.

But the recent developments in Iraq and Canada have obscured other new evidence that points toward a very different reality: that the Islamic terror threat was never as severe as Bush made it out to be after the 9/11 attacks and that it has been fading ever since.

While Bush has sought to frighten the American people with apocalyptic visions of Islamic terrorists establishing an empire that “spans from Spain to Indonesia,” the new intelligence data actually reveals al-Qaeda as a largely dissipated force that now exists more as an inspiration to violence than as an organized movement.

Indeed, since 9/11, with Osama bin-Laden on the run and many other al-Qaeda leaders captured or killed, leading theoreticians of Islamic terror have jettisoned the idea of a tightly organized movement that could take territory or even mount coordinated attacks.

Instead, these strategists have been reduced to encouraging scattered acts of crude violence by home-grown terror cells that can manage to scrape together their own resources, make their own plans and launch attacks far less sophisticated than those on 9/11.

While still capable of some horrific acts of violence, like the Madrid train bombings in 2004 or the London subway bombings in 2005, these self-motivated cells would seem to represent more of a police challenge than a justification for putting the U.S. government onto a perpetual war footing with a President exercising total – or “plenary” – authority.

In fact, it could be argued that the excesses of Bush’s “war on terror” – the invasion of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA prisons – have become the central organizing tool and the chief motivating force for the emerging shape of Islamic terrorism.

Captured Theorist

U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies have been aware of this altered structure of the Islamic terror threat for the past couple of years and have developed detailed knowledge since the capture of terror theorist Mustafa Setmariam Nasar in October 2005.

Nasar “has turned out to be a prize catch, a man who is not a bomb-maker or operational planner but one of the jihad movement’s prime theorists for the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world,” the Washington Post reported in a little-noted article in May 2006.

Nasar’s masterwork was a 1,600-page treatise entitled “The Call for Global Islamic Resistance,” which has been circulating on the Internet for about 18 months, the Post reported. Nasar’s manifesto urged self-sustaining cells to engage in resistance against the West with organizational links kept to an absolute minimum.

“The enemy is strong and powerful, we are weak and poor, the war duration is going to be long and the best way to fight it is in a revolutionary jihad way for the sake of Allah,” wrote Nasar, a 47-year-old Spanish-Syrian citizen who was captured in the city of Quetta, Pakistan and has since been questioned by various Western intelligence agencies. [Washington Post, May, 23, 2006]

While Nasar’s theories and other intelligence discoveries suggest that Islamic terror will remain a sporadic problem into the future, the information also puts that danger into perspective and suggests that some calibration of the Western counterterrorism strategies could be helpful in reducing the risk even more.

In contrast to the alarmist warnings from Bush about the construction of a global terrorist empire, the current strategy of the Islamic terrorists appears to be mostly defensive in nature. The attacks in Spain and London, for instance, targeted nations that were participating in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Spain has since withdrawn its troops, but Great Britain remains engaged in the conflict and there have been no follow-up attacks since the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings that were carried out by four Muslim youths, mostly long-time residents from the industrial region around Leeds.

The 17 Canadian Muslims, including five juveniles, were arrested in early June 2006 on charges of plotting a series of bombings in Ontario that also allegedly were motivated by anger over Western military action in an Islamic nation. Canada has deployed 2,300 soldiers to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Zawahiri’s Letter

Other documents purportedly captured from terrorists in Iraq further reinforce this image of a struggling movement that is fueled by the fury felt by individual Muslims over the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

For instance, a captured 6,000-word letter purportedly sent by al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman Zawahiri to Zarqawi on July 9, 2005, revealed a weakened organization worried that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq might cause many of its foreign jihadists to lay down their arms and go home.

According to the letter, as released by U.S. intelligence, Zawahiri hoped that after U.S. forces left Iraq, al-Qaeda's contingent could hold out in some Sunni enclaves and keep the jihadists in line by promising the eventual creation of a “caliphate” in an area along the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, known as the Lavant.

But the “Zawahiri letter” recognized the weakness of al-Qaeda’s position, especially if the U.S. military suddenly withdrew. Not only might al-Qaeda find itself surrounded by hostile forces, but many of the jihadists might be inclined to call it quits.

The “Zawahiri letter” floated the “idea” of an Islamic caliphate “only to stress … that the mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal.”

In other words, assuming U.S. intelligence is correct that the letter was written by Zawahiri, al-Qaeda saw promoting the dream of an unlikely “caliphate” as a needed sales pitch to keep the jihadists from returning to their everyday lives once the Americans departed Iraq.

The letter also pictured al-Qaeda as a struggling organization under financial and political duress, not a movement plotting global domination. Al-Qaeda’s leaders were so short of funds that they asked their embattled operatives in Iraq to send $100,000 to relieve a cash squeeze, according to the letter.

Zarqawi’s Army

Despite the Bush administration’s longstanding efforts to make Zarqawi the terrifying poster boy of the Iraqi insurgency, U.S. intelligence knew that Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda contingent of foreign fighters represented only a small percentage of the armed resistance to U.S. and allied forces in Iraq.

Most intelligence assessments put the size of this foreign jihadist force at only a few thousand fighters, or around 5 percent of the overall Iraqi insurgency.

In 2005, a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative Washington-based think tank, said the number of foreign fighters was “well below 10 percent, and may well be closer to 4 percent to 6 percent.” [See CSIS’s “Saudi Militants in Iraq,” Sept. 19, 2005]

A former U.S. official with access to intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency cited similar numbers in an interview with the New York Times, estimating that 95 percent of the insurgents are Iraqis. [NYT, Oct. 15, 2005]

Also, suggesting that the international threat from Islamic terrorists was less severe than Bush let on was the historical fact that Muslim nations succeeded, again and again, in suppressing radical movements as long as Western powers stayed out of the way.

In an Oct. 6, 2005, speech, Bush inadvertently underscored this point when he noted that “over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Jordan for potential takeover.” Bush could have added Algeria to the list of countries that faced a radical Islamic threat.

But the bottom line to all these cases was that the radicals were defeated, explaining why so many of al-Qaeda’s leaders are exiles. Osama bin-Laden is a Saudi; Zawahiri is an Egyptian; Zarqawi was a Jordanian. In the late 1990s, bin-Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were even banished from the Sudan, forcing them to flee to remote Afghanistan.

Hitler/Stalin

Bush, however, has offered his own chilling vision of al-Qaeda’s global power.

In that Oct. 6, 2005, speech, Bush asserted that Muslim extremists intended to use Iraq as a base to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia” and thus would isolate and strategically defeat the United States.

The disparity between the intelligence data about al-Qaeda’s weaknesses and Bush’s claims about the group’s extraordinary prowess suggests that Bush is still exaggerating the threat posed by his Islamic enemies, much as he hyped allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq in March 2003.

Just as he roused American fears with images of “mushroom clouds” from hypothetical Iraqi nuclear bombs, Bush now appears to be presenting an off-the-charts worst-case scenario about the threat from Islamic extremism.

In that same speech, Bush likened al-Qaeda leaders to historic tyrants, such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, suggesting that anyone opposed to the Iraq War was inviting slaughter on a massive scale.

But there are few indications that al-Qaeda’s leaders – believed to be holed up in the mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border – represent that level of threat.

Instead, Bush’s intent appears to be to use a never-ending hyped-up threat of Islamic terrorism as the organizing principle for a new authoritarian form of government in the United States. By keeping Americans scared, he and his advisers believe they can exert virtually unlimited power inside the United States without significant opposition.

Bush’s strategy also might have a circular quality to it. As long as he cites the threat of Islamic terrorism, he can maintain enough political support to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and continue the operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison.

That, in turn, will keep young Muslims riled up and thus increase the likelihood of sporadic violence in the months ahead. That will further stoke the fears inside the United States and let Bush consolidate his authoritarian powers even more.

So, the ultimate danger from al-Qaeda and any home-grown spin-offs may not be from the violence that they can inflict but from their status as the bogeymen who can scare the American people into surrendering the democratic Republic envisioned by the Founders.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

After gays and flag-burning, what's next for GOP?

With the President and his panicky Republican allies seeking to rally the base with constitutional amendments against gay marriage and flag-burning, what else can they do to win support? They're betting that the rural, Midwest and Southern voters who fell for their pandering before will respond again, even if they lose on those red-meat issues in Congress. But to shore up their support, here are some other measures under consideration by the Bush Administration:

1. Mandating that all grade-schoolers learn to read directly from the Bible -- with chapbooks just like in colonial days.

2. Administration supporters are working with the Fox News Network to launch MolestTV, a 24/7 cable network highlighting coverage of trials, arrests and in-depth profiles of accused and convicted child molesters, mostly focusing on gays (even though critics of the new network note that a majority of pedophile cases involve heterosexuals.) Bill O'Reilly will anchor an hour show on the network, "Fighting for Our Kids," focusing on politicians, liberal journalists and judges who are "soft on crime" while featuring regular appearances by representatives of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)

3. Executing a few scary-looking accused terrorists with "funny-sounding" Arabic names who have been held at Guantamano Bay.

4. Cracking down on all that cursing on HBO, once and for all.

5. Having Attorney General Gonzales order the arrest of mostly Jewish reporters for publishing leaked classified information about our secret intelligence-gathering and interrogation (i.e., domestic spying and torture) operations.

The closer we get to November, here are some other desperation moves being considered:

6. Putting out an all-gay list of fugitives and serial murderers on the FBI's Most Wanted list.

7. Banning all condoms and contraceptives from drug-stores because they promote "teen sex cults."

8. Pushing a constitutional amendment calling for life imprisonment for all doctors who either perform abortions or tell patients how to join NARAL.

9. Finding one of those flag burners, somewhere, and ordering a federal SWAT team to invade his house for a high-profile arrest. (Failing that, arranging through shell groups and third-parties a payment to an undercover Republican operative willing to be the perp and take the fall. That's Karl Rove's idea, but some administration insiders say it goes too far, dubbing it "Operation Reichstag.")

10. When all else fails, starting a pogrom. But this time, include illlegal immigrants, too. It's helped rally the base in other countries, so why not try it here?

Posted by Art Levine on 06/06/06 at 11:18 PM

© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress

Another day, another martyr

Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com

06.09.06 - On March 31, 2003, a week after George Bush launched his illegal invasion, I wrote a column entitled “The six day war: Why America has already lost its war against Iraq.”

Here’s a relevant portion:

”The only remaining unknowns are how many months or years it will take America and Britain to figure out that they have already lost, and how many people will die in the interim. From the beginning, Bush Administration rationales for this invasion have been based on the premise that Americans (and their faithful canine companions, the Brits) would be welcomed with open arms by both Iraqi civilians and soldiers...

Never mind.

It was evident by the middle of last week, and has become increasingly evident each day since -- even through the muddle of U.S. media coverage and frantic spinning in Washington and London -- that Iraqis do not want the Americans in their country. Period. We are not welcome….It seems to have never occurred to Bush and his advisors that people who hate Saddam wouldn't automatically welcome America...

What it means is that even with all the firepower in the world -- especially with all the firepower in the world -- the United States cannot win this war. The Pax Americana that Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, and their ilk envisioned for Iraq -- and eventually the whole region -- simply cannot be achieved through brute force alone. That's what we're starting to see already...”

I bring this up now because Iraqi Prime Nouri al-Maliki Minister (aka Washington’s Exile Thug of the Week) has announced the apparent assassination Wednesday night by U.S. forces of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the designated satanic figure blamed by the Pentagon and White House for much of the carnage in Iraq over the past couple of years.

So what?

Needless to say, this will play as a huge media story, particularly in America. By the time you read this, President Bush will have stood behind another podium, cameras rolling, and solemnly pronounced that Iraq has turned yet another corner, that this is yet another milestone on Iraq’s inexorable march to freedom and democracy and yada yada ya. Meanwhile, on the ground in Iraq, an American funhouse where countless corners have already been turned to no avail, Zarqawi’s death will make no noticeable difference at all.

That’s because, since the beginning of his public notoriety, Zarqawi has been an American fiction. His death is yet another myth. Oh, Zarqawi the man was real enough, and presumably (hopefully we’ll see a body, right?) his death is, too; he was responsible for a great many unsavory deaths, and few outside the world of jihadism will mourn his passing.

But Zarqawi has always been most significant as a concept., both for America and for that portion of the Islamic world enraged at America. And there will be someone to replace him. There already is; we just don’t know the name yet, because there are so many to choose from.

Washington made Zarqawi. He first came to prominence in the orchards of Dick Cheney, cherry-picking division, as the tenuous sole link between Al-Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was nonsense, of course, but when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 Zarqawi used that Washington-bestowed pedigree as a sort of street cred to recruit jihadists to his cause. He thus became what Washington had originally insisted he was when he was not. Just as Iraq became a haven of terrorists after the invasion, but was not until that time.

Zarqawi took full advantage. On the Muslim street, he became arguably a more mythic figure than bin Laden, because while Osama hid in some cave in the Pakistani mountains, Zarqawi was where the action was, taking the fight directly to the infidels. Even the Americans said so. Thing is, for all the attention the White House (and its obedient American media) has subsequently bestowed upon him, Zarqawi and his forces, with their kidnappings and car bombings and beheadings, were never more than a minor part of the resistance in Iraq.

Zarqawi was useful to the Bush administration. Originally the insurgency was not blamed on him; it was blamed on the Baathists, the so-called “bitter-enders” who were irrationally loyal to Saddam. All that was supposed to end when U.S. forces killed Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, in July 2003. That was the first of the post-Mission Accomplished “turning points,” just as the surge in violence that came after their deaths was the first of many “temporary” surges written off by Washington as what Cheney would later label “last throes.” The capture of Saddam was another of these points, a presumed huge military triumph that supposedly heralded the end of the Iraqi resistance -- all somehow being orchestrated from a spider-hole -- and the onset of True Democracy.

When that didn’t pan out, the American public got its first heavy dose of Zarqawi as the all-purpose terrorist, personally responsible for all mayhem befalling Iraq’s liberators. Zarqawi became a figure Washington could demonize, always an essential for a good pro-war propaganda campaign, and a difficult task in a war with a murky, invisible foe. But the foe was and is murky and invisible precisely because the vast majority of the people fighting the American occupation in Iraq are nationalists, not foreign jihadists. When they’re not planting roadside bombs or launching mortar attacks, they fade into a general population that broadly supports what they are doing.

And these days, the attacks on American and British forces are themselves only part, and far from the largest part, of the bloodshed. The vast majority of the carnage now is coming with the steadily escalating sectarian civil war, a civil war in which the U.S. is giving massive amounts of weaponry and support to one side through its creation and arming of Iraq’s army and police forces. Those forces are heavily infiltrated by the same sectarian Shiite militias whose death squads terrorize Sunni neighborhoods, often in uniforms, taking away and executing Sunnis.

All that is an uncomfortable narrative for Washington. It’s much easier to blame all the bloodshed on “the terrorists,” preferably “the foreign terrorists.” Hence, the utility these past years of the Jordanian Zarqawi. And now, we can posture that we have achieved some major victory by assassinating him. Just like we “won” when Uday and Qusay were killed three years ago, or when Saddam was captured in December 2003, or when Fallujah was crushed in April 2004, or when Fallujah was crushed even more brutally in November 2004. And so on.

The Iraq violence at this point isn’t primarily about taking aim at the Americans, though the endemic sectarian violence is very much a product of Bush’s Folly. Even the violence that is aimed at the Americans is coming primarily from nationalists. And even among the jihadists, Zarqawi will be replaced by someone else, just as the Israelis have been assassinating PLO and Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders for decades to no avail.

Creating martyrs just motivates even more potential martyrs. The problem was never Zarqawi, just as it has never been one or another resistance figure in Palestine. Just as with Israel and Palestine, the problem in Iraq is an illegal, brutal, and exploitative military occupation of a place the U.S. has no business being in.

It was true in March 2003, and it is still true now: Violence against American forces in Iraq will end the day the last U.S. forces leave Iraq. Not a moment sooner. No matter who we kill, and no matter how many we kill, along the way.

(c) 2006, WorkingForChange.com

California Dems vote down spending measures

E.J. Dionne, Jr. - Washington Post Writers Group

06.09.06 - WASHINGTON -- When it comes to spending their tax money, voters can be wary even of very good causes.

While the political world was obsessed with the Republican victory in a special election for a California congressional seat, the truly sobering news for liberals was in the statewide voting. Proposition 82, the ballot measure that would have guaranteed access to preschool for all of California's 4-year-olds, went down to a resounding defeat, 61-39 percent.

Not only that -- voters also rejected a $600 million bond measure for the state's libraries. A vote against libraries? Yes, the bonds went down 53-47 percent.

And bear in mind that these spending measures appeared on a primary ballot at a time when Democrats were holding a fierce contest for their gubernatorial nomination while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced only token Republican opposition. There were roughly 500,000 more Democratic than Republican primary votes -- meaning that a significant number of Democrats voted against both propositions.

Progressives can find plenty of alibis. Instead, they need to deal with the sources of voter skepticism about public spending.

The preschool initiative seemed to have everything going for it. There is ample evidence that quality preschool really does improve the life chances of poor children. The measure had celebrity backing from Rob Reiner, the actor and director. The program was universal: it would have helped every child in California, not just the poor. And it was financed through substantial tax increases only on the very wealthiest Californians -- couples earning more than $800,000 a year and individuals earning over $400,000 a year. The vast majority of Californians would not have seen their taxes go up.

Almost all these assets became liabilities.

Reiner, whose enthusiasm for preschooling is genuine and infectious, ran into controversy when it emerged that a state commission he chaired had spent $23 million promoting the value of early learning -- even as Reiner was organizing to put the initiative on the ballot. It sure looked like tax dollars were being used to promote an actor's favorite cause.

Because the measure covered everyone, including kids already in preschool, it was very expensive. The wealthy rebelled against the big income tax increase -- the top rate would have gone from 9.3 percent to 11 percent -- and bankrolled the opposition. Private preschool providers worried that the public provision of preschool would threaten their businesses.

There was also the good government point: Californians have grown sensibly weary of "ballot-box budgeting" through which initiatives are used to mandate both programs and the tax increases to pay for them. That robs state officials of flexibility at times of budget turmoil, which Californians have seen a lot of lately.

The library bond defeat is more puzzling, given that none of these factors was in play. But Californians will be voting this fall on an enormous ($47 billion) infrastructure bond. They may have been wary of adding another liability before they decided on the Big Enchilada.

Progressives have a lot to think about. For one thing, there remains a deep skepticism about government spending, even for the best purposes. On the same day that the two propositions went down, voters in five California counties rejected sales tax increases, mostly to fund transportation projects. Attacks on tax and spend sound old and tired, but they still have force.

Higher taxes on the wealthy are a logical way to finance necessary programs because the best-off Americans have been posting much larger gains in income and wealth than the rest. But the well-to-do can still fend off such tax increases by creating rational doubts about what the money will be used for.

Hardest of all is the issue of "universality." In principle, programs that cover everyone -- Social Security and Medicare are prime examples -- are usually better programs and commend broad political support. Programs for the poor alone are often less comprehensive and enjoy a shakier foundation in public opinion.

But universal programs carry large price tags. In retrospect, Reiner might have gotten closer to his honorable goal with a smaller program directed at the poorest kids and requiring a smaller tax increase. Is there a lesson here on how to expand health insurance coverage?

It gives me no joy to say these things, since I wish both California propositions had passed. But realism is not the enemy of idealism, and taxpayers aren't selfish just because they place a heavy burden on those who would ask them to part with some of their money. Advocates of public action need to meet that test.

(c) 2006, Washington Post Writers Group