Politics

Having relinquished the power to decide war and peace, the House moves on. They have passed a resolution saying the President can decide when, or if, to attack another country. I consider this abandonment of Congress’s right to declare war illegal. Every person voting yes should be impeached.

As the Senate prepares to do the same, we have this ridiculous statement from Daschle:

Across the Capitol, where the Senate was moving toward passage of the same resolution, Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said Americans will return attention to the economy “once we get this question of Iraq behind us.”

How is going to war putting it “behind us”?

Znet has a very informative interview with Noam Chomsky on Iraq. He sounds pretty reasonable for a man many paint as a lefty fanatic madman.

A few highlights:

Saddam’s worst crimes, by far, have been domestic, including the use of chemical weapons against Kurds and a huge slaughter of Kurds in the late 80s, barbaric torture, and every other ugly crime you can imagine. These are at the top of the list of terrible crimes for which he is now condemned, rightly. It’s useful to ask how frequently the impassioned denunciations and eloquent expressions of outrage are accompanied by three little words: “with our help.”

The crimes were well known at once, but of no particular concern to the West. Saddam received some mild reprimands; harsh congressional condemnation was considered too extreme by prominent commentators. The Reaganites and Bush 1 continued to welcome the monster as an ally and valued trading partner right through his worst atrocities and well beyond. Bush authorized loan guarantees and sale of advanced technology with clear applications for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) right up to the day of the Kuwait invasion, sometimes overriding congressional efforts to prevent what he was doing. Britain was still authorizing export of military equipment and radioactive materials a few days after the invasion. When ABC correspondent and now ZNet Commentator Charles Glass discovered biological weapons facilities (using commercial satellites and defector testimony), his revelations were immediately denied by the Pentagon and the story disappeared. It was resurrected when Saddam committed his first real crime, disobeying US orders (or perhaps misinterpreting them) by invading Kuwait, and switched instantly from friend to reincarnation of Attila the Hun. The same facilities were then used to demonstrate his innately evil nature. When Bush 1 announced new gifts to his friend in December 1989 (also gifts to US agribusiness and industry), it was considered too insignificant even to report, though one could read about it in Z magazine at the time, maybe nowhere else. A few months later, shortly before he invaded Kuwait, a high-level Senate delegation, headed by (later) Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, visited Saddam, conveying the President’s greetings and assuring the brutal mass murderer that he should disregard the criticism he hears from maverick reporters here. Saddam had even been able to get away with attacking a US naval vessel, the USS Stark, killing several dozen crewmen. That is a mark of real esteem. The only other country to have been granted that privilege was Israel, in 1967. In deference to Saddam, the State Department banned all contacts with the Iraqi democratic opposition, maintaining this policy even after the Gulf war, while Washington effectively authorized Saddam to crush a Shi’ite rebellion that might well have overthrown him — in the interest of preserving “stability,” the press explained, nodding sagely.

That he’s a major criminal is not in doubt. That’s not changed by the fact that the US and Britain regarded his major atrocities as insignificant in the light of higher “reasons of state,” before the Gulf war and even after — facts best forgotten.

I feel the need to quote TBOGG‘s title for this:

We’d love to look into this…but we’ve got a war to fight…

Harvard University’s financial relationship with President Bush’s former oil company was deeper than previously understood, with the university’s management fund creating a separate ”off the books” partnership with Harken Energy Corp. that helped keep afloat the financially troubled company, according to a report to be released today.

HarvardWatch, a student-alumni group that monitors the school’s investments, plans to issue the report and say that it has analyzed documents showing that the Harvard fund, an independent entity that manages the university’s endowment, formed a partnership in 1990 with Bush’s oil firm called the Harken Anadarko Partnership. The partnership effectively removed $20 million of debt from Harken’s books, relieving the Texas company’s short-term financial problems.

About the same time, the Harvard fund invested about $30 million in Harken, which also helped keep the firm afloat. The partnership has not been mentioned in recent accounts of Bush’s financial dealings in the oil business.

The Boston Globe article may be found here.

Apparently Bush and his masters think there’s enough money to spend $9+ billion per month on Iraq, but there’s not enough money to provide pension benefits for disabled veterans. Rumsfeld and Bush think it’s “double dipping” for a veteran to get any extra money if they’re retired AND disabled.

Bush Threatens Veto of Defense Bill – President Wants Costly New Disabled Military Pension Benefits Eliminated

The Republicans seem to feel the same way about soldiers that they do about babies. They’re OK at the beginning, but we don’t care what happens to them later.

Statistic: Nearly one quarter of all homeless people are veterans.

Walter LaFeber, distinguished historian, has a good column in the Washington Post on our country’s Wilsonian split personality when it comes to engaging the outside world.

Wilsonianism, more than any other -ism, has shaped the foreign policy thinking of Americans in the early 21st century. Articulated in Wilson’s 1917 speech asking Congress to declare war, it rejects neutrality in an age where the conduct of “civilized states” was at issue.

Wilsonianism has been glorified, especially since the American triumph in the Cold War. But it is less a policy than a disorder. That is because at its core, Wilsonianism has a split personality. One Wilson preached the ideal of worldwide democracy and free enterprise under the aegis of the League of Nations. The other Wilson was the greatest unilateral military interventionist in U.S. history.

He sent troops into Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, and it took generations of diplomacy to clean up the results. This was the Wilson who pledged to teach Mexico “to elect good men,” even if he ended up sending in U.S. troops to do rather intense, if irrelevant, teaching. This was also the Wilson who, when asked whether he was going into World War I in concert with “allies,” replied that the United States would maintain its freedom of action and thus enter the conflict only as an “associated” power.

I just found this column, courtesy of TBOGG.

Some readers may have gotten the impression that I am unequivocally against a war with Iraq. As a matter of fact, that is not true. But one reason that I am against an attack upon Baghdad is because I do not think our military leaders are the best ones to lead it.

To the contrary, I think that our many superzealous civilian officials who are impassionedly leading the fight should be right up there in the front lines. Wars always need the most aggressive and “warlike” at the front. Instead, we find ourselves today in a virtually unheard-of situation where most of the men planning this abstruse war are hawkish and agenda-prone intellectuals who seem to think that war is the ultimate metaphysical experience — for someone else, of course.

…

Richard Perle revealed his own deep concern for American soldiers when he was asked on a recent “Wide Angle” TV show about the threat of chemical and biological weapons to troops landing in Iraq. All he could do was announce, without any emotion, “These are not effective weapons in terms of the outcome of the engagement.”

Protesters Jeer Gephardt

“Gephardt, Gephardt has no spine! He just follows Bush’s line,” the crowd loudly repeated, holding signs and banging drums, standing a few feet away from the high-ranking Democrat. The age of protesters ranged from college students to middle-aged parents to white-haired seniors.

The New York Times article is horrible. My feeble post was as journalistic as their report, which mostly quotes people with the most tangential messages to show that it was “just a bunch of kooks — nothing to worry about”. A lot of people at the rally itself spoke very well on the use of 9/11 as an excuse for the Bush administration to do what it likes anyway in terms of stifling dissent and shredding the Bill of Rights. They also talked about how talk of war is being used to distract the country from the problems of corporate crime, the bad economy, and people’s worries about their retirement. Here’a a good Alternet column on this topic, whose thesis is that we may not even go to war. War talk is being used to win the election.

The Daily News’s coverage is better. They and the other media outlets, such as the BBC, also use higher numbers than the Times.