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POPSThe Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not with Islam Simon Jenkins on threats to peace and democracy. This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s liberties”. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.
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POPSA Tragic Legacy And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world. New essay by Glenn Greenwald on the future legacy of America's reaction to 9/11.
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POPSHow Did Soviet-Style Torture Become ‘Interrogation’? A Senate investigation is underway, but many of the details are surfacing already. His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychiatry, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies.... he article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information.
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POPSIraq’s Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory A bloodthirsty sectarian war centuries in the making has only just begun. It's going to get much worse before it gets better. Caught in the middle of the civil war are the Americans. To Iraq’s factions, they are the weakest of all the armed groups in one crucial respect: their will is ebbing and their time here is limited. That leaves Iraqis more motivated than ever to cling to their weapons, preparing for what many see as an inevitable plunge into the abyss. “Everyone — the Sunni, the Shia — is playing the waiting game,” an Iraqi leader told me over dinner at his home in the Green Zone. “They’re waiting out the Americans. Everyone is using time against you.”
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POPSMark Twain's "The War Prayer" In 1904, disgusted by the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine-American War, Mark Twain wrote a short anti-war prose poem called "The War Prayer." His family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously: None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth. "The War Prayer" was eventually published after World War I, when its message was more in tune with the times. Now, Washington Monthly's publisher, Markos Kounalakis, who was affected by Twain's words when he covered the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, has made "The War Prayer" into a short video for release this Memorial Day weekend. It features stunning illustrations by Akis Dimitrakopoulos and is narrated by Peter Coyote, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Erik Bauersfeld. *
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POPSWolfowitz Resigns From World Bank The Guardian on the committee report that ended the tenure of Wolfowitz (considered the top intellectual architect of the Iraq War): Sounding more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader, in testimony by one key witness Mr Wolfowitz declares: "If they f*** with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to f*** them too." The remarks were published in a report detailing the controversy that erupted last month after the size of Ms Riza's pay rises was revealed. The report slates Mr Wolfowitz for his "questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest", saying: "Mr Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply."
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POPSJFK, 1963, on peace JFK's commencement address at American University in 1963, after the Cuban missile crisis. In it he remarks on Soviet propaganda claims that the U.S. is planning a "preventative war" -- which he describes as outlandish -- and declares, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war."
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POPSRe-Thinking The War Here's looking forward to a time when clips on America's reputation are more fitting for the nation we aspire to be. When the next major terrorist attack comes, the question will simply be how much liberty Americans have left. That is a victory al Qaeda could not have achieved by force of arms. It is something they have achieved with our witting and conscious help.
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POPSLebanon War Probe Accuses Olmert of 'Severe Failure' The first part of the official, government-appointed report is in and already the results are scathing. This is what the face of governmental accountability looks like. Better late than never, America will go through the same process of political introspection and repair as it goes forward. The inevitability of accountability is what allows a true democracy to survive almost anything. "Some of the declared goals of the war were not clear and could not be achieved, and in part were not achievable by the authorized modes of military action," the report said.
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POPSThe Stick Figure Guide to Winning in Iraq As described in the article, the creator of this humorous, optimistic cartoon, a young Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq just last Wednesday. His creation has been circulating among the troops and, lately, across the internet. PDF version of the presentation .
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POPSThe AK-47: Weapon Of Mass Destruction Historical overview of the cheap, mass-produced assault rifle that would permanently change the balance of power in conflicts the world over. By Larry Kahaner, the author of AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War : Now 85, tiny, feeble, nearly deaf, his right hand losing control because of tremors, Kalashnikov is often haunted by the killing machine he has bestowed upon the world. "I wish I had invented a lawnmower," he told the Guardian in 2002.
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POPSAmerican Conservative Magazine: GOP Must Go There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen—in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur—as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.
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POPSWho's Planning to Vote for Whom Fifty percent of independent voters, a closely watched segment of the electorate in such polarized times, said they intended to vote for the Democratic candidate, versus 23 who said they would vote for a Republican.
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POPSArmy Times: "Time for Rumsfeld to go" Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.
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POPSConfessions of Evil Some look to the terrorist and call them evil. Others say it the liberal press that are evil. This guy has the right idea - he starts by looking in the mirror. Where do you look?
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POPSIraq like Vietnam, says Bush Asked whether he agreed with Friedman's summary , Bush said, "He could be right. ... There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."
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POPS The Seductive Logic of Exterminationism The second tendency stemming from dwelling so much on Hitler's exterminationist logic is to begin to absorb it and to start thinking like Hitler himself, to say to oneself: Well, while it wouldn't do to come out and quite say it publicly, it's simple logic that if we can't democratize the Muslims (which looks increasingly implausible), we'd better do unto them before they do unto us: exterminate them. That way of thought leads toward a war of nuclear genocide that would be as unnecessary as it is criminal.
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POPSThe Islamic Way of War - Andrew J. Bacevich (The American Conservative) the sun has set on the age of unquestioned Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War. In Baghdad and in Anbar Province as at various points on Israel’s troubled perimeter, the message is clear: methods that once could be counted on to deliver swift decision no longer work.
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POPSNot So Clean Break - Taki (American Conservative) The Bush doctrine of creating democracy in the Middle East with bombs will go down in history as the cruelest and craziest ever. A war on terror, as Bush calls everything he doesn’t agree with, cannot be won by a democratically elected government acting like a terrorist organization. Killing civilians, especially children, is wrong.
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POPS"Psychological motives of belligerent, chest-beating warmongers" Digby , clipped from Glenn Greenwald's blog, with some insightful points, I think. Neoconservative author Francis Fukuyama felt that with the fall of our last great opponent at the end of the Cold War (see Pax Americana ), American men were doomed to fail to live up to the Western-Frontier-era ideal of masculinity. In other words, peace is for wussies. This idea worried him so much that he wrote an entire book on the subject — The End of History and the Last Man — which was held by an important few warmongers in Washington to be the perfect moral prescription to find new enemies with which to wage continuous war.
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POPS War! What is it good for? (Less and less these days) Steve Sailer concludes: Still, there will be plenty of men who will get very excited over every twist and turn in the Game of Nations, and bay for war to prevent any loss of the slightest advantage. As former war correspondent Fred Reed notes, after decades of following the sounds of guns it occurred to him that war, important as it seems at the time, is just something males do.
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POPSUS Army: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices" Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said these words last Wednesday at the Pentagon while presenting the new Geneva-abiding Army field manual on interrogation practices. Ironically, almost at the exact same time in Washington, the US President was trying out a new angle to convince the American public of the need to torture enemies. Talk about raining on Bush's parade....
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POPS Spurned by the West, Turkey looks eastward I know Invictus said Turkey would never fall to Muslim extremism, but surely Turkey's relations with the West have become a bit frayed lately? Of course, it wouldn't be the only crucial former ally our administration has managed to spurn. Feel safer? Formally, Turkey remains in the Western camp, but it is increasingly the odd man out. In contrast, Turkey's relations with Russia have developed exponentially. Relations with Iran are also improving. Tehran provides assistance to Ankara's efforts to fight the PKK and is a significant gas supplier.
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POPSThe Central Truth (Thomas Friedman - NY Times) And then, the conundrum on everyone's mind: It truly, truly baffles me why a president who bet so much of his legacy on this project never gave it his best shot and tolerated so much incompetence. He summoned us to D-Day and gave us the moral equivalent of the invasion of Panama. ( Published Sept. 8, 2006.)
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POPSMajority of Israelis 'want Olmert to go' The Israeli government came under increased pressure today with the publication of a newspaper poll showing that for the first time a majority want Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign over perceived failings in his handling of the war with Hizbullah.
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POPS"Big Talk, Little Will" - Thomas Friedman (NY Times) August 16, 2006. Friedman asking the right questions again. Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides — the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases
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POPSWashington's "Green-Lighting" of the War in Lebanon - Seymour Hersh Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports in this week's issue of the New Yorker that Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a "green light" for an attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved, Hersh says, in part to remove Hezbollah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran.
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POPSHaaretz: Lebanon "failure" puts strain on US-Israel alliance Rivkin and Casey rightly worry about Israel's privileged ally status to the US after failing to decisively defeat Hezbollah, espeically in light of the predicted return of some Democratic control in Washington. "Israel must win," they half-heartedly write, but with the UN cease-fire draft up for vote later today , they must know the time for "winning" is almost up. All that is left will be the inevitable post-war spin from both sides...and preparing for the next round of the Neverending War.
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POPSComic-Blogging Beirut Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese-born artist comic-blogging the aerial bombardment from his home in Beirut. Every day he uploads a new sketch or commentary to his blog , assuming electricity and internet are working that day. His arresting style and somewhat fatalistic mood make for a strikingly personal look into the war. I clipped a few of his best drawings.
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POPSHezbollah's Other War - Michael Young A great insider perspective on the intertangled, democratic and sectarian groups that have used (and abused) Lebanon for cross-purposes throughout its history, laying the groundwork for the current Hezbollah stranglehold on the country. Fans of simplistic, black-and-white views of the world may want to skip this article.
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POPSWW4? Don’t Flatter Them - John Derbyshire Derbyshire grants the Cold War as worthy of the moniker "WW3", but all this talk of World Wars 4, 5, & 6 is "nonsense on stilts." Leave it to grumpy, old Derbyshire to keep raining on the parade of his fellow young, flighty, reactionary neocons at the National Review with heavy doses of realism, skepticism and conservatism...in the true sense of the word. This is not a war, and by calling it one, we flatter the jihadists far beyond their deserts. No jihadist nation — let alone any jihadist group — can field an army against us. We are frightening ourselves with bogeymen.
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POPSCato: Staying in Iraq 'Monumentally Bad Idea' Too bad it wasn't sooner, but Cato has been telling fellow conservatives what they don't want to hear for a while now. If you haven't read Cato's last quarterly letter, you should. Tucker Carlson managed to sit down long enough to write this straight-talking essay: The Decline and Fall of the Republican Party (PDF)
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