Molly Ivins Tells The Truth

Enron, Iraq, Jessica Lynch, and now Pat Tillman. Poor Tillman was awarded the Silver Star posthumously and he was killed by friendly fire! The fraud goes on and on and on. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
Truth, justice and the American way
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN - CBS News has acquired tapes of Enron employees boasting about how they were "[expletive] over" California during the late, great "energy crisis" there.

My favorite segment in these charming conversations is the dismay at Enron when local utilities try to get the money back. "They're [expletive] taking all the money back from you guys?" inquires an Enronite. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

"Yeah, Grandma Millie, man."

"Yeah, now she wants her [expletive] money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her [expletive] for [expletive] $250 a megawatt hour."

Grandma Millie. The nerve of her. Imagine thinking it's wrong to rig a market and overcharge by billions of dollars. But hey, no worries at Enron, because George W. Bush is about to be elected president. "It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay secretary of energy."

"When this election comes, Bush will [expletive] whack this [expletive], man. He won't play this price-cap [expletive]."

Bush said obligingly in May 2001, "We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse, and that's why I oppose price caps."

Bush eventually changed course, as he so often does, which adds such special piquancy to his campaign against John Kerry for "flip-flopping."

Since we're having a bad language day, I may as well quote Ben Bradlee, longtime editor of The Washington Post, who had a great fondness for "Holy [expletive]!" stories, meaning those where your reaction is, "And I thought I'd heard everything!"

I thought I'd heard everything about Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who conned the neocons in the Bush administration, collected more than $33 million in payments from the State and Defense departments for bad information and snookered The New York Times about weapons of mass destruction.

Turns out he did more damage than that -- he told the Iranians we'd cracked their intelligence code, thus blowing our most valuable intelligence asset in the Middle East.

Not being a Washington reporter myself, I can only read the tea leaves from afar. There appears to be a significant split between the military and both the Bushies in the Pentagon and in the White House. It's safe to say most of those now running the military earned their stars and bars in Vietnam, from which they took away two overwhelming lessons.

The first is that if you're going to go to war, go in to win -- go in with "overwhelming force," as Colin Powell did in Gulf War I. The second is, "Have an exit strategy" -- figure out ahead of time how you're going to get out.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, along with his Pentagon buddies Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, et al. decided this hard-earned wisdom could be tossed out the window. That made the brass unhappy.

So now what we're looking at is one of those underwater struggles among various bureaucratic behemoths involved in some hideous internecine conflict of which we can see nothing except roiled water, as though several Loch Ness monsters were going at it deep out of sight.

I have no idea where the sad case of Pat Tillman, the patriotic football player, fits into this, but I'd bet it's connected. It takes nothing away from the heroism of Tillman, who gave up a highly remunerative pro football career to serve his country after 9-11, that he is now reported to have been killed by friendly fire. Anyone who was around for Vietnam knows these things happen.

The troubling part is the initial story we were fed about how Tillman was killed by the enemy in heroic action in Afghanistan and so was given a posthumous Silver Star. Again, the new information takes nothing away from Tillman, although it does raise some questions about the "elite unit" in which he served.

War is full of tragedy tinged with terrible irony. It's making stuff up afterward for public relations purposes that is so offensive. The story of Jessica Lynch going Rambo before being captured is a classic example.

One of the most admirable traits of the American military is its commitment to going back after the firing has stopped and the dust has settled to figure out what actually happened, so it might be done better next time. The after-report on the Grenada episode is a classic of the genre.

We have just finished dedicating the memorial in Washington to "the Good War," and all honor to those who served in it. But they, too, had their tragedies and their ironies. The military understands, if the White House does not, that what is, finally, most important is to get it right.

Can the PR. Give us the facts.


© 2004 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

Texas Barbeque Trail

Barbeque in the Austin area is unlike most any other in Texas (with the exception of the Hill Country). The Texas Barbeque Trail is a good guide to this cuisine. Most of these purveyors offer primitive, no-frills ambience. With the exception of Cooper's in Round Rock, most offer smoked meat and little else. For a more primitive experience at Cooper's, the gourmand must travel to Llano in the Hill Country; customers pick their own meat out of the pit area under a tin roof and then the meat is taken inside and weighed. At Cooper's in Round Rock, the fare is served on plates, not butcher paper. If this is (fair & balanced) gastronomy, so be it.

12 Burning Questions For W

It's time to take the gloves off. W has had a free pass long enough. Chalmers Johnson's Dozen is a good start. If this is (fair & balanced) interrogation, so be it.

[x HNN]
12 Questions for President Bush
By Chalmers Johnson

1. Please tell us more about your notion of "full sovereignty" for Iraq. Will this be like our returning Okinawan sovereignty to Japan in 1972, when we retained exclusive control over the thirty-eight military bases on the island and the deployment and behavior of American forces on them?

2. Please tell us: If we plan to return Iraq to the Iraqis, why is the U.S. currently building fourteen permanent bases there?

3. Presumably the American troops to be stationed on these bases will remain under the control of the Pentagon and beyond the legal reach of any "sovereign" Iraqi state. Such arrangements are usually covered by a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) that we normally impose on the government in whose territory our bases are placed. Who will sign the SOFA on the Iraqi side? What are its terms? Will it be binding on the new government you hope the Iraqis will elect early next year?

4. The sovereignty discussion has been focused mainly on the question of who will control the actions of what troops -- Iraqi or American -- in the coming months. But American advisers will be stationed in every Iraqi "ministry"; the new government will evidently be capable neither of passing, nor abrogating laws or regulations laid down by the occupying power; and the economy, except for oil, will remain open to all foreign corporate investors. Please tell us if this really strikes you as "full sovereignty"?

5. You say that we will tear down Abu Ghraib prison if the Iraqis so wish. What if they wish to preserve it as a monument to our cruelty as well as Saddam Hussein's?

6. Your administration has recently confirmed that while captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters were not, in your eyes, covered by the Geneva Conventions, Iraqi prisoners and detainees were. The acts in Abu Ghraib prison contravened those conventions. We now know that teams of interrogation experts were sent by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commandant of our Guantánamo prison from Cuba to Abu Ghraib to teach Americans working there "better" interrogation techniques. If these contravened the Geneva Conventions, should General Miller be brought to trial for this? If General Miller acted at Guantánamo and elsewhere on the basis of guidelines and urgings from his superiors in the Pentagon and the military chain of command, should they face the same? Your views on this would be appreciated.

7. If it turns out to be true that some of the acts of torture in Abu Ghraib prison were, in fact, committed by members of the Israeli intelligence services, who were placed in the prison via our independent contractors, does this not further confuse American policy in the Middle East with that of Ariel Sharon's Israel? Is this really a good idea?

8. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the war and occupation in Iraq by 130,000 U.S. troops now costs close to $5 billion per month, or $60 billion a year. So far the war has cost American taxpayers $186 billion in direct military expenses. You've asked for another $425 billion in defense appropriations for the 2005 Pentagon budget, plus another $75 billion for Iraq, $25 billion for the development of new generations of nuclear weapons, and untold billions for such things as military pensions and veterans' health care. Not included in these figures are the multibillions in secret amounts spent on the CIA and other intelligence activities, not to speak of other Department of Defense "black budget" activities kept out of the appropriations process. Where is all this money going to come from? Why is our government putting all this money on the tab for future generations to deal with?

9. Speaking of military pensions and health care, would you please address the fact that something like 30 percent of the troops who participated in the first Gulf War are now seeking disability payments for illnesses contracted there -- chiefly as a result of our use of depleted uranium shells. Would you please discuss some of these long-term dangers of modern warfare (even when our initial short-term casualties seem relatively modest)? How will our military hospitals be able to care for all the soldiers who are likely to develop cancer or give birth to children with birth defects as a result of the current war?

10. On June 1, 2002, in your West Point speech enunciating your new doctrine of preventive war, you said there were sixty countries that were potential targets for regime change. Would you please list those sixty countries for us, and are you still determined in a second term to proceed down this list?

11. If you are determined to start new wars, or if the Iraq war drags on and not enough soldiers re-enlist, will you reinstate the draft?

12. Why do you usually give your speeches to the American people before audiences of servicemen and women at military academies, on bases, and the like, where they have been ordered by their superiors to attend and to applaud? Why not give one of your speeches -- especially if you're going to propose reinstating the draft -- at a large state college?

Chalmers Johnson is the author of THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE: MILITARISM, SECRECY, AND THE END OF THE REPUBLIC and of an earlier volume, BLOWBACK: THE COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN EMPIRE, among other works.

Copyright © 2004 History News Network

Dutch: Warts & All

Dutch was NOT the greatest president of the 20th century. The only thing that makes him better than W is Dutch's ability to pronounce nuclear correctly. If this is (fair & balanced) diction, so be it.

[x History News Network]
Ronald Reagan, De-Mythologized
By Juan Cole

I did not say anything about Ronald Reagan's death on Saturday. The day a person dies he has a right to be left alone.

But yesterday is now history, and Reagan's legacy should not pass without comment.

Reagan had an ability to project a kindly image, and was well liked personally by virtually everyone who knew him, apparently. But it always struck me that he was a mean man. I remember learning, in the late 1960s, of the impact Michael Harrington's The Other America had had on Johnson's War on Poverty. Harrington demonstrated that in the early 1960s there was still hunger in places like Appalachia, deriving from poverty. It was hard for middle class Americans to believe, and Lyndon Johnson, who represented many poor people himself, was galvanized to take action.

I remember seeing a tape of Reagan speaking in California from that era. He said that he had heard that some asserted there was hunger in America. He said it sarcastically. He said, "Sure there is; they're dieting!" or words to that effect. This handsome Hollywood millionnaire making fun of people so poor they sometimes went to bed hungry seemed to me monstrous. I remember his wealthy audience of suburbanites going wild with laughter and applause. I am still not entirely sure what was going on there. Did they think Harrington's and similar studies were lies? Did they blame the poor for being poor, and resent demands on them in the form of a few tax dollars, to address their hunger?

Then when he was president, at one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.

The meanness was reflected, as many readers have noted, in Reagan's "blame the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it, made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.

Reagan's mania to abolish social security was of a piece with this kind of sentiment. In the early twentieth century, the old were the poorest sector of the American population. The horrors of old age--increasing sickness, loss of faculties, marginalization and ultimately death--were in that era accompanied by fear of severe poverty. Social security turned that around. The elderly are no longer generally poverty-stricken. The government can do something significant to improve people's lives. Reagan, philosophically speaking, hated the idea of state-directed redistribution of societal wealth. (His practical policies often resulted in such redistribution de facto, usually that of tossing money to the already wealthy). So he wanted to abolish social security and throw us all back into poverty in old age.

Reagan hated any social arrangement that empowered the poor and the weak. He was a hired gun for big corporations in the late 1950s, when he went around arguing against unionization. Among his achievements in office was to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives. I doubt he made us safer in the air.

Reagan hated environmentalism. His administration was not so mendacious as to deny the problems of increased ultraviolet radition (from a depleted ozone layer) and global warming. His government suggested people wear sunglasses and hats in response. At one point Reagan suggested that trees cause pollution. He was not completely wrong (natural processes can cause pollution), but his purpose in making the statement seems to have been that we should therefore just accept lung cancer from bad city air, which was caused by automobiles and industry, not by trees.

In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s.

Reagan's aggression led him to shape our world in most unfortunate ways. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Ronald Reagan created al-Qaeda, it would not be a vast exaggeration. The Carter administration began the policy of supporting the radical Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan who were waging an insurgency against the Soviets after their invasion of that country. But Carter only threw a few tens of millions of dollars at them. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was giving the holy warriors half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the U.S. contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Usamah Bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. This sort of thing was certainly done in coordination with the Reagan administration. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was a wild man, and balked at giving the holy warriors ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow the holy warriors to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that the holy warriors would eventually morph into a security threat in their own right.

Reagan's officials so hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua that they shredded the Constitution. Congress cut off money for the rightwing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the rightwing insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the rightwing guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it, either through collusion or inattention. It is not a shining legacy, to have helped Khomeini and then used the money he gave them to support highly unsavory forces in Central America. (Some of those forces were involved after all in killing leftwing nuns.)

Although Reagan's people were willing to shore up Iranian defenses during the Iran-Iraq War, so as to prevent a total Iraqi victory, they also wanted to stop Iran from taking over Iraq. They therefore winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the U.S. did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.

I only saw Reagan once in person. I was invited to a State Department conference on religious freedom, I think in 1986. It was presided over by Elliot Abrams, whom I met then for the first time. We were taken to hear Reagan speak on religious freedom. It was a cause I could support, but I came away strangely dissatisfied. I had a sense that "religious freedom" was being used as a stick to beat those regimes the Reagan administration did not like. It wasn't as though the plight of the Moro Muslims in the Philippines was foremost on the agenda (come to think of it, perhaps no Muslims or Muslim groups were involved in the conference).

Reagan's policies thus bequeathed to us the major problems we now have in the world, including a militant Islamist International whose skills were honed in Afghanistan with Reagan's blessing and monetary support; and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which the Reagan administration in some cases actually encouraged behind the scenes for short-term policy reasons. His aggressive foreign policy orientation has been revived and expanded, making the U.S. into a neocolonial power in the Middle East. Reagan's gutting of the unions and attempt to remove social supports for the poor and the middle class contributed to the creation of an America where most people barely get by while government programs that could help create wealth are destroyed.

Reagan's later life was debilitated by Alzheimer's. I suppose he may already have had some symptoms while president, which might explain some of his memory lapses and odd statements, and occasional public lapses into woolly-mindedness. Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory. There are 4 million Alzheimers sufferers in the U.S., and 50 percent of persons living beyond the age of 85 develop it. There are going to be a lot of such persons among the Baby Boomers. By reversing Reaganism, we may be able to avoid his fate.

Juan Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. Juan Cole's website

Copyright © 2004 History News Network