Another more disturbing turn: US troops are improvising unconventional war tactics, rounding up civilians suspected of guerrilla warfare. Expect atrocities, expect to lose any "hearts and minds" campaign. This thing's getting uglier by the minute.Want to find out more: http://www.statecraft.org

That's a false analogy, Rolo. Anyone can start his own band, no one can start his own country. And in the US, people who dislike the government's policies are expected to work for change, not leave.Sorry if you think I'm pompous. Pomposity is not my intent, but I suppose like beauty and ugliness, it's all in the eye of the beholder. I'm just trying to diminish the bloodshed. But maybe you have a problem with that?

Unfortunately, I predict this thing will end with a weather report something like “ It’s 5000 degrees and cloudy over the middle-east right now. . . ” It can not be stopped now. Then there will be 1000 years of world peace. As for Hack the crackpot: By your logic, if anyone dislikes US policies, I suggest he start his own country rather than merely criticizing from the (fringe) wings.... How stupid can you get you pompous asshole.

The suicide attacks are disturbingly reminiscent of Israel's and the US's failed invasions of Lebanon in the 80s, which were eventually defeated by suicide bombers.Unfortunately, the current US invasion is fanning the flames of Islamic fundamentalism and creating a huge cadre of people willing to blow themselves up to hurt the USA. Bin Laden could not have planned it better: the USA is his best recruiter.In the meantime, if the Bush team gamble of a quick war does not bear out, this thing is going to get a lot uglier, and as it becomes more of an unconventional war, both sides will commit atrocities. What's worse, is more and more people will become more and more hostile to the USA and more willing to die in order to hurt us.

Putting words in other people's mouths again, eh Rolo?Both Franklin's and your (nilknarF's) answers are predictions. Only time will tell what the results of this war will be. All we know at this point is that Iraq had not attacked us or threatened us, that Iraq did not use its weapons of mass destruction in the first Gulf War, that it destroyed at least 95% of those weapons in 1991, that no concrete evidence of remaining WMD were found prior to present hostilities, and that if such weapons are used, it will be because of this war, not despite it.We're still living with the results of the first Gulf War, including delayed casualties among US veterans (Gulf War Illness), oppressive sanctions on the Iraqi people (which I admit I once supported), even the attacks of 9/11 and now of course the present war are largely results of the first one. It's interesting that both Osama bin Laden and Bush & Co. cite the plight of the Iraqi people as justification for their actions. But five thousand preventable child deaths per month -- half a million over the last decade -- should shame everyone. Each “sides” blames the other, but I think both sides are to blame.Yes, Saddam Hussein diverts huge amounts of money to himself and his family and is reported to have 7 billion dollars in foreign bank accounts. Surely he's been robbing Iraq ever since he came to power, yet prior to the first Gulf War and sanctions, the Iraqi people were among the most prosperous in the region. Their present plight is not due solely to Saddam but also to our refusal to allow the necessities for reconstruction after the first war, such as equipment for battlefield decontamination and water purification, as well as a multitude of common medicines, out of fear they might be put to military use. The sanctions continued even during periods that Iraq allowed weapons inspectors.Five thousand needless deaths per month (and most of them children) -- what is that, the toll from 9/11 every 3 weeks? And probably more than the total number of combatants and non-combatants who will die in this war. Our imperative should be to end the sanctions. I would have preferred that they end without war, but since the US and UK would never agree to that, at least the war will end them.I provided this link regarding the effects of sanctions before, but just in case someone missed it:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=380738And here's a link on Gulf War Illness:www.sftt.org/gwv.docAnd if anyone dislikes Blowback's music, I suggest he start his own band rather than merely criticizing from the (right) wings....

yes, we are.however , i do believe that:1)a lot of terrorists and Islamo-fascists are going to get killed2)US and British soldiers are going to suffer losses – today’s suicide attack is reminiscent of what the animals are doing to innocent civilians in Israel every chance they get3)the world will be a much safer place after we snuff out this evil philosophy of radical Islam 4)the French will remain upset (more sour grapes)5)the Iraqi people will reap the benefits of a free capitalist society with vast natural resources6)Kurds will finally be rid of the horrors of the current regime7)Blowback will still suck

It depends on what your definition of “is” is. . . Or in other words, YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Franklin is a walking contradiction. Surprised??

no, we're nothowever, i do believe that:1) a lot of innocent civilians are going to get killed2) US and British soldiers are going to suffer losses - today's suicide attack is reminiscent of what befell the Israelis in Lebanon3) the world is going to be made a lot less safe - look at what North Korea said today about weapons inspections4) the USA is going to lose even more friends and made even less safe - not to mention the economic mess of the deficit and crumbling domestic infrastructure5) US oil companies are going to make a killing in psot-war Iraq, if the whole thing doesn't unravel first6) Kurds are going to get screwed again-and so is the US Constitution

oh don't tell me you guys are some of those bush-is-going-to-carpet-bomb-iraq-and-kill-all-the-orphins-in-the middle-east-so-we-can-get-oil people.

Hey, I haven't signed in for awhile because of the war.Yes, Warren Rudman and Gary Hart co-chaired a bipartisan inquiry, presented in the first months of the Bush administration, that said we were woefully unprepared for terrorist attacks. Their report was completely ignored by the administration, though some Democrats like Sen. Biden cited it in opposing Bush's Anti-Ballistic Missile plan. Biden said something along the lines of our primary threats these dasy are terrorists, not long-range missiles. I also remember Sen. Feinstein in early summer 2001 speaking on the floor of the Senate about reports of foreign nationals, from countries on the State Department's terrorist nation list, taking lessons at flight schools in this country. Bush's discounting of the Rudman-Hart report is probably the reason (as reported by Fox News, no less) that Rudman is the one Republican whom the administration would not accept on a new bipartisan commission to investigate events leading up to 9/11 (you know, the one that Kissinger ultimately declined to serve on).On a somewhat related subject, Tom Friedman of the NY Times presents a documentary on the Discovery channel tonight (Wednesday) at 10 pm. MSNBC showed an excerpt today and it looks very worthwhile.Speaking of documentaries, I was glad to see Michael Moore win that category's Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine," discussed in this forum last year. Maybe Blowback can write a song for his next film?Getting back to the war, it goes without saying that everyone -- for or against this war -- wants it to end soon with as few casualties as possible. But honestly, Rolo, if you really feel anyone here is guilty of sedition for advocating peace, then don't beat around the Bush. Go down to your local FBI office and swear out a warrant for his arrest. I have nothing to fear, and I bet Franklin would enjoy the publicity from a test case he would certainly win. But then, swearing out a warrant would require giving your real name....;-)

If you haven't checked it out lately, now's the time to be checking in closely with Sam Smith's the Progressive Review:http://www.prorev.comFind out about the ongoing assault on civil liberties, the censored news about the war in Iraq, and why you too should boycott Delta Airlines.

Great column in today's Washington Post on the irresponsible (and censoring) US media coverage:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29409-2003Mar25.html

"The Fog of War"NEW YORK TIMES- In the hour before President Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein expired, cable channels ran ticking clocks on their screens, the same sort of clock that ABC would later use in counting down to the Oscars. There were also the portentous logos: "The Final Hour" and "Zero Hour". After Friday's air assault on Baghdad, television anchors took to promising viewers that there was more "Shock and Awe" to come, and military analysts talked about how new technology had made the Pentagon "more imaginative than it's been in the past" and "more creative". It may be recalled that many television networks, including, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox, are owned by multimedia corporations well practiced in the manufacture of entertainment.

WOW! ROLO AND HIS SPAMMY LITTLE HEAD ARE BACK!! YEAY FOR ROLO THE SUPERPATRIOT WHO SURELY MUST BE POSTING FROM WHERE THE TROOPS ARE DEPLOYED. AREN'T YOU, OUR SPAMMY LITTLE EINSTEIN?Now, for the rest of us, a question raised by a resident of Atlanta quoted in today's Washington Post: How can Bush who "ignored a demoncratic process at the UN... is now saying he's going to install a democratic process in Iraq." Good question.Another good one: given how sheepishly quiet the Grand Ole Party has been on any discussion about this deficit, did it ever care about the deficit?Remember what the Post reported today (full article below today's daily dosage of RoloSpam): The senior administration official said the new war costs would probably bring the fiscal year 2003 deficit close to $400 billion.YOW!

For all of you filthy Birkenstock wearing scum of the earth quislings:16 May, 1918The U.S. Sedition Act United States, Statutes at Large, Washington, D.C., 1918, Vol. XL, pp 553 ff. A portion of the amendment to Section 3 of the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917.SECTION 3. Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies, or shall willfully make or convey false reports, or false statements, . . . or incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct . . . the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, or . . . shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States . . . or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully . . . urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production . . . or advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both....

For my little anti-American, Communist/Islamo-fascist, sleeper-cell member, 5th column quislings:WHO IS QUISLING?Quisling, Vidkun(kwiz´ling, Nor. vid´koon kvis´ling) , 1887-1945, Norwegian fascist leader. An army officer, he served as military attaché in Petrograd (1918-19) and Helsinki (1919-21) and later assisted Fridtjof Nansen in relief work in Russia. He was Norwegian minister of defense from 1931 to 1933. He then left the Agrarian party to found the fascist Nasjonal Samling [national unity] party. In 1940 he helped Germany prepare the conquest of Norway. Remaining at the head of the sole party permitted by the Germans, he was made premier in 1942. Despite his unpopularity and difficulties with his German masters and within his own party, he remained in power until May, 1945, when, after the Germans in Norway surrendered, he was arrested. He was convicted of high treason and shot. From his name came the word quisling, meaning traitor. I expect there will be another new word or two for traitor in the Webster’s dictionary soon. "Clinton" comes to mind for his dealings with the Chi-Coms among other things.

Where is the Grand Ole Party's concern for the deficit?Excerpts from today's New York Times's article "Bush Requesting Nearly $75 Billion for War CostsBy ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID FIRESTONE"WASHINGTON, March 24 — President Bush will ask Congress for $74.7 billion to pay for the war in Iraq, a senior administration official said tonight, but the money covers anticipated expenses for only the next six months. It does not cover any war expenses after the end of the current fiscal year, on Sept. 30, or the long-term costs of reconstruction.The amount, one of the most intensely debated figures in the capital, is the first real insight into the expectations of the White House about the scale and length of the war. The $74.7 billion, the senior administration official said, is to cover six months that are expected to include "a conflict, a period of stabilization in Iraq and the phased withdrawal of a large number of American forces."The official did not say how long the White House expected the conflict itself to last, although he did repeat the recent words of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the war would go on for "weeks, not months."...The request for war financing, made public on another day of setbacks for the allies in Iraq, immediately opened a new political front between the White House and Congress, including many members of Mr. Bush's own party. Lawmakers are increasingly alarmed about the cost of paying for the president's proposed 10-year, $726 billion tax cut at a time of an expensive war.The senior administration official said the new war costs would probably bring the fiscal year 2003 deficit close to $400 billion.The $74.7 billion request includes about $63 billion for fighting the war, including replenishing used munitions and other matériel to prewar levels; about $8 billion for relief efforts and immediate reconstruction; and about $4 billion to better protect the United States against what the administration says is the increased likelihood of terrorist attacks.The $8 billion in relief and reconstruction would include $5 billion in aid for what the administration official said were "supportive" countries in the region affected by the war, like Pakistan, Israel, Jordan and Turkey. The official said Turkey alone would receive $1 billion, but refused to say what for. On March 1, the Turkish Parliament rejected an American request, along with $6 billion in grants and an unspecified amount of loans, to use Turkey as a base for a northern front in the war.Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee predicted that the final cost of the war — which will be borne almost entirely by American taxpayers — could be twice the amount requested today, and Pentagon officials did not deny that more requests would be coming."We have not budgeted the 2004 budget for the global war on terrorism or the current operation for Iraqi freedom," a senior defense official said today. "It's obvious. How could we budget for something that we didn't know would happen?"..."We need to know exactly where this money is going," said Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. "With all due respect to Don Rumsfeld's brilliance, he has not been given Congress's power of the purse, and it's our job to know exactly what the purpose of this spending is."Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said he supported every dollar needed by the troops to complete their mission, but would not sign a blank check. "We have a duty to the American people to tell up front what is expected, what the costs are in terms of lives and in terms of dollars," he said. "This bill is just a down payment.."

WOW! ROLO IS NOW BILL O'REILLY!!! AND IN HIS GREAT ORIGINALITY, HE IS SPAMMING THE SITE!!So looks like a suggested price tag for the entire escapade might be out soon ensuring we have the biggest deficit in decades and the Gran Old Party who so doggedly pursued President Clinton with such principle and steadfastness on the deficit is sheepish and quiet... nary a peep from the ilks of "Hot Tub Tom" DeLay... WHY OH WHY???

Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thank you for watching us tonight. When you do a program as controversial and intense as The Factor, it's good to be right. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo. Federal authorities arrested University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian this morning, almost a year and a half after The Factor broke the story nationally. Al-Arian is charged with illegally raising money for the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which authorities say is the responsible for the murders of more than 100 people in the Middle East, including two Americans. As you may know, Al-Arian was suspended by USF after we grilled him. He has denied all wrongdoing and indeed is innocent until proven guilty. Nevertheless, Al-Arian is in deep trouble. Here's some of what he said to us. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)All right, what say you, professor? This guy is now a big shot in the Islamic Jihad and they're taking credit for all kinds of terrorist activity. You know him pretty well. Got an explanation here?SAMI AL-ARIAN, UNIVERISTY OF SOUTH FLORIDA PROFESSOR: Well, I mean, when he came here, he came as a volunteer. He worked in an intellectual think tank. And he taught at the university and then he left. He said that his father was sick and he was going back to the occupied territories. And then, six months later, we were shocked like everyone else in the world, in which he became the leader of the Jihad movement. O'REILLY: You were shocked. You couldn't understand it. He never told you that his political views were that extreme? You were just taken by surprise?AL-ARIAN: Everyone was. O'REILLY: All right. You knew a man named Tarik Hamdi correct? You know Tarik?AL-ARIAN: Mr. Tarik Hamdi, yes. O'REILLY: You know him. Were you surprised that he set up an interview with ABC News with Osama bin Laden? That surprise you?AL-ARIAN: I didn't know about that. O'REILLY: Were you surprised that he was implicated in the embassy bombings in Africa?AL-ARIAN: Well, my understanding he was never implicated. O'REILLY: Yes, he was. AL-ARIAN: My understanding is that the FBI has talked to him, they give him security clearance. And if the FBI gives someone security clearance, he must not be implicated. O'REILLY: Right now he's on the list of suspected terrorists. Did you know that?AL-ARIAN: No, I'm not aware of that. O'REILLY: In 1988, you did a little speaking engagement in Cleveland. And you were quoted as saying, "Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam, death to Israel. Revolution, revolution, until victory rolling to Jerusalem." Did you say that?AL-ARIAN: Let me just put it in the context. When President Bush talked about cross, we understood what he meant here. The Muslim world thought that he was going to carry a cross and go invade the Muslim world and turn them into Christians. You have to understand the context.When you say death to Israel, you mean death to occupation, death to apartheid, death to oppression...O'REILLY: But not death to any human beings?AL-ARIAN: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.O'REILLY: All right. So what we have here is you saying death to Israel. You're bringing a guy over here who gets paid by the good citizens of Florida and then goes back and becomes one of the lieutenants or generals of the Islamic Jihad. You don't know anything about it. Another guy sets up an interview with Osama bin Laden for ABC, and you don't know anything about that. You know, doctor? It looks to me like there's something wrong down there at the University of South Florida. Am I getting the wrong impression?AL-ARIAN: You're getting completely wrong impression. Because you can pick and choose and interpret it, you know, in different ways. O'REILLY: With all due respect, if appreciate you coming on the program. But if I was the CIA, I'd follow you wherever you went. (END VIDEOTAPE)O'REILLY: Now, after our report on Al-Arian, we were vilified by some at the university and by some in the Arab-American community. Listen to this.(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)Mr. Ibish, now. Am I out of line here or what?HUSSEIN IBISH, AMERICAN-ARAB ANTI-DISCRIMINATION COMMITTEE: I think it was handled very irresponsibly. I mean, I think first of all in a climate where people are getting shot and another Arab-American store owner today murdered for being an Arab, it has to be -- it can't be presented the way it was. I mean, the whole segment was entitled "Professor of Terrorists." But what have you got? You've got people he knew in the past, who turned out to be later on to be bad guys and things he may have said 15 years ago, 14 years ago. There's nothing there. I mean, it's a very McCarthy-ite, instead of guilt by association. (END VIDEOTAPE)O'REILLY: All right. Now we like Mr. Ibish. He's a stand-up guy. But he was wrong on this one. The larger point, however, is that the USA is full of pressure groups with strong agendas and those agendas are inhibiting many news agencies that do not want to be branded McCarthy-ites or whatever. Thus, we stood alone on Sami Al-Arian. Finally a few kinds words for Attorney General Ashcroft. We've been tough on him for being too passive in corruption investigations, but it looks like his work on terrorism is getting stronger. Talking Points is happy this case has finally come to a head. But, again, the government must prove its case in court.

Saturday Washington Post revealed that the CIA - none other than the CIA - warned the Administration that the document the Administration was going to use to "prove" the Iraquis were developing a nuclear program - was fake. Yet both Bush and Powell went ahead and used the document anyway.Also, did people see the PBS special on the fact that the Administration is relying on the "good will" of private industry to ensure safety from possible terror strikes. They examined the chemical industry and realized that industry is not doing a damned thing. Former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, who co-authored a study on terrorism that warned of a 9/11 calamity several months BEFORE it happened, said something to the effect that it was unconscionable that the Administration was so lax on industry.

Ah yes, when fresher bait doesn't work, go back to the old familiar red-baiting. You may miss the Cold War, but I'm not falling for that one either.

Spam... Keep telling the big lie, my little commie friends.

Looks like Rolo's been fishing for compliments but no one's biting today. Maybe he should try some kind of bait other than stinkin' spam.

"The Fog of War"THE AGE, AUSTRALIA:Oscar will don his tightest security cloak ever this year to thwart potential terror strikes, with war prompting worried stars to opt for armored limousines and private jets on Hollywood's biggest night. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/21/1047749930478.html

WOW NEW FLASH EVERYBODY: ROLO CHANGED HIS NAME AGAIN!! And Again! And Again! And again!The "Aw shucks" strategy as in:- aw shucks, the primary evidence of Iraqui nuclear program was fabricated, and contradicted by the international nuclear watchdog agency- aw shucks, there is no connection between this war and 9/11 and a non-existent connection to Al Queda, although the war is more than likely to make them into allies- aw sucks,the Bushies demontrate complete disregard for the provision in the US Constitution which MANDATES that Congress declares war, not the President (or in this case, the Resident)and aw shucks, complete ignorance by rabid visitors of this site who don't know what is the 1st amendment...Now, even a short-term victory (provided that the Turks vs Kurds doesn't cause complete spillover and that Baghdad involves street fighting) will have long term consequences, as the world community trusts us even less now, and would-be terrorist have probably been inspired by the busloads. Way to go Bushies!!

U.S. intelligence officials tell us the evidence that Iraqi artillery units are preparing to use chemical warfare shells is based on reconnaissance photographs of the shells. The rounds were identified as chemical weapons-capable shells with slots where a vial of nerve agent or biological-weapons dust is inserted before firing. No evidence of the actual chemical or biological agents has been spotted so far. Officials said the weapons of mass destruction vials are kept separate from the artillery shells and then brought to the units before being fired. The artillery units with the special shells were bombed Wednesday in southern Iraq in a pre-emptive strike. Officials believe the Iraqis, if they use weapons of mass destruction, will draw on their hidden stocks of VX nerve agent, an extremely potent poison. Military ruler We are told that Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, one of two deputy commanders of U.S. Central Command, will likely be the top U.S. military officer in post-war Iraq. The Arabic-speaking West Point graduate would essentially run the country while the United States maintained order and then slowly handed off power to Iraqi citizens. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who directs the Pentagon's office of Iraqi reconstruction, is now in Kuwait readying his team, which will follow the ground troops all the way to Baghdad. Gen. Abizaid is helping to direct the war from Central Command war headquarters in As Saliyah, Qatar. One of three regional rulers in post-Saddam Iraq has been designated. She is career Foreign Service Arabist Barbara Bodine, who last served as U.S. ambassador to Yemen. She will run civilian affairs in Baghdad and central Iraq, along with two other U.S. regional administrators. Miss Bodine's appointment has angered some FBI and law enforcement officials because of her role in hampering the FBI's investigation of the October 2000 al Qaeda bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. She clashed with FBI counterterrorism official John O'Neill during the probe. She blocked Mr. O'Neill from returning to Yemen after a trip back to the United States, scuttling an aggressive investigation into the blast. Mr. O'Neill retired from the FBI and was killed in the September 11 World Trade Center attack. Bogus intelligence U.S. intelligence officials said they have serious doubts about the intelligence information being provided by captured al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Contrary to news reports this week praising Mohammed's role in supplying information about al Qaeda terrorism, officials said Mohammed appears to be supplying disinformation designed to fool U.S. intelligence, as well as information that is accurate but already widely known. "What he's telling us has been in the press and has been known well before he was captured," one official told us. "He's trying to deceive his interrogators." For example, Mohammed said that Osama bin Laden picked the targets attacked September 11, something that was known from other intelligence and from a videotape of bin Laden himself. Other information on al Qaeda plans provided by Mohammed also were known from other intelligence that has been made public. Quake or nuke It is a hallway maxim at the CIA and other spy agencies that when an intelligence analyst smells flowers, he looks for a hearse. That pessimism was at work recently when the ground shook in China's remote western Xinjiang province on Feb. 24. U.S. intelligence agencies at first thought that China had conducted an unannounced underground nuclear test at its Lop Nur testing facility in the area. Analysts at first feared they had been caught napping again, as happened with India's underground nuclear test in May 1998, which was a major U.S. intelligence failure. The event in Xinjiang was in fact an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale. The quake killed 263 persons and injured 4,000 others. Admiral's war message On the eve of war with Iraq, Vice Adm. Timothy Keating, Central Command's top naval officer, sent a message to the 5th Fleet telling sailors "you are about to begin a momentous task: the liberation of Iraq." "You have worked very hard preparing for this moment," Adm. Keating said. "You are ready. For some of you, this is a culmination of years, decades perhaps, of training. For others, this is your first exposure to the frightening reality of armed conflict. "In any case, you will be called upon for sacrifice, for strenuous labor, for gut-wrenching, split-second decisions. You will make the right call. You will find a reservoir of strength and wisdom. I know you will because you have been schooled in the traditions of our glorious service, our United States Navy." The strike-fighter pilot added that "it is time for us to go to work." "Do so aggressively, intelligently, with audacity and courage. Go fully confident in the knowledge that you have earned the support of your countrymen and of millions of freedom-loving people around the world." The Navy has deployed five carrier battle groups, which kicked off the war Wednesday night by firing more than 40 Tomahawk weapons into Baghdad and other sites. Bunker buster Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has pointed to the 1991 bombing of the Amiriyah bunker in the Baghdad suburb as an example of how Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein fights. In a recent prewar press conference, Mr. Rumsfeld said Saddam put civilians in a military command bunker knowing allied planes would eventually strike it. Sure enough, on Feb. 13, 1991, an Air Force jet attacked the communications command bunker with a penetrating bomb. At daylight, the Iraqi regime displayed the dead civilian bodies to the international media as an example of America's murderous ways. In his new book, "War with Iraq: Critical Lessons," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson writes a detailed description of how the target, No. L30, was chosen. "Why were civilians in the bunker?" asks Gen. Glosson, who designed the air campaign. "At this point in the war, how likely was it that people would go to a bunker on their own when they could very easily see we were only bombing things of military significance in Baghdad. In other words, the safest place to be in Baghdad was in an apartment complex or in a housing area." He answers his own question: "Saddam did it on purpose. Saddam wouldn't have cared about the fact that a lot of people that were killed were dependents of the military and the intelligence service. That fact was irrelevant to him. All life, except his own, is irrelevant to him."

IT BECAME CLEAR the nation was finally going to war with Iraq this week when the New York Times pulled two dozen reporters off the Augusta National Golf Club story. In a speech to the nation on Monday night, President Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of Baghdad, warning that the American military was poised to remove him forcibly. Many still held out hope that Saddam would abandon power without a fight, primarily so we could listen to liberals explain how a peaceful resolution was brought about by their urgent demands that we work through the United Nations, and had nothing to do with the fact that Saddam was surrounded by 200,000 American troops. In response to Bush's ultimatum, Saddam's son, Uday Hussein, said Bush was stupid. He said Bush wanted to attack Iraq because of his family. And he said American boys would die. At least someone is finding the New York Times editorial page helpful these days. In angry harangues largely indistinguishable from the one by Uday Hussein, the Democrats were also hopping mad at Bush. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., spent 40 minutes detailing Saddam Hussein's manifest cruelties and violations of all human norms. Without breaking a sweat, Lieberman then said he could understand why the French were not bothered by these indisputable barbarisms: It was Bush's failure of "diplomacy." Bush, the clod, had failed to convince the inconvincible. Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said: "I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country." Mostly, the Democrats were saddened that America was about to win a war. With the nation on the verge of a glorious military triumph, liberals have had to put their predictions of a Vietnam "quagmire" on the back burner for a few weeks. Instead, they have turned with a vengeance to attacking "American arrogance." The day after President Bush's speech, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius spoke of self-defeating "American arrogance." The Post quoted "a senior U.S. official" (newspaper jargon FOR:"a janitor at the Pentagon") who warned of "a degree of hubris unprecedented in American history." The New York Times' lead editorial on Tuesday also bemoaned American "hubris." One front-page article called Bush trigger-happy and another bitterly accused him of breaking a campaign pledge to preside over a "humble" America. In the 19 months since the 9-11 attack, the Times has used the phrase "American arrogance" nearly as many times (17) as in the entire 96 months of the Clinton presidency (24). Instead of American arrogance, the Times yearns for Clintonian flatulence. There was no more eloquent testimony to what liberals mean by "American arrogance" than an article in the March 10 New Yorker, which nonchalantly quoted a Nazi in support of the proposition that Americans are jingoistic, imperialist rednecks. Amid page after gleeful page of European venom toward Americans, Columbia University professor Simon Schama quoted the anti-American bile of Norwegian writer and renowned Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun. Schama admiringly cited Hamsun's contempt for American boosterism, neglecting to mention that Hamsun went for Hitler boosterism in a big way. Beginning in the early '30s and until his death in 1952, Hamsun was absolutely smitten with Adolf Hitler. He exchanged gifts and telegrams with Goebbels and Hitler. Indeed, so enamored of Joseph Goebbels was he, that Hamsun gave Goebbels his own Nobel Prize medal. When the Nazis invaded Norway, Hamsun wrote a newspaper column saying: "NORWEGIANS! Throw down your rifles and go home again. The Germans are fighting for us all." Tearful upon news of the Fuhrer's death, Hamsun was quoted in an obituary on Hitler saying: "I am not worthy to speak his name." He never equivocated and he never apologized. While he issued tributes to Hitler, Hamsun wrote the ironically titled book "The Cultural Life of Modern America," which, as professor Schama sniggeringly writes, was "largely devoted to asserting its nonexistence." Hamsun called America "a strapping child-monster whose runaway physical growth would never be matched by moral or cultural maturity." It must have been a relief for Hamsun to find such genuine "cultural maturity" in Nazi Germany. Hamsun hated America for all the reasons liberals hate America. To the delight of New York sophisticates, Hamsun once sneered at pathetic Americans marching in veterans' parades, "with tiny flags in their hats and brass medals on their chests marching in step to the hundreds of penny whistles they are blowing." America's little patriotic parades apparently compared unfavorably to a stirring Nazi war rally. This is the essence of liberal admiration for Europeans and their pompous cultural snobbery. For proof that Americans are immature hicks in an ugly jingoistic mood, they cite a Nazi.

NEW York's highest- rated radio talk-show hosts loaded their Scuds on opponents of the war yesterday. And if you were looking for a debate on "Operation Iraqi Freedom," fuhgeddaboudit. "I'm not messing with people who want to say this attack is illegal, it's not warranted, it's not justified - I'm not going to argue with you people anymore," WABC's Rush Limbaugh warned listeners yesterday. "Take your propaganda to somebody else who might believe it," he said. Likewise, WFAN's Don Imus ordered producer Bernard McGuirk to steer clear of guests "who come on and whine about how the president failed to explore all diplomatic avenues - just drop it because I'm not interested in having that discussion. "We got stabbed in the back by those a******s in France and the rest of them," Imus railed. "Enough of Tom Daschle, who is disgraceful, and all the rest - enough of that." WOR's Bob Grant said President Bush spent too much time listening to "pusillanimous pipsqueaks" like UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. "I'm sick and tired of these left-wing America haters," Grant said. "I don't know who I hate the most: Tom Daschle, Saddam Hussein or Peter Jennings." WABC and Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity blasted politicians who continued to criticize military action even after the President's final warning. "I was stunned by Democrats making these partisan attacks on the eve of war - stunned," Hannity said. Surprisingly, K-Rock's Howard Stern was - relatively speaking - the calmest of the top five yesterday. "I hope our president doesn't do what his dad did," Stern told listeners. "He's got to finish the job - we've got to kill Hussein." The shock jock read an e-mail that claimed one of Hussein's sons ordered 30 men dropped into a giant plastic-shredding machine. "I'm trying to give people reasons to hate Hussein if you don't have enough reasons," Stern said. "Some people can't find the energy to hate him." Limbaugh said he found it ironic that "all these journalists [who say] this war's not called for" seemed disappointed that there wasn't more to show on TV. "They didn't express disappointment, but you could hear it in their voices that Baghdad wasn't being blown to smithereens last night," he said. There were a few talk-show hosts who oppose the war: WABC's Ron Kuby and Richard Bey. But both of them are partnered on the air with pro-war sidekicks, Curtis Sliwa and Monica Crowley, respectively

Bush's approval rating for handling the situation with Iraq is 65 percent; his father's comparable rating at the start of the Gulf War was 80 percent. And Bush's overall job approval, 67 percent, is up just five points from early this month. His father's overall rating, by contrast, jumped 16 points after the 1991 war began, to 79 percent.Some other basic measures of support, while high, are also lower than they were the last time around. Sixty-seven percent of Americans say the United States did enough to seek a diplomatic solution before attacking; it was 77 percent at the start of the Gulf War. And on timing, 62 percent say it was right for the United States to attack now — compared to 75 percent on Jan. 16, 1991, the night the Gulf War began. Sampling, data collection and tabulation for this poll were done by TNS Intersearch. These views likely reflect, at least in part, the current president's inability to win United Nations support, which many Americans would have preferred. And unlike Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the threat this time is more ambiguous — believing it requires believing Bush, which many Democrats, in particular, are less apt to do.Public backing for the war held steady Thursday night, after spiking Monday night when Bush set a 48-hour deadline for attacking. Seventy-two percent of Americans support the war, and most, 53 percent, support it "strongly," same as Monday night. That's closer to the level of support for the Gulf War at its start in 1991 — 76 percent.Public Opinion Now Jan. 1991 Support the War 72% 76% President's Approval Overall 67% 79% President's Approval on Iraq 65% 80% U.S. Tried Enough Diplomacy 67% 77% Right for U.S. to Attack Now 62% 75%

REMEMBER when Mayor Martin O'Malley used all those colorful cuss words a few years back in speaking about Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy? Remember the uproar? Remember how all those black folks gathered out in front of City Hall with signs and accused O'Malley of insulting all black women? How dare the mayor use such language about a black female government official, they fumed. On Saturday, at one of the state's public colleges, another man said something even worse about another black female government official. In front of an overwhelmingly black audience of about 100 at Coppin State College, Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's Lunatic Laureate, called national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a "skeeza." For those of you not in the know, a "skeeza" is a derogatory street term used in reference to a woman and as offensive as calling her a prostitute. It's a noxious, bilious, disgustingly sexist term and one of the worst things you could call a woman. It is something Rice certainly is not. Baraka knows she's not. Those blacks who laughed, giggled, tittered and applauded when Baraka said it know she's not. But what was the reaction of these black folks when Baraka finished his invective masquerading as poetry that he called "Somebody Blew Up America"? They gave him thunderous applause and a standing ovation. At no time was there the indignation that was present when O'Malley said much less about Jessamy. I guess Baraka can get away with it because he hates all the right people. "Somebody Blew Up America" has caused a dispute for the lines, "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed(?) Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day(?) Why did Sharon stay away(?)" Some say Baraka clearly crossed the thin line that separates criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism. "Anybody who spews out hatred and malicious lies has a right to do so," said Arthur Abramson, executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council. "But the fact that he's doing it on state property in a time of budget cuts is unfortunate. I also find it tragic and sad that a racemonger of his type would receive a positive reception." Robert Cataliotti, an associate professor in Coppin's department of humanities and media, said Baraka was paid for his appearance, and he defended his being invited to speak. "[Baraka's] a major figure in the development of African-American literature," Cataliotti said. "I'm not here to judge the content of his poem. He has the right as an American to express his opinion." Regarding anti-Semitism, as well as the reference to Rice, Cataliotti said, "Most of the poem is in the form of questions. [Baraka] is probing these issues and putting them out for examination." Baraka claimed Saturday that he was referring to Israelis, not Jews, and that there is a difference between the two. That's true, of course, but Baraka should have continued with the truth. Some Israelis are Arabs, who have voting rights and citizenship. Some sit in the Knesset. In short, Israeli Arabs are much better off than Jews similarly situated in Iraq and other Arab countries. Baraka further tried to cover himself by proclaiming that he got the information about the 4,000 Israelis from a "left-wing" Israeli paper. Abramson disputed the claim. "That claim came out of Iranian intelligence, shortly after Sept. 11," Abramson said. "That's been documented, and I'll put my credibility up against Baraka's any day." Abramson won't have to. Baraka damaged his own credibility with his mephitic attack on Rice. During his speech, he repeated the lie that because the armed forces are "disproportionately" black and Hispanic, most of the casualties from the Iraq war will be minorities. USA Today ran a story in January that noted that blacks make up about 10.6 percent of combat units. Most blacks in the military serve in noncombat units. When Baraka told his audience that "they want our children to go and get all shot up," he knew he was lying. When he called Rice a "skeeza," liberal black leaders who couldn't wait to get their faces in front of a camera after the Trent Lott gaffe knew Baraka was lying. We haven't heard word one from these leaders regarding Baraka and Rice, but if O'Malley's remarks about Jessamy were insulting to all black women, then so are Baraka's. It would be nice if one of those black state legislators who voted to fund the money that was paid to Baraka would say so.

The Democratic National Committee is asking party members to defend Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's criticism of the way President Bush has handled the Iraq crisis even as U.S.-led forces invade the country. In the hours before and after the president's order Wednesday night to begin the war to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, the DNC sent e-mails to its grass-roots activists that said "Democratic leaders are standing up to Bush; Make sure you stand up for them!" "Republicans will stop at nothing to gain a political advantage from this military conflict," said an e-mail yesterday. Republican National Committee officials declined requests to comment on the DNC e-mails, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times. But another Republican official called the messages "outrageous. Our people are at war, risking their lives, and the Democrats are playing politics." Another e-mail sent Wednesday to DNC's members and supporters just hours before hostilities in Iraq were about to begin, said, "We must spread the word that Democrats are standing up and speaking out for all Americans in this dangerous time." The e-mail took Republicans to task for rebuking Mr. Daschle for his attack on the president's war policies Tuesday. The South Dakota Democrat said at that time that he was "saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country." His statement was denounced by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who said the remarks "may not give comfort to our adversaries, but they come mighty close." The rebuke by Mr. Hastert and other Republicans triggered a wave of DNC e-mails to Democrats, saying that "Republicans have responded with personal attacks on Democrats, questioning their patriotism in order to gain a political advantage from the military conflict." The tone of the DNC e-mails was in sharp contrast to statements put out by Democratic presidential front-runners, who support Mr. Bush on the war. Several of the candidates made clear they had no differences with Mr. Bush over the mission to liberate Iraq. "Now is one of those times when we are all standing shoulder to shoulder," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. "President Bush is a Republican. I'm a Democrat. But at this moment there's not an inch of distance between us." "Nobody wishes for war. But we must face the challenge of terrorism head on and I support our commander in chief and the American military at this critical time in that struggle," Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri said. Mr. Daschle and his Democratic counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, have vowed to continue to speak out on the war, while other Democrats say the time for debate is over. "There are better ways to express opposition to the war. I don't think the statements by the Democratic leadership have been examples of better ways of expressing opposition to the war," said Bill Galston, a veteran policy strategist with the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic state chairmen during the past two days showed that while all of them defended Mr. Daschle for speaking out, they wanted the party to end its criticism of the war.

Why don’t you go and protest a bulldozer somewhere, you anti-American piece of shit.

Speech by Senator Robert Byrd, "Today I weep for my country": http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0319-04.htm

WOW NEW FLASK EVERYBODY: ROLO CHANGED HIS NAME AGAIN!!And really, you mean "Aw shucks," as in:- aw shucks, the primary evidence of Iraqui nuclear program was fabricated, and contradicted by the international nuclear watchdog agency- aw shucks, there is no connection between this war and 9/11 and a non-existent connection to Al Queda, although the war is more than likely to make them into allies- aw sucks,the Bushies demontrate complete disregard for the provision in the US Constitution which MANDATES that Congress declares war, not the President (or in this case, the Resident)and aw shucks, complete ignorance by rabid visitors of this site who don't know what is the 1st amendment...

SHOCK AND AWE!!!!!!!!, you worthless Anti-American Mother Fuckers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, I cut and pasted too quickly form the moveon.org people. The war started quite a while back, not just last night.

If a war with Iraq starts soon, folks across the country are planning vigils and other events. You can find events in your area at the United for Peace website: http://www.unitedforpeace.org

My top five reasons why this war is a shitty idea:1) will increase hatred towards USA around the world and breed more terrorists2) will force Hussein to unleash God knows what against the incoming troops and neighboring countries, not to mention the torching of the oil fields3) the Kurds will get screwed again and the Turks will unleash a nasty conflict in the north4) will make a nasty budget deficit even nastier5) what should be at the top of the list: lots of innocent people will sufferWhat Bush blew:1) opportunity to let inspections work and disarm Hussein peacefully2) good will around the world that came into being after 9/11What will always nag me: was war really the only way to get rid of Hussein and his ilk? (brought to power in part thanks to the CIA and maintained in power by Reagan and Bush I)Gandhi maintained until the end that Hitler could have been conquered non-violently.

No need to fret Senyor. Rolo knows only one argument: "whatever you just said is unreasonable because it doesn't support what I believe. Which means you're unpatriotic, anti-American, and need to go back to Baghdad." I think Rolo needs plenty of attention and clearly lacks tender loving care. But your time will come Rolo. We're writing a song about you called "Vermin Scum." You do remember your name "Vermin Scum", don't you? I think you abandoned it as soon as you posted all the neo Nazi stuff.

so.. rolo. i'm not sure i understand what, if anything, was unreasonable about what franklin just posted. seems pretty straightforward. what could a reasonable person disagree with?

It is not possible to reason with someone (read Franklin) who is unreasonable. . .

My top five reasons why this war is a shitty idea:1) will increase hatred towards USA around the world and breed more terrorists2) will force Hussein to unleash God knows what against the incoming troops and neighboring countries, not to mention the torching of the oil fields3) the Kurds will get screwed again and the Turks will unleash a nasty conflict in the north4) will make a nasty budget deficit even nastier5) what should be at the top of the list: lots of innocent people will sufferWhat Bush blew:1) opportunity to let inspections work and disarm Hussein peacefully2) good will around the world that came into being after 9/11What will always nag me: was war really the only way to get rid of Hussein and his ilk? (brought to power in part thanks to the CIA and maintained in power by Reagan and Bush I)Gandhi maintained until the end that Hitler could have been conquered non-violently.

On the eve of conflict I've decided to start a new posting entitled:"The Fog of War"Entry #1:The Federal Aviation Administration Tuesday announced flight restrictions for aircraft flying in the New York City and Washington areas, and near Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Unless commercial or private pilots are granted specific exemptions from air traffic controllers, no flights are allowed within a three-mile radius around the parks or below 3,000 feet in the area. Let the Fog roll!!!!

For a line by line critique of Bush's speech, go to:http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/iraqspresp.htmlVery interesting; supported by the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank that is for people's empowerment and against the war. They are also very involved in the "Bring Pinochet to Justice" campaign, the effort dealing with the other September 11 and the other clear example of deadly blowback, but also from the same source: that enlightened institution, the CIA.

We all agree that the Iraquis, including the Kurds, are an oppressed people under a brutal dictator who deserves to be overthrown.Where we part ways is whether or not war is the answer, and whether the USA acting outside the framework of the UN is wise. I am much clearer that we should not depart from the UN framework than I am on war in general, although my heart of hearts insists that war is wrong in any case.The most compelling argument that I find on the pro-war side is that nothing else has worked on getting rid of Hussein. Can the USA be counted on doing it without making an even greater mess of things? Not convinced in part because i find the Administration's motivations suspect.On the other hand, acting outside of the UN framework essentially tells the entire world that there are no rules that should ever be respected - and puts the USA in a situation vulenrable to further attacks.I don't know if anyone else caught the PBS Frontline yesterday (Monday 17 March) evening. It retraced USA involvement in Iraq from before Hussein's rise to power. While far from perfect, it was extremely informative and shed a lot of light on the question of the inspectors during the 1990s.

Dear Patriot,Thank you for your honest contribution to the debate. We may agree or disagree, but I appreciate the fact that you can state your positions honestly, without name-calling, without hurling charges of sedition, without questioning the patriotism of those who disagree with you, and without using multiple aliases in an attempt to drown out opposing views. Don't worry about typos or spelling -- we all make them, and I've only pointed them out when someone has been unable to spell his own pseudonym or one time when a writer parodied colloquial speech but had his own problems with the English language.You'll have to excuse Rolo, he seems to make everything personal and take everything personally. You'll have to decide for yourself, Patriot, whether what Rolo says is true, including which responses you receive are rational.

Dear Patriot,You will not receive a rational response from anyone on this site. You may however receive criticism on your spelling from the genius Haskell (A.K.A. Hack). The members of this band and the friends thereof are all supporters of Communism and are on the far left fringe of the issues whatever they may be. They kick America and all she stands for at every opportunity. They will of course deny this and quote something from someone like Madison, Jefferson or one of their left wing revisionist historians. Depending on the situation. This group likes to march with the likes of Ramsey Clarke who as we all know is completely anti-American, anti- capitalist, anti-anything not communist. His organization A.N.S.W.E.R. is an offshoot of the well known Communist Workers World Party which has been around for years. It all boils down to the fact that you can’t reason with someone who is unreasonable. This group is completely unreasonable. The upcoming months and years will expose them for what and who they all are.

first off, i must thank Blowback, while i do not necisarrily agree with all of the views posted here, i am appreciative of a forum in which concerned citizens can give their views. This upcoming war with Iraq is necissary, i cant as a conservative say that President Bush has given any credentials to the connections of Al Queda and the Iraqi Regime, but can we not agree that the Iraqi people have lived lives in fear and deserve to be liberated? The citizens of Iraq deserve to enjoy the freedoms and rights that have been prevelant in our society. This war is not to be fought for Oil and i dont think at any point has Bush come forward and said that we are fighting for oil. I feel that we as Americans must liberate ourselves from the United Nations. The U.N has let us down as a country, we do not need them to wage this war but it would be nice to know that countries which owe America for past heroics have not forgotten what we have done for them. France upsets me in that of any country that we have liberated in the past they owe us the most and yet they are so opposed to America liberating the Iraqi people as we have liberated them twice in the past century. It upsets me that they can oppose our doing the same for the Iraqis that we have done for the French. Perhaps we need to liberate Iraq and then liberate ourselves from a One World Government. please respond, i would be interested to hear what you have to say on this topic.

Some have recently argued that a war with Iraq now would not be pre-emptive because the first Gulf War never really ended and we've been at war with Iraq for the last 12 years. At first I considered this argument to be a semantic rationalization, but after reading the following article on the severity of the sanctions, I had to agree: we've been laying siege to an entire country for over a decade.Just one excerpt:Under the economic embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council, now in its 14th year, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to decontaminate its battlefields from the 1991 Gulf War.Professor Doug Rokke, the US Army physicist responsible for cleaning up Kuwait, told me: "I am like many people in southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my team are now dead."We face an issue to be confronted by people in the West, those with a sense of right and wrong: first, the decision by the US and Britain to use a weapon of mass destruction: depeleted uranium. When a tank fired its shells, each round carried over 4,500g of solid uranium. What happened in the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare."In 1991, a United Kingdom Atomic Eneregy Authority document reported that if 8 per cent of the depleted uranium fired in the Gulf War was inhaled, it could cause "500,000 potential deaths". In the promised attack on Iraq, the United States will again use depleted uranium, and so will Britain, regardless of its denials.Full article available at:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=380738

Thanks for the post, Rolo. I've read Morris' biographies of Haig and Kissinger, and I've read excerpts of "Partners in Power" before but not the whole book. Yes, of course Clinton was aware of Mena, as was Poppy Bush. That is the premise of the title, that rather than being in competition, the two men -- as well as many other politicians of both major parties -- were actually participants in a power-sharing arrangement and, in exchange for cooperation with (or turning a blind eye towards) certain covert activities, received behind-the-scenes help in their political careers.You see, despite your assumption, I never said Clinton was my hero. I simply said you can't blame him for 9/11 or for most of the things in Krauthammer's article. If you do, you have to blame Reagan and Poppy Bush as much or more. As you reminded us with the post from Morris' book, the gun-running and drug-smuggling at Mena was all part of the Reagan administration's Contra program and apparently had approval from the highest levels, including VP Bush, who I'm sure we all remember was once Director of CIA himself.If it helps you to understand, I think Nixon was a horrible President, but that doesn't mean I would blame him for LBJ's mistakes.

He knows his shit about Haskell's hero bill clinton too:Excerpt from:PARTNERS IN POWERby Roger Morrispg. 404-411Early in 1984, a twenty-nine-year-old Arkansas trooper named Larry Douglass Brown was eagerly applying for work with the Central Intelligence Agency.As he told the story with impressive substantiation from other accounts a decade afterward, Brown had been privy to some of the Clintons' most personal liaisons, their biting relationship with each other, their behind-the-doors bigotry toward "redneck" Arkansas, and other intimacies; he and a stoic Hillary had even talked earnestly about problems in their respective marriages. At one point in the early 1980s, Brown had come in contact with Vice President Bush during an official gathering. The 'rather conservative' young officer, as one friend described him, had been impressed by Bush. Afterward Clinton has twitted him about his Republican "hero," though the two remained close. Regarded as among the better state police officers, Brown received some of the most sophisticated training that national law enforcement agencies offer regional police officers, including advanced courses provided by the DEA and Customs in intelligence gathering, drug importation, and conspiracy cases. Because of Brown's extensive training, Clinton handpicked him to serve of a state committee studying the drug epidemic to help develop educational programs in Arkansas, and Brown wrote several of the panel's position papers later cited as evidence of the state government's fight against narcotics.By Brown's repeated accounts, including hundreds of pages of testimony under oath and supporting documentation, the sum of the story was stark: The governor had clearly been aware of the crimes of Mena as early as 1984. He knew the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible, knew that there was major arms and drug running out of western Arkansas, believed the smuggling involved not only Barry Seal but also a cocaine dealer who was one of Clinton's most prominent backers, and seemed to know that approval of the Mena flights reached as high as Vice President Bush. Brown remembered how Bill Clinton had encouraged him to join in the operation -- "Clinton got me into this, the governor did," he would testify -- and how Clinton had then dismissed his repugnance at the evidence that Seal was trafficking cocaine under CIA auspices. The state policeman watched in "despair," his brother recalled, while the governor did nothing about the drug smuggling. Brown would still think a decade later that Bill Clinton "was surprised only in that I had found out about it."Clinton had urged him to answer a newspaper ad for CIA employment that ran in the NEW YORK TIMES on April Fool's Day, 1984. "L.D., I've always told you you'd make a good spy," Clinton remarked to him when Brown showed him the paper and asked "if this is for real?" "Well, you know that's not his name," Clinton said of a personnel officer listed in the ad, "but you need to write him a letter." Brown did just that two days later. "Governor Clinton has been an inspiration for me to further my career in government service," he wrote, " and in particular to explore the possibilities of employment with your agency."Clinton proceeded to show an avid interest in Brown's application. He urged Brown to study Russian for an intelligence career, and Brown characteristically took the advice to heart, practicing the foreign script in a copybook and artlessly, proudly informing the CIA of his "understanding the Cyrillic alphabet." He and Clinton talked, too, of the role of an operations officer, with Clinton explaining the CIA's diplomatic cover abroad and the recruitment of informers. "It was strange, you know. He was into the fiction aspect of it and intrigue," Brown remembered.At one point Clinton told him he would personally call the CIA on his behalf. "He, obviously, from all our conversations, knew somebody," Brown recounted in a sworn deposition. "I don't know who he called, but he said he would. He said he did. I made a note one day that he made a phone call for me." But in a private conversation Brown would go even further with the story of the call. Clinton, he said, had not bothered to go through any officeholder's liaison or other formal CIA channel in Washington but had simply telephoned someone directly at the agency, someone whom he knew on a first-name basis and with whom he talked for some time. As usual, Brown was impressed with his boss'sknowledge and contacts. Early in the process the governor had begun to greet him whenever they met with a grinning question they both understood to refer to Brown's relationship with the CIA. "You having any fun yet?" Clinton would ask.By the end of the summer of 1984 -- four months after taking and passing a CIA entrance examination -- Brown had met with a CIA recruiter in Dallas, someone named Magruder, an "Ivy League looking guy" who spoke "admiringly of Clinton," and whom Brown would later recognize in photographs and identify to congressional investigators in 1996 as a onetime member of Vice President Bush's staff. This was the man who asked him if he would be interested in "paramilitary" or "narcotics" work as well as "security." Brown said he wanted to be considered for such assignment and, in the course of the interview, duly signed a secrecy agreement. Somebody, he was told, would be giving him a call.On September 5 he received formal notification of his nomination for employment. Scarcely a month later the expected CIA call came to his unlisted number at home. As Brown testified, the caller "talked to me about everything I had been through in the meeting in Dallas, ... made me very aware that he knew everything there was to know." He asked Brown to meet him at Cajun's Wharf in Little Rock, a popular restaurant and bar off Cantrell Road in the Arkansas River bottoms just below the white heights. His name, he said, was Barry Seal.At their meeting, the corpulent Seal was memorable for the athletic young state trooper. "Big guy. He had one of those shirts that comes down ... outside your pants, big-guy kind of thing." Seal was cryptic but again seemed clearly to know details Brown had provided on his CIA application. "He knew about the essay and everything I had done, so absolutely there was no question in my mind," Brown testified. Seal also spoke vaguely about working for the CIA: "He'd been flying for the agency, that's all I knew." In comnversations over the next few weeks, Seal referred casually to Clinton as "the guv" and "acted like he knew the governor," Brown recalled. He invited Brown to join him in an "operation" planned to begin at Mena Intermountain Regional just before sunrise on Tuesday, October 23, 1984.Arranging his shifts at the mansion to make time for the flight, Brown met Seal at the Mena airport in the predawn darkness and was surprised to find them boarding not a small private craft but a "huge military plane" painted a dark charcoal with only minimum tail markings, its engines roaring with a "thunderous noise," he remembered. "Scared the shit out of me just taking off."Seal ordered him matter-of-factly to leave behind all personal identification, including his billfold, keys and jewelry. Along with Seal at the controls sat a copilot whose name Brown never learned, and in the back of the aircraft sat two men, "beaners" or "kickers" the trooper called them. Though he did not know it, Brown was aboard the FAT LADY, and his later account marked the flight as on of Mena's routine gun-and-drug runs.After a refueling stop in New Orleans and the flight to Central America, the C-123K dived below radar, then climbed and dipped again for the "kickers" to roll out on casters large tarp-covered palettes, which were swiftly parachuted over what Brown could see out the open cargo door was a tropical, mountainous terrain. Later Sal told Brown the loads were M-16s for the Contras. On the return they landed in Honduras, where Seal and the "kickers" picked up four dark green canvas duffel bags with shoulder straps, which Brown did not seeagain.Back at Mena Seal handed Brown a manilla envelope with $2,500 in small bills, presumably as payment for his time -- "used money just like you went out and spent," Brown recalled -- and said he would call him again about another "operation." As the ambitious young trooper testified later, he was diffident about this apparent audition with his CIA employers, reluctant to ask questions, even about the cash. "This guy (Seal) obviously knew what he was doing and had the blessing and was working for the agency and knew everything about me, so I wasn't going to be too inquisitive."At the mansion on Brown's next shift following the run to Central America, Clinton greeted him with the usual "You having any fun yet?" though now with a pat on the back. With a "big smile" Brown answered, "Yeah, but this is scary stuff," describing "a big airplane" which he thought "kind of crazy." But Bill Clinton seemed unsurprised and unquestioning, casual as always about what Brown told him about the CIA, Seal and Mena. "Oh, you can handle it," he said again. "Don't sweat it."Brown was startled at the governor's obvious prior knowledge of the flight. "He knew before I said anything. He knew," Brown testified. Asked later under oath if he believed the Seal flight had been sanctioned by the governor, Brown would be unequivocal. "Well, he knew what I was doing. He was the one that furthered me along and shepherded me through this thing." Did he have any doubt that Clinton approved of the flight from Mena to Central America:? "No," he testified. Did he believe the Seal run "a sanctioned and approved mission on behalf of the United States?" "Absolutely. I mean, there is no doubt."Not long afterward, in the later fall of 1984, Seal called the trooper as promised, again inquiring about Clinton: "he always asked me first thing, how is the guv?" They talked about the first flight and Seal, ruminating on his service for the CIA, confirmed that they had dropped a load of contraband M-16s for the Contras. "That's all he talked about was flying and (the) CIA and how much work he had done for them, and that's all he did. That's all we would talk about," Brown recalled. They met again, this time at a Chinese restaurant near the Capitol, and arranged for Brown to go on another trip in late December.On Christmas Eve, 1984, once more with the governor's encouragement, Brown again flew with Seal to Central America on what he still understood to be some kind of orientation mission for his CIA employment. Seal picked up two duffel bags on the return through Honduras, and just as before, back at Mean he offered Brown $2,500 in small bills. Yet this time Seal also brought one of the duffels to Brown's Datsun hatchback in the Intermountain Regional parking lot and proceeded to take out of it what the former narcotics investigator instantly recognize as a kilo of cocaine, a "waxene-wrapped package," as he called it, "a brick."Alarmed and incensed, brown quickly told Seal he "wanted no part of what was happening" and left, speeding back to Little Rock in mounting agitation, not least over the role of the state's chief executive. "I'm just going nuts in my mind with all the possibilities," he would say. "I'm thinking, well , this is, this is an official operation. Clinton got me into this, the governor did. It can't be as sinister as I think it is ... He knew about the airplane flights. He knew about it and initiated the conversation about it the first time I came back."Returning to the guardhouse, Brown first called his "best friend," his brother Dwayne in Pine Bluff, who remembered his being "terribly upset" and later wentto the mansion to see him when the Clintons were away. According to the two men, Brown told his brother part of what he had encountered, though without mentioning the CIA involvement. "Who's pushing this. Who is behind it?" his brother asked at one point. In reply, as each recalled clearly, Brown "nodded over towards the governor's mansion."Brown decided to approach Clinton directly about what he has seen. When they were together soon after the second flight, a smiling Clinton seemed about to ask the usual question. But Brown was angry. He asked Clinton if he knew Barry Seal was smuggling narcotics. "Do you know what they're bringing back on that airplane?" He said to Clinton in fury. "Wait, whoa, whoa, what's going on?" the governor responded, and Brown answered, "well, essentially they're bringing back coke." More than a decade later, Brown would testify to his dismay at Clinton's response" "and it wasn't like it was a surprise to him. It wasn't like -- he didn't try to say, what? ... He was surprised that I was mad because he though we were going to have a cordial conversation, but he didn't try to deny it. He didn't try to deny it wasn't coming back, that I wasn't telling the truth or that he didn't know anything about it."In waving off Brown's questions about Mena, Clinton had made another remark as well, added as what seemed both justification and warning. "And your hero Bush knows about it," he told Brown. "And your buddy Bush knows about it."Brown was chilled. "I'm not going to have anything else to do with it ... I'm out of it," he told Clinton. "Stick a fork in me, I'm done," he added, an adolescent phrase from their shared Arkansas boyhood. The governor had tried to calm him: "Settle down. That's no problem." But Brown turned away, hurried to his car, and drove off, leaving behind his once-promising career. "I got out of there, and from then it was, you know, not good."The trooper immediately called the CIA to withdraw his application, albeit discreetly. "Just changed my mind," he recalled telling them. But he saw no recourse, no appeal to some higher level of government in a crimes in which both the governor of the state and Washington were knowledgeable and thus complicit. "I mean if the governor knows about it ... and I work for the governor," he remembered thinking, "exactly who would I have gone to and told? I mean, the federal government knows that this guy is doing this ... I don't know what authority I would have gone to." More than a year later, as they were having drinks in Jonesboro, Brown would tell the commandant of the state police, Colonel Tommy Goodwin, but even then he acted out of a desire to confess his unwitting involvement rather than out of any expectation that Arkansas would move on the crimes. All the while, he was bothered by the role of his onetime hero at the mansion. "Number one," he would testify later of Bill Clinton, "he didn't deny it. I wanted him to tell me, OH, GOOD GOSH, THAT'S TERRIBLE. WE'VE GOT TO REPORT THIS. And I wanted him to deny knowing anything about it or explain it away to me ... THEY'VE GOT A BIG STING PLANNED, AND THEY'RE TRYING, YOU KNOW, TO MAKE A CASE ON SUCH AND SUCH, but no. It was no surprise to him. He was surprised, I think -- this is what I think -- that Seal showed it to me. That's what I think to this day."But perhaps what most disturbed L.D. Brown was a direct reference by Clinton to a member of the governor's own inner circle. Clinton "throws up his hands" when Brown mentions the cocaine, as if a crucial, somehow rationalizing distinction should be made between the gunrunning and the drug trafficking."Oh, no," Clinton said, denying that the cocaine was related to the CIA Brown

Wow Franklin. Your Berkeley boy is a fucking prophet. . .HEADLINE: Why War Is IrrelevantJanuary 9, 1991 BYLINE: By Roger Morris; Roger Morris was a staff member of the National Security Council in the Johnson and Nixon Administrations. DATELINE: SANTA FE, N.M. BODY: As Secretary of State James Baker meets the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, hopes rise that the talks will amount to more than a repetition of the public postures of the two sides. In an era suspicious of secrecy, millions wish devoutly for a hidden agenda today in Geneva. Yet, while the timetable clicks on inexorably in the Persian Gulf, there is a gathering sense of irrelevance about the stark options to which Washington is reduced. Neither war nor a last-minute diplomatic device will resolve the deeper issues that have brought us to this bleak rendezvous in the desert. Whatever the outcome in Geneva, the Administration's choices between battle and backdown betray an underlying futility -- and thus carry the seeds of future crisis. Neither military action nor a status quo ante peace will remedy the incipient turmoil of Arabia, where the vast disparity between rich and poor creates bitter conflict within and among nations, where a U.S. "victory," by arms or ultimatum, will only strengthen belligerent forces like Iran and Syria while hastening anti-American upheavals. Nor can Washington bomb or negotiate away the malignant oil dependence of Europe, Japan and the U.S., which makes this episode such a reckoning on past negligence. No smart weapons or shrewd bargains will alter the caprice of petroleum politics, or the inequities inflicted by the oil market on poor countries. Just as some showdown with Saddam Hussein will not release the resources needed for development and social peace in the Middle East, it will waste precious billions amid a deepening economic agony in the U.S. Nothing in President Bush's strategy promises a creative initiative on the anachronistic Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at once symbol and substance of the larger crisis. No success now envisioned by the White House, whether through blood or bluster, purges that poison, and will probably only deepen it. Least of all do Mr. Bush's options genuinely serve the heralded new world order, the beckoning image of a post-cold-war consortium of nations in which the President has wrapped his venture, and for which thousands of Americans may soon die. With its preponderance of U.S. forces in front of token, rear-guard allies, the martial assembly in the gulf may be the precedent for future Punic expeditions by the Pentagon, but scarcely for a new peacekeeping coalition. Washington's corridor cajolery and economic-political blackmail, simply to gather resolutions and fig-leaf contingents, have hardly lent fresh legitimacy to the U.N. In its reflexive resort to Great Power extortion, the White House squandered a chance for authentic progress toward multilateral responsibility in a new era. It is not merely that American men and women constitute a de facto mercenary force for the Germans, Japanese, Saudis and gulf sheiks, or that the Soviets, Chinese and others are absent. Just as national units of the gulf force cannot even talk to one another effectively in the field, western diplomacy has been fractured. The European Community, like the Arabs before them, is trying desperately to mount a mediation behind Washington's posturing and media polemics. The gulf alliance reflects a sadly outmoded concept of collective security. There is no true collection of interests, no secure understanding of the irrelevance of both the old violence and the old diplomacy in a vastly changed international landscape. No lesson taught the Iraqis seems likely to correct the deep-seated irresponsibility of the regime in Washington: Nothing will erase the fateful prelude to crisis -- a U.S. that had armed and subsidized Iraq for a variety of wanton purposes, that failed for bureaucratic reasons to try to deter aggression months before it happened, that ignored multiple warnings of invasion and left its unalerted citizens to become hostages. On the eve, the Administration all but diplomatically acceded to the Iraqi attack. Then, in propaganda extraordinary even by the usual standards of political hypocrisy, it sought to incite both national idealism and native chauvinism by labeling its recent client another Hitler. Imagine the alternatives: a U.S. that had not cynically armed one more dictator nor rendered itself an energy hostage in the greed of the 1980's; a Washington no longer culpable in profiteering and inequity in world resources, a President dedicated to statesmanlike lifting of the Arab-Israeli curse with genuine international initiative, a world in which 400,000 Americans need not be in the gulf because a principled foreign policy was there before them. Instead, it is to the Bush Administration -- without effective check or balance because of the foreign policy abdication of Congress -- that America and the rest of the world will still be prey, whatever happens in the next few weeks. Perhaps that is what makes Washington's expected victory in the Persian Gulf already so Pyrrhic. The ultimate irony is that the crisis presents a chance to deal with fundamental challenges of the post-cold-war world. In the grim concentration of global attention, these last days of peace afford an opportunity like no other in this century, and a singular moment for U.S. statesmanship. A comprehensive and farsighted American peace effort would begin with authentic negotiations with Baghdad, not to reward aggression but to see it in proportion and to look beyond to ethnic, territorial and economic grievances dating to the Ottoman Empire. Iraq would be given equitable national treatment on disputed petroleum and access to the gulf. Kuwaiti sovereignty would be restored under U.N. auspices with an end to predatory oil practices. U.S. and allied armies would be withdrawn in favor of U.N. buffer forces. The price of Iraq's violence would be the dismantling of its threatening arsenals, though part of a larger regional settlement in which concessions would be security for all sides. Washington would let the European Community take the lead on the Palestinian issue, recognizing the Europeans' stake and credibility as well as setting a precedent for shared responsibility. Simultaneously, every resource of American diplomacy would be applied to forging a united Arab commitment to settlement, to ridding Israel of its indispensable enemy by pan-Arab demilitarization, on the model of Mikhail Gorbachev's arms initiatives toward the U.S. To Israel the U.S. would pledge, by a joint resolution of Congress, that any invasion of its pre-1967 territory (excluding Gaza) would be equivalent to an attack on the U.S., requiring our full defense. We would urge the U.N., and particularly the Soviet Union, to join us. But with or without their participation, the U.S. commitment would be unequivocal. If Israel failed to join promptly in European-sponsored negotiations, it would be the U.S. position that our principled support does not extend to mutual suicide, and that Israel would be economically sanctioned like any other international obstructor. To the Palestinians, the U.S. would pledge its matching commitment to the establishment and integrity of a sovereign state on the West Bank and in Gaza, in return for an immediate end to the intifada and prompt settlement negotiations. As with Israel, Palestinian hostilities under any guise would bring new, U.S.-sponsored international sanctions. Washington would lead a world consortium to provide special aid to Jordan, and technical and educational assistance to Palestine, enabling them to gain their peaceful equilibrium. Civil rights of Arab citizens in Israel and Jewish citizens in Palestine, along with the multicultural status of Jerusalem, would be enforced by the U.N., a first act of the new world order. The U.S. and other wealthier nations would press for a new Middle East commonwealth -- adama tziburit in Hebrew, al-tharwa al-oumoumiya in Arabic, the ancient, concept of a shared land and resources, economic and spiritual. A regional development bank would equitably redistribute from rich Arab nations to poor, away from chaos toward equity and vested interests in peace. The U.S. would support a Middle Eastern community, Arab and Jew, no less than it supported European unity, and for similar historical reasons. A Middle East demilitarization conference, nuclear and conventional, would be convoked by U.S. leadership through the U.N., on the principle of "trust but verify," with international inspection of all states. Regional arms control would parallel U.S.-Soviet-European arms reductions. The White House would launch at home a program for energy diversification and alternative fuels, aimed not only at domestic realignment but also at international conservation, conversion, and planetary management of scarce resources, environmental hazards and imbalances in development. That -- not the anachronistic and unavailing punishment of Iraq -- would give meaning to the words new, world and order. If only the rhetorical fictions of politics, the false practicalities and irrelevant experiences did not impede such a breakthrough. If only an American President, letting a petty dictator claim what he will in a small corner, could move confidently beyond to build a legitimate peace and receive his own rightful credit.

Some more history for those who know how to read. The prior regime change in Iraq, brought on with the help of your local friendly CIA. (Goodness, did "we" help put Saddama in power? Like we did Noriega, Somoza, and Pinochet? Geepers Creepers!!) A Tyrant 40 Years in the MakingBy ROGER MORRISEATTLE — On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.The Iraqi leader seen as a grave threat in 1963 was Abdel Karim Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Washington's role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A.From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression, the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt — much as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had grown more assertive. Seeking new arms rivaling Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests, resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East — all steps Saddam Hussein was to repeat in some form — Kassem was regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies — chiefly France and Germany — resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s "Health Alteration Committee," as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television. Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. "Almost certainly a gain for our side," Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy the day of the takeover.As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad — for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup, the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.The Kassem episode raises questions about the war at hand. In the last half century, regime change in Iraq has been accompanied by bloody reprisals. How fierce, then, may be the resistance of hundreds of officers, scientists and others identified with Saddam Hussein's long rule? Why should they believe America and its latest Iraqi clients will act more wisely, or less vengefully, now than in the past?If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and uncertainty, just wait for the peace.Roger Morris, author of "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician," is completing a book about United States covert policy in Central and South Asia.

You’re right Franklin. The USA is just a big piece of shit. If you need additional proof, look at each and every single person in your little Communist Worker’s Union... Uh... I mean A.N.S.W.E.R. rally. You will find all the shit the world has to offer marching in lock-step.

And how 'bout that drone aircraft and the forged "secret" documents Colin Powell used as evidence of Iraqui malfeasance. Seems like a third government may have forged the docs. Gee, I wonder which gov't that could be??

You just keep watching C-SPAN there Rolo. While you're at it, pick up a history book or two. You might learn something. If you have trouble reading, a bongo IS a lot of fun!Everyone else: don't forget this Saturday's marches which will take place on both coasts. The ANSWER web site has logistical info if you do not live near one of the march sites, with contact info for rides.Seems like more and more musicians are putting out anti-war songs. Apparently the Beastie Boys added one to their website. You saw it here first!

Kinda like chanting or bongo playing during one of your vocal minority anti-American protest marches...

How's this for the height of idiocy??French Fries Get New Name in Congress Cafeterias to Protest France's Action in U.N. 3/11/03 4:15PM By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer House cafeterias will be serving fries with a side order of patriotism Tuesday with a decision by GOP lawmakers to replace the "French" cuisine with "freedom fries.""This action today is a small but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France," said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee.Ney, whose panel oversees House operations, ordered the House Administrative officer to change the menus in House office building cafeterias to read "freedom fries" and "freedom toast."The House action follows moves by several restaurants around the country to remove "French" fries from their menus to protest French opposition to U.S. military action in Iraq.Also leading the anti-French campaign was Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who noted in a letter to colleagues that Cubbie's restaurant in Beaufort, N.C., in his district, was now serving "freedom fries."

It was nice of the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens to issue two anti-war songs but what is this noise about him having supported the call to assassinate Salman Rushdie?? That sucks ass.

Hack,what happened to your email account? I tried to email you but it won't go through.Drop me a line!Bob

Again, you are proving my point.

Thanks for the well-wishes, Rolo. Yet for some reason you're strangely silent on everyone's recognition that Hussein is a cannibal. Good thing you have plenty of time to watch C-SPAN; we'll try to let you know when we're going to appear.Moving on (BTW, if you haven't signed the moveon.org emergency petition, they've extended the deadline to Monday), from last night's press conference:GWB: I think first of all, it's hard to envision more terror on America than September 11th, 2001. We did nothing to provoke the terrorist attack. It came upon us, because there's an enemy which hates America. They hate what we stand for. We love freedom, and we're not changing."To say we did "nothing to provoke" the attack is to ignore all of history since the end of World War II, not to mention history since the First Gulf War. And to say we love freedom and aren't changing is to pretend that the USA Patriot Act did not pass. Must be living in Rolo's world, where history does not exist and might makes right.

I stand by my previous statement.

Yow Rolo! Who doesn't say the truth about Hussein? He's a dictator that leads a regime armed to the teeth by the US (Reagan and Bush) who looked the other way when he gassed the Kurds (with chemicals provided by reagan Bush). Can you say that Rolo? or do you stop where it's convenient? Down, boy, down!

Oh boy Franklin!!! I sure hope they put the vocal minority and their anti-American message on C-Span. It is very entertaining to watch the desperation of the communist backed groups attempt to slam America and say not one negative word about the dictator of Iraq.

http://www.moveon.org/emergency/Tonight (Wed March 5) is the last night before this petition is delivered to the UN. Same organization that organized the petition to stop the impeachment of President Clinton.

This Saturday, March 8, AKA International Women's Day, there will be a women's march to the White House as part of Code Pink: Women's Preemptive Strike for Peace. for more information, check out: www.ips-dc.org Same site has information on the dozens (100+?) cities in the US who have passed resolutions against the war.If you use the search engine, www.google.com, you can find the Code Pink people and get more info. This Friday night Michelle Shocked and Alice Walker will headline a program in DC, also against the war. Lisner Auditorium.A caravan today went around to all Embassies resisting the war and gave a heartfelt THANKS!! (for not being an asshole, we might add).Students all throughout the country walked out of their classrooms this afternoon in protest of the war.

Don't forget to come to Washington for the Saturday March 15 emergency mobilization. Logisitical info can be found on many sites. For starters: www.internationalanswer.orgAnd don't forget, you don't have to agree with every speaker and every position to march to make your own fundamental anti-war statement. It's funny how the marchers' critics say "all marchers agree with everything the march organizers support" and in the same breath also say "isn't it ridiculous how all the marchers have their own particular messages." Wanting to have their cake and eat it too!Funny too how the Washington Post had an article about a recent demonstration by 150 people in favor of the war. WOW!! 150 people - what a staggering number! And they came from out of state too! OOOOH

Here is some left-wing humor from an anti-antiwar website http://www.culturewar.50g.com/index.htm"Okay, some thoughts on our protest action this pastSaturday... I was pleased overall. At our peak we hadabout 25 people and it was great to have severalpeople from Broward Citizens for Peace and Justicejoining us as well as some new people brought by Kwameand others, so that was cool. I wasn't that thrilledabout our location but we were highly visible topeople driving by and it did allow us to meet peopleat the bus stop. Best of all, we got to meet some newfolks who saw us while driving by and stopped to meetus and expressed interest in joining BAWC.Despite Marcus and myself putting out press releasesto over 20 media, we received zero press coverage. Wedid have a cameraman from Channel 10 come by and filmus and take an interview, but it was never aired. Ofcourse that would conflict with the corporate media'smanufactured image of "America united" and might causeothers to question this whole damn war, so no surprisethere...On the negative side: despite the fact that we agreedat last week's meeting not to engage with pro-warprovacateurs trying to bust up our action, in practicewe didn't follow our own directive. I admit Isuccumbed to responding to that jerk with the videocamera a couple of times myself. He's extremelyskilled at provoking people. Also, we really didn'tdo a good job of conveying this decision and WHY wemade it to those of us who weren't at the meeting so anumber of us fell into the trap of engaging with thatasshole (BTW, his name is Jorge Torres). Torres' whole purpose there is to get in our faces,and try to provoke us and divert our energy from ouroriginal purpose to being focused on him. And hesucceeded. If you go to his website: www.antiantiwar.com you will see that he succeeded inmaking himself the focus of our energy. This guy CANNOT be reasoned with or convinced of ourviews. He is a professional far-right organizer andif you read his posts on various right-wing messageboards, you will see he believes in violence againstthose on the political left. In fact I think a majorpurpose of his website is to IDENTIFY people like usfor others on the far-right to commit acts of violenceagainst us. (A note from me, the "professional far-right organizer". This paragraph is pure leftist nonsense. I have never posted anything to any message board advocating violence. Quite the contrary, I am the one that has been threatened, verbally abused, and even assaulted by a sign wielding senior citizen peacenik. It's all in my videos for the world to see. My counter-revolutionary weapon of choice is the video camera.)If we had followed our decision of giving him completesilence, I believe he would have quickly gotten boredand left. Instead we allowed ourselves to fall intohis trap and he stayed for quite a long period oftime.I'm not suggesting we don't talk to anyone passing by,even if someone is opposed to our point of view. If apasserby is interested in having a conversation thenof course we talk to them. It's when people get tothe point of being abusive or are there expressly todisrupt (like Mr. Torres), that we shouldn't engagewith them.We need to do things like start chanting when someonelike him tries to disrupt. I think it would be goodfor us to brainstorm on some chants and put them on achant sheet so we're better prepared when this occurs."Does anyone else think this was written by Haskell? The writing style and thought processes are remarkably similar. . .

From www.veteransforcommonsense.org (excellent website)(Unfortunately the author's anonymous, but he probably fears government retaliation)Ten Reasons Why Many Gulf War Veterans Oppose Re-Invading Iraq anonymous Gulf war veteran http://www.alternet.org Posted 9/24/2002 11:21:37 PMWith all the war fever about re-invading Iraq, the press and politicians are ignoring the opinion of the veterans of our last war in the Gulf. But we veterans were there, and we have unique and critical first-hand knowledge of the course and consequences of warfare in Iraq. Our opinions should be solicited and heard before troops deploy for battle, not after they have returned wounded, ill or in body bags. Another invasion of Iraq in 2002 will be very different from the invasion of 1991. The war's mission has changed in the intervening years, from removing Iraq from Kuwait to removing the entire Iraqi government and military establishment from power. Because the goal of the U.S. military has changed, the Iraqi army may retreat to the cities, where they may face better odds than in the desert. During the open desert tank battles of '91, U.S. tanks out-classed and out-fought obsolete Iraqi tanks, and U.S. infantry captured tens of thousands of poorly supplied Iraqi soldiers operating without command and control from Baghdad. But in the urban warfare scenario of 2002, pitched infantry skirmishes and ambushes in cities may present a more level battlefield for Iraqi troops fighting in their hometowns. The Iraqi military can be expected to fight for each block within each city with the most ruthless means available. When faced with the impending overrun of their nation, the Iraqi military didn't hesitate to use chemical weapons against Iran. Because of these significant differences, here are 10 reasons why, as a Gulf War combat veteran, I oppose a second Gulf War as a costly and preventable mistake. 1. U.S. troops are vulnerable to Iraqi chemical and biological warfare agents -- if Iraq is capable of using them. The gas masks, detection alarms and protection suits don't work, according to internal Department of Defense documents uncovered during investigations by the U.S. General Accounting Office. This leaves U.S. troops highly vulnerable to chemical and biological attack. U.S. chemical and biological warfare agent casualties in 2002 could be significantly higher than in 1991. Only a few months ago, the Pentagon sent out a press release stating 140,000 U.S. soldiers were exposed to low-levels chemical agents near Khamisiyah, Iraq during the Gulf War. While these soldiers appeared to return home healthy, many tens of thousands face long-term disabling medical problems that are difficult to treat. 2. Scientific evidence shows that even low-level chemical exposures are dangerous. According to a recent National Academy of Sciences report (Gulf War and Health, September 2000), low-levels of chemical warfare agents cause long-term medical problems. This conclusion is based on research resulting from the sarin attack in Japan in 1995. 3. Research shows long-term adverse side effects from mandatory vaccines given to U.S. soldiers deploying to the war zone. According to the product label insert made by BioPort in Michigan, the sole producer, the experimental anthrax vaccine has caused several deaths. The National Academy of Sciences this year concluded there are some risks to the hotly debated vaccine. 4. The Gulf War battlefield remains radioactive and toxic. Scientific research funded by the military and released two years ago links exposure to depleted uranium (DU) ammunition with cancer in rats. Solid depleted uranium bullets, ranging in size from 25mm to 120mm, are used by U.S. tanks, helicopters and planes to attack enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers. The Gulf War battlefield is already littered with more than 300 tons of radioactive dust and shrapnel from the 1991 Gulf War. Another war will only increase the radioactive and toxic contamination among U.S. soldiers. As of today, U.S. troops are not fully trained about the hazards of depleted uranium contamination, even though Congress enacted a law in 1998 requiring extensive training, especially for medical personnel. 5. Research shows long-term adverse side effects from mandatory pills given to U.S. soldiers deploying to the war zone. According to testimony before Congress (Rand Corporation, 1999), the experimental pyridostigmine bromide (PB) anti-chemical warfare agent pills "can't be ruled out" as linked to Gulf War illness. During the war, soldiers were told to take one pill every eight hours. After the chemical alarms sounded, some soldiers, out of legitimate fear for their lives, took more than the prescribed amount. To date, the long-term consequences of PB pills remain largely unknown. 6. The Iraqi civilian opposition was abandoned by U.S. troops in the first Gulf War. After U.S. troops had liberated Kuwait and conquered southern Iraq at the end of February 1991, former President George H.W. Bush encouraged the Iraqi opposition, mainly civilians, to rise up against the Iraqi dictatorship in March 1991. However, former President Bush left the rebels twisting in the wind to be ruthlessly killed by the Iraqi army's Republican Guard flying helicopters allowed by the cease-fire arranged by U.S. military and political leaders. U.S. troops in southern Iraq in March 1991 were ordered not to interfere. How can U.S. troops or Iraqi rebels be confident this won't happen again? Long oppressed by the Iraqi military, what will the civilian population do if Iraq is liberated? The American public won't support a long-term occupation and high casualties. 7. Many post-cease-fire military actions of the first Gulf War were deplorable. In March 1991, the Iraqi army was in a full route inside Iraq. Against orders, former General Barry McCaffrey slaughtered thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers after the cease-fire (documented in the article, "Overwhelming Force," by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 2000). Many U.S. soldiers returned home with serious objections about the course and consequences of such actions, including the horrific carnage of the "highway of death," littered with hundreds of destroyed cars, tanks and human remains (see "Prayer at Rumayla" by Gulf War veteran Charles Sheehan-Miles, Xlibris, 2001). Will there be another massacre of Iraqi soldiers? Will Iraqi troops slaughter U.S. soldiers in retaliation, killing U.S. prisoners or retreating U.S. soldiers? And will the press be allowed onto the battlefield to record what really happens? 8. No one has been held accountable for arming Iraq with chemical and biological weapons from 1980 to 1990. A recent news article reported that top aides for former presidents Reagan and Bush armed Iraq with these weapons during Iraq's war against Iran between 1980 and 1988 ("Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas," New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002). Some of these former George H.W. Bush aides now work for President George W. Bush. These advisors did nothing to stop the sale of the chemical agents to Iraq, did nothing to stop the use of the agents by Iraq, and did nothing to tell the world about Iraq's crimes, even when the world learned Iraq used poison gas against civilians. These top political aides have remained silent for more than 14 years, and many refused to comment on the recent news reports. 9. U.S. allies in Europe oppose invading Iraq. They have refused to supply soldiers, funding or logistical support. Some of the serious U.S. battlefield casualties from 1991 were sent to U.S. military hospitals in Germany. Where will our casualties be flown to for emergency care if Germany follows through on its policy to remain neutral and not allow the use of German airspace? This contrasts sharply with the more than 30 nations allied with the U.S. during Desert Storm in 1991. Today, the U.S. has no Arab allies. In 1991, the U.S. forgave billions in outstanding loans owed by Egypt to buy its support. Now Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations oppose a second invasion of Iraq. If something goes wrong, where will U.S. troops retreat if Saudi Arabia won't allow U.S. troops within its borders? We must avoid another Gallipoli. 10. The Department of Veterans Affairs will not be able to care for additional casualties because VA can't even take care of current VA patients. Most veterans now wait six months to see a VA doctor, and most veterans wait more than six months to receive a decision on a VA disability claim. Many of those waiting in line are Gulf War veterans, many with unusual illnesses. According to VA, of the nearly 700,000 veterans who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, more than 300,000 have sought VA healthcare, and more than 200,000 have filed VA disability claims. Two weeks ago, President Bush slashed $275 million from the healthcare budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Although the Iraqi government is a corrupt dictatorship that must eventually be removed, current proposals to remove the government by deploying hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops are deeply flawed. A premature attack against Iraq, especially when the public opposes it, would be a horrible mistake. Since 1990, more than 400 U.S. soldiers have died in the Gulf War theater of operations. Untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, also died. A second invasion of Iraq for one man is not worth one more life; let's use common sense and avert a second Gulf War. The author is a Gulf War combat veteran.