The Pope Gives It the Thumbs Down in the 'Just-War Theory Department'
From the Houston Catholic Worker:
Pope John Paul II calls War a Defeat for Humanity:
Neoconservative Iraq Just War Theories Rejected
Just?....say....no.
Internet muse.
Daring, bold, never sold.
My daily weblog of politics, humor, philosophy...and a constant and nagging reminder of the existence of universal love....
Thursday, September 04, 2003
God Not On Our Side--Pope John Paul II
The Pope Gives It the Thumbs Down in the 'Just-War Theory Department'
From the Houston Catholic Worker:
Pope John Paul II calls War a Defeat for Humanity:
Neoconservative Iraq Just War Theories Rejected
Just?....say....no.
Fire Rumsfeld
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
".....Every day, Iraq's troubles make it more certain that Rumsfeld was wrong in his assessment of troop needs. His rapid action plan brought quick victories. But just as Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, security requires several hundred thousand military..."
As I blogged about on July 11, Rumsfeld needs to go.
Give Rummy the boot!
Death of a Schoolboy
After years of being relentlessly bullied, last month Thomas Thompson took an overdose and died. He was 11 years old. Here, his mother Sandra talks to Libby Brooks
Monday August 25, 2003
From The Guardian / UK
".....More than 200 mourners packed St Paul's Church, Wirral, to say goodbye to Thomas Thompson, many of them children. By the day after the funeral, Sandra had received so many cards that she had to display some of them on the floor around the mantelpiece. "He was a lovely lad," says his grandmother, "and he touched a lot of people's hearts."
His mother is inevitably suspicious of the motives of the children who attended the funeral. "If Thomas had had all those friends then he wouldn't have been where he is. Where were they every Saturday morning, knocking on the door and asking him out? Where were they on the bus that morning? Where were they when my son was getting bullied?...."
Iraq War Pricetag--Winners and Losers
Loser: U.S.-- ".....A $20 million budget shortfall is forcing cuts at U.S. ports of entry that could impact security..."
~~~~~
Loser: U.S.-- Bush set to double price tag for Iraq....
~~~~
Loser: U.S.--"....Bremer himself revealed the enormous economic toll of the occupation when he told reporters that it will cost "several tens of billions" of dollars next year alone--money that will come from even deeper cuts in education, health care and other social services at home..."
~~~~
Loser: U.S.-- "Meanwhile, Taliban Terror Surges in Afghanistan.."
~~~~
Where is the winner, you ask?
Sorry.
I haven't a clue.
9-11: Bush let Saudis Run
at the time of 9-11.
9-11: Thanks to Bush, it was time to say "goodbye" to Osama Jed and all his kin.
Was it the bum's rush or a rush to protect the Bush family assets?
New York Times
September 4, 2003
White House Approved Departure of Saudis After Sept. 11, Ex-Aide Says
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
".....Top White House officials personally approved the evacuation of dozens of influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin
Laden, from the United States in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when most flights were still grounded, a former White House adviser said today..."
"...The adviser, Richard Clarke, who ran the White House crisis team after the attacks but has since left the Bush administration, said he agreed to the
extraordinary plan because the Federal Bureau of Investigation assured him that the departing Saudis were not linked to terrorism..."
Note: Mr. Clarke's recent statements have provided the first acknowledgment that the White House had any direct involvement in the plan and that senior administration officials personally signed off on it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This was far too great a risk.
Why did the President take it?
140 Saudis on 9-11.
Let go.
No questions asked.
"It's almost as if we didn't want to find out what links existed." Senator Charles Schumer
A season for sighs
So, yesterday we learned that Wesley Clark is a Democrat.
Howard Dean is electable.
George Will is worried...
As he should be.
*Can you say: "running mates"?*
George Will: Don't underestimate chance of Dean victory
".....A Dean presidency is not inconceivable. Granted, it is unlikely for reasons that make it undesirable. He may not wear well with the public. If he is half as bright as he thinks he is, he is very bright. And his is no uncertain trumpet: the brio with which he proclaims his beliefs proves that he is not paralyzed by the difference between certitude and certainty.
But there is danger as well as benefit for Dean in his very Deanness. The obverse of his high opinion of himself is his low opinion of President Bush. So he probably would sigh, or do the functional equivalent.
If Al Gore had not expressed his disdain for Bush by those exasperated sighs during the first debate, Gore might be president. But Gore had to sigh. Expressing disdain of Bush was for Gore a sensual delight, almost a metabolic necessity. It might be for Dean, too. But most of the electorate would be unforgiving of bad manners toward any president...."~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**HAHAHAHA! Hey, Dr. Dean---you're electable...just don't sigh!!
Seriously, if we had known THEN what we NOW know about Bush, we'd all have been sighing.
It's said: "To everything there is a season.."
This is a season for sighs.
Antiwar protest planned for Washington
Mark your calendars.
Antiwar protest planned for Washington
".....Organizers predict the Oct. 25 march from the Justice Department to the White House and the Pentagon will attract tens of thousands of people."
Would you like some freedom fries with your crow, Mr. President?
*****************************
Six months after spitting in the face of the world, the Bush administration
is crawling on its belly before the U.N. If the world doesn't rush to help
it, the White House has only itself to blame.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gary Kamiya
www.salon.com
Sept. 4, 2003 | Let me make sure I've got this right. After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the
Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America's disastrous Iraq occupation -- while the
U.S. continues to run the show?
In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an
invasion it bitterly opposed.
The rest of the world may be crazy, but it ain't stupid.
The Bush administration's humiliating announcement that it wants the U.N. to bail it out officially confers the title of "debacle" upon the grand
Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz adventure. Not even the world-class chutzpah of this administration can conceal the fact that by turning to the despised world
body, it is eating a heaping plate of crow. This spectacle may give Bush-bashers from London to Jakarta a happy jolt of schadenfreude, but it
does nothing to help Americans who are stuck with the ugly fallout of the Bush team's ill-conceived, absurdly overoptimistic attempt to redraw the
Middle East.
The bitter truth is that everything the administration told us about Iraq
has turned out to be false.
The biggest falsehood, of course, concerns the reason we went to war in the first place. President Bush's recent hints that we invaded Iraq to get rid
of the evil tyrant Saddam are patently false: The administration's entire prewar argument, until it began to grasp desperately for other explanations
on the eve of the invasion, was that Iraq represented an imminent threat to our security. That was, of course, a lie. Iraq never had any connection to
al-Qaida (not even the ever-serviceable Tony Blair tried to claim that) and
if it had weapons of mass destruction -- which in any case there is no reason to believe it would have used against the U.S. -- none have been
found. (In this light, Bush's somewhat peculiar attack on "revisionist historians" appears to have been a Freudian slip.)
However, the Bush administration has succeeded in making its fears come true: Iraq now does harbor enemies who represent an imminent threat to the lives of the 140,000 American servicemen who are hunkered down there. By
removing Saddam's dictatorial regime, the U.S. turned a nation that borders Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Syria into a lawless, anarchic swamp, open
to every jihadi and America-hater who wants to blow up the Yankee infidels who invaded a sovereign Arab state. A G.I. dies almost every day, and 10
more are wounded, and there is no end in sight, and the reasons why are beginning to seem even murkier than the reasons we were in Vietnam.
The Bush administration is probably hoping that the American people won't notice that the invasion created the very problem it was supposed to solve.
After all, half of all Americans believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 -- the result of months of the administration's repetitive, hypnotic demonizing of
Saddam and total silence about the embarrassingly uncaught Osama bin Laden. Why not go for an even bigger lie and claim that the Iraq nightmare shows that the invasion was needed because now we see just how evil those terrorist ragheads really are?
Perpetual war for perpetual reelection: According to this master strategy, even a losing "war on terror" is a winning hand for Bush, because it makes
the world a scarier place and when people are scared they vote for the tough guys. Even if the tough guys don't know what they're doing.
The administration, which in its supreme arrogance regarded postwar planning as beneath it (that's for sissy nation-builders), never acknowledged or
even considered that the war and occupation could be messy, long and ruinously expensive -- and it silenced those who tried to warn that it was
living in a fool's paradise. When straight-shooting Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would
be needed to pacify Iraq, the insufferably smug Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld squashed the now-departed officer like a bug: "Any idea that it's
several hundred thousand over any sustained period is simply not the case."
Sober contingency analysis could not be allowed to derail the administration's carefully timed new product rollout. The misgivings and
warnings of professionals could not be allowed to spoil the grand visions of inspired amateurs embarked on a grand crusade.
Bush said the U.N. must sanction his war on Iraq or "become irrelevant." It did not. Yet today he is crawling on his belly to the supposedly irrelevant
U.N., begging it to bail him out of the quagmire he created.
The administration said that America was so omnipotent that it could afford to spit in the face of the rest of the world. Indeed, for the ideologues
who run the Bush show, flouting our solo might almost seemed to be a sign of God's special favor. Now, having burned our bridges to all of our allies
except Britain, the America über alles crowd is reduced to sputtering in rage as the rest of the world -- surprise! -- declines to rush forward with
open checkbooks.
Had the U.S. worked with the U.N. to deal with Iraq, as Bush's considerably more world-wise father did in 1991, we would not be facing this problem.
The community of nations would have regarded Iraq as its shared responsibility and stepped forward. But by alienating the world -- and
squandering the unparalleled goodwill created by 9/11 -- the Bush administration created a powerful disincentive to even those nations that
understand the vital necessity of rebuilding Iraq. The unpleasant truth is that for much of the world, helping this shattered nation, even if
understood to be a worthy and necessary goal, now equals lending aid and
comfort to an American regime that is perceived as blustering, simplistic, addicted to violence, self-righteous, and dangerously out of control.
In a nobler world, France and Turkey and Germany and Russia would forget all those nasty things that Bush officials (and their mouthpieces in the
Murdoch media empire) said about them and send tens of thousands of troops to bail us out. But the real world does not work that way. The "axis of
weasels" is now enjoying every minute of it while the Bush regime squirms.
By insisting that any U.N. forces be placed under U.S. control, the Bush administration is trying to save what little face it has left, but also
making it that much harder to enlist the help of other nations. Moreover, no one at the United Nations is likely to have forgotten that the bombing
that blew up the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad could never have been carried out except in the power vacuum that followed the ouster of Saddam. Had the Bush administration not poured contempt upon the U.N., that fact might not have led to acrimony and finger-pointing -- after all, it is unreasonable to blame the U.S. for that vile deed. But the Bush team is reaping what it has sowed.
To be sure, some kind of deal may yet be worked out. But if the terms of that deal are more niggardly than the Bush administration would like, if
much of the world stands on the sidelines and watches the bully twist in Iraq's deadly breeze, it will have only itself to blame.
The Ambassador Wilson Affair: The End of Karl Rove – And George Bush?
by Al Martin
"....(Sep 2) This is the hottest and most explosive story behind the scenes in Washington in terms of how it could affect the Bush administration..."
".....Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been turning up the heat in this situation. He revealed on Friday August 29 in a symposium in Washington the person in the Bush administration, who had leaked it out to the Washington Post that Wilson’s wife is a CIA agent of 26 years. As a consequence of this leak, her entire team of overseas assets were liquidated.
The leaker, it turns out, was none other than the notorious Karl H. Rove, Bush’s so-called White House advisor. Ambassador Wilson identified him as Karl Roverer, with the umlaut over the “o.”
According to reliable sources, as well as our own Al Martin Raw.com investigation, Karl Rove is, in fact, the grandson of Karl Heinz Roverer, the gauleiter of Mecklenburg, who was also a partner and senior engineer of Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurbüro AG. They built Birchenau, the concentration camp in Nazi Germany....."
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