Recently Obama was asked by CNN's Candy Crowley if "there's anything that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?" Obama responded by saying, "No, I don't believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards." The United States, Obama told Crowley, "remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world" [1].

obama is a truly democratic expansionist:
The nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullsh*t on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and "image-making", now magnified by "virtual" technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush's case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win.
(...) His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community – which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations – Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.
(...) Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had "lost Latin America". He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a "vacuum" to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the "Colombian solution" to Mexico. He did not stop there. "We must press further south as well," he said. Not even Bush has said that.

it's uphill for the democrats:
Democratic adherents to what might be called the "neoliberal" position are well organized and well positioned. Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright, then President Bill Clinton's secretary of state: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future." She was speaking of Bosnia at the time, but her remark had much wider implications.
(...) Make no mistake," write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction, "we are committed to preserving America's military preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership." Recalling a Democratic "tradition of muscular liberalism," they insist that "Progressives and Democrats must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service. Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric -- is fundamentally the Democrats' legacy, the Democrats' cause, and the Democrats' responsibility."
(...) It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand. The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.

obama's insults:
(...) During his Brown Chapel address, Obama praised the “Moses [King and Selma] Generation” of Civil Rights leaders for bringing black America “90 percent” of the way to social equality in America. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” blacks to get past “that [final] 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said. This formulation was consistent with his 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope’s claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a “Third World” nation (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002], pp. 78-79).
(...) Too bad Obama’s relatively privileged background has little to do with American Horatio Alger (rags to riches) mythology. And too bad that Obama’s paean to the American Dream was plagued by a different sort of empirical challenge: the relatively stationary and harshly unbalanced structure of American inequality.
(...) Not only does the social class into which you are born matter a very great deal when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the U.S. than it does in most if not all the rest of the industrialized world. As reporter David Wessel noted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2005, the best scholarship on the subject simply does not support "the notion that the US is a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." The U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."
(...) As Obama waxed eloquent about “generous America’s” status as the global beacon of ascendant opportunity, the best current research determined at least 45 to 60 percent of "parents' [class] advantage" is "passed on to their children." Using the 60 percent estimate, Wessel reported that rich Americans’ inherited edge and poor Americans’ inherited disadvantage goes five generations deep in the U.S., extending back to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. According to Chicago Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumdor, who matched government survey data with the Social Security records of thousands of men burn during the 1960s, just 14% of American men born to fathers in the bottom tenth of the wage structure have risen to the top 30%. Conversely, just 17% of men born to fathers in the top tenth have fallen into the bottom 30th.
(...) It gets worse, Wessel noted, when you factor in race: fully 42% of blacks born into the bottom tenth of families for income fail to escape the lowest ten percent. By contrast, just 17% of whites born into the bottom tenth stay there as adults.
(...) “The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for,” Obama told labor union members in Chicago’s Soldier Field last August. “The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate.” At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon. These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. Especially insulting to our intelligence and sensibilities is Obama’s determination to retain close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms he claims to repudiate. Obama talks a big game of not taking lobbyist money but he works regularly with influential lobbyist players who (as Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Moran noted last August) “skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers.”
(...) In an interview last year with Time’s Joe Klein, Obama expressed interesting misgivings even about Massachusetts’ (non-single payer)plan for universal health insurance. He insulted American intelligence and moral sensibilities when he told Klein that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” Never mind that, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2006 (Chomsky Failed States [2006], p. 225): “A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee “everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply;”’ a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’” Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
(...) These were maddeningly meager reflections on the wonders of American democracy. Obama’s ode to the absence of fascist dictatorship in the U.S. deleted the absence or weakness of substantive positive popular governance there. It evaded the unpleasant fact that much of ordinary U.S. citizens’ freedom to “say,” “write,” and “think” whatever they wish generally amounts to the liberty to whisper to one's immediate neighbor in the front row of a crowded movie theater with a blaring sound track since it is generally drowned out by giant, concentrated corporate media and the special megaphones possessed by private and state power. In a similar vein, Joe Six Pack et al.’s votes - when actually counted - are mere political half-pennies compared to the structurally empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied interests and corporations that exercise such well known disproportionate influence on American “market democracy.”
(...) It gets worse and more insulting and authoritarian with Obama. After referring to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes,” Obama’s Keynote Address praised "a young man" named Seamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." Seamus' most endearing quality, Obama told the 2004 Convention, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." Reflecting on Seamus’ supposed blind and unquestioning devotion to the American fatherland, Obama "thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child." So much for the venerable democratic tradition of encouraging critical thinking and questioning authority!
(...) "We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses." Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape." Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation, July 30, 2007).

questions that might determine history:
Since the war began in 2003 (actually, for a long time before that, but for the sake of maintaining focus), there has been an element in the antiwar movement that understands the fundamentally imperialist nature of the US war and occupation. In response, this element has organized its opposition to the debacle in anti-imperialist terms. The anti-imperialists’ politics range from libertarian to anarchist with most of them considering themselves leftists. I have had a running conversation with Ashley Smith — one of those organizers with the International Socialist Organization — since well before March 2003. Recently, we decided to exchange thoughts regarding the need for a re-energized antiwar movement whose fundamental understanding is that the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is imperialist and that opposition to that war should be anti-imperialist.
(...) For most people opposed to the war on Iraq, the problem is the Bush Administration or this or that wing of corporate America, say the oil companies. This administration or the oil industry has corrupted what is essentially, whatever its pock marks, a fine system. The aim of the movement therefore should be to pressure the government, isolate a regressive wing of corporate America, elect a liberal Democrat, and then implement a sane foreign policy through the existing government. Imperialism is therefore a problem of policy, not the of the system itself. In 2004, this led the mainstream anti-war movement to entirely subordinate grassroots struggle to the project of electing John Kerry, who was an ardent supporter of the Iraq War and merely claimed that he would more effectively run the war. The anti-war movement thus collapsed. Understanding the actual roots and nature of imperialism is therefore pivotal for building an effective movement that can end this occupation and develop a radical movement for overthrowing imperialism.
(...) The US has thus far more at stake in Iraq than it had in Vietnam and will take an ever more powerful movement to drive it out of Iraq and the region. During the Vietnam War, which was a brainchild of Cold War Democrats Kennedy and Johnson, it took a mass domestic anti-war movement, a rebellion of US troops in Vietnam, and a heroic resistance by the Vietnamese people to defeat the US. Congress never lifted a finger. We should learn that lesson well and organize an independent mass movement of mass protests and sit-ins, help build a new Vet and GI resistance through Iraq Veterans against the War, and also support the legitimate resistance of the Iraqi people against occupation. Only the combination of all those forces has the social power to drive the US out of Iraq.
(...) The New York Times had a piece on the Democratic candidates’ true Iraq/Afghan war stances and none of the three major candidates’ plans include anything even approaching an immediate and unconditional withdrawal. This isn’t a surprise to us, but you gotta’ wonder how many antiwar citizens think that Edwards, Obama or Clinton are going to end the war. Just like the 2006 Congressional elections, the Democrats are lying about their true intentions, yet you can bet that there will be some of their supporters at every antiwar rally between now and the 2008 elections. This is our biggest task: get the movement past these liars.
(...) The Democrats are really a challenge for social movements and the Left. Just a glance at the main funders of the party reveals the problem; they get the bulk of their money from corporate America. As a result, however much they appeal to the movements of workers and the oppressed, they are tied to a class that does not share our interests and as a result betray their promises to us. Nowhere is that more clear than the war in Iraq. Save for a handful of exceptions, they voted for the war; they refuse to cut the funding; they oppose immediate withdrawal; and won’t even impeach the war criminals in the White House. Some of them are actually more hawkish on Iran than Bush is!
(...) The key historical precedent we have to turn to is how we, not the Democrats, ended the Vietnam War. We ended it through the dynamic interaction between a truly mass domestic anti-war movement, a rebellion among the US troops and Veterans documented in David Cortright’s brilliant book Soldiers in Revolt, and the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people.

the "gift" that keeps on bleeding:
And how have the Democrats treated their gift now that they control Congress? The Democratic House and Senate have continued to fund the war while posturing against it. For example Hillary Clinton, who pollsters regard as the Democratic frontrunner for her party's presidential nomination, told the New York Times that when she is elected she would keep troops in Iraq but run a smarter operation. The public's opinion of Congress has plummeted with no end in sight to the bloody occupation.

how the democrats blew it in only 8 months:
Led by Democrats since the start of this year, Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than Republicans scored last year.
(...) The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement was to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush. The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she'd wanted to. But she didn't. The Democrats' game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base to their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.
(...) It didn't take an antiwar movement to make the people antiwar. People looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion that the war is a bust. Their attention is already shifting to the economic crisis: housing meltdown, car sales meltdown, credit crisis, threats from the Chinese to destroy the dollar. What war? The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen months? Pursue them for war crimes after they've stepped down. Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing next to the man with the limo sign.

hillary's pro-nuclear stance:
What in the world was Sen. Hillary Clinton thinking when she attacked Sen. Barack Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in going after Osama bin Laden? And why aren't her supporters more concerned about yet another egregious example of Clinton's consistent backing for the mindless militarism that is dragging this nation to ruin?
(...) Sen. Clinton has treated the military budget as primarily a pork-barrel target of opportunity for jobs and profit in New York state, supports increased money for missile defense and every other racket the military-industrial complex comes up with, and still feels no obligation to repudiate her vote for the disastrous Iraq war.
(...) Just exactly how does one make a compelling case to other nations against the proliferation of nuclear weapons when members of the nuke club, particularly the president of the one nation that has killed hundreds of thousands of people with two of these ungodly weapons, will not, at the very least, promise to abstain from first use of a weapon that could quite easily eliminate most life on this planet?
(...) Great, so forget the hope that a woman president might prove to be more enlightened than macho men in the matter of peacemaking, and instead rest assured that Hillary would have the cojones to "push the button" that would kill us all. Once again, the old Clintonian tactic of triangulation: positioning oneself politically instead of taking a position of integrity.

barack obama war-mongering:
"When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Obama told the foreign policy establishment. The sovereignty of Pakistan will not be respected, under an Obama presidency. "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

engage with hamas: we earned our support
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a "road map" to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building. Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever.
(...) Some critics raise the red flag of "al-Qaeda" and say that Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas's military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's creed?
(...) Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is hypocritical given America's billions of annual aid dollars for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
(...) Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals -- the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation.
(...) Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free from the influence of those who seek little more than to perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.

media coverage of john edwards:
Elite media seem more comfortable with millionaire politicians who identify with their class – and half of all U.S. senators are millionaires.
(...) Of course I don’t know many presidential candidates either (except my friend Dennis Kucinich, whose net worth in 2004 was reported to be below $32,000.)

explaining iraq:
...most Iraqis agree with the tens of thousands of Shia who marched in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of its fall. They chanted: "Death to America" and "Leave, Occupier! Leave!" They know that the original motivations for the invasion no longer matter. Well over a million Iraqi citizens are dead or wounded. Between half and three quarters of the population is unemployed. More than a hundred thousand have been driven from their homes. The national infrastructure is in ruins; security is non-existent; the dinar has no value; crime is rife; oil production has sunk below pre-war levels; one third of the population lacks decent drinking water; and one quarter of Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition. No one suggests any longer that the sacrifices were "worth it": Iraq has been labeled among the top five "failed states" and "the most dangerous place on earth" by the United Nations.
(...) Consensual support existed for the invasion of Iraq that derived from consensual assumptions. Unless these assumptions are brought to light, most likely, "pragmatic" liberals will again endorse pulling the trigger once the next set of nitwits come up with their next plan to export democracy and human rights through the barrel of a gun. That is what makes it necessary to consider the mainstream arguments for why the debacle took place. Four positions have been articulated in terms acceptable to the political mainstream –- the same mainstream that brought us the war and greeted it with such acclaim in the first place. Each of them will be discussed in turn.
[argument #1]
(...) The most widely held view for the failure in Iraq concerns the incompetence of those running the military enterprise. That this interpretation should be so popular only makes sense since it simply recapitulates arguments already made familiar toward the close of the preceding debacle: the Vietnam War. The refrains echo: not enough troops were employed, equipment was shoddy, and too much emphasis was placed upon air power.
(...) This kind of argument is content to suggest that the plan was good and that, merely, the execution poor. It assumes that the great bulk of the Iraqi public was just waiting for an introduction to American "values" and ready to embrace the invaders as well as their puppet regime. None of this, of course, was the case. For all the talk of "integrating" former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and the Sunni chieftains that gave it support, this view of events gives little attention to the long-standing ethnic divisions and religious tensions among the masses of Iraqis. It also essentially ignores what might be termed the "sociocide" -- the complete destruction of the social infrastructure and its norms -- that the invaders perpetrated in Iraq. Or, to put it a different way, this interpretation is content to concentrate upon the United States and its ability (or inability) "to get the job done" while the price paid by the Iraqis fades from view.
[argument #2]
(...) The second mainstream interpretation of the debacle in Iraq is based upon the failure of the American intelligence apparatus or, better, the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration. The now famous "Downing Street Memo" of 1 May 2005, minutes of a meeting taken by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft -- whose veracity is now generally acknowledged -- makes clear that Rumsfeld and his friends understood the difficulty in presenting "a good case" for war.
(...) Yet information contrary to that offered by the mainstream media and the bulk of the official intelligence community was all over the web in the months preceding the war. Democrats fearful of bucking the nationalist trend simply did not listen to experts like Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Mohamed El Baradei. In reality, whatever the degree to which official and mainstream intelligence was manipulated, critical information was easily available for those willing to seek it.
(...) Opposing the war was not very difficult: it demanded courage and a willingness to see clearly rather than "more information." No one asked what interest a secular regime headed by Saddam Hussein would have in making cause with Islamic fundamentalists. No one wondered how it was that a nation spending $4 billion dollars a year on the military would pose a threat to another nation spending more than $400 billion dollars a year. No one questioned how 30,000 bombs could be dropped on Baghdad in the first week of the war with only a few hundred casualties as a consequence.
[argument #3]
(...) Interpretation number three rests on the claim that the debacle ultimately derived from the refusal of the United States to turn over power to the Iraqis –- or, better, the "right" Iraqis -- quickly enough. But then the idea that "if only we had trusted the right people" -- is also an old refrain in imperialist circles. It highlights the arrogance of those "insiders" who substituted arbitrarily selected personal testimony –- or, better, simple gossip -- for knowledge of real conditions. This argument has been forwarded in various venues by neo-conservatives like Richard Perle. It is also the position now taken by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, a completely corrupt businessman later accused of acting as a double agent for Iran, who was virtually anointed by the Bush Administration to lead the new Iraqi government. Had friendly politicians like Chalabi been given power quickly, so the argument runs, Iraqi and American interests could both have been served.
(...) Unfortunately, however, this seemingly noble interpretation veils the desire by American imperialist policymakers to identify the interests expressed by their Iraqi friends in the political and economic elite with those of the Iraqi people. As it happened, Chalabi turned out to be a fraud: he had no support whatsoever among the Iraqi people and his party received 0.5% of the vote in the December 2005 elections. Left hanging is also a basic fact of political life in Iraq following the fall of Saddam: any set of leaders, friendly or not, would have had to face the lack of an army, a police force, a functioning bureaucracy, and a dilapidated infrastructure.
[argument #4]
(...) The fourth, and final, interpretation of why the war was lost is the exact opposite of the interpretation above. It suggests that the basic mistake lay in giving the Iraqis too much power too soon. This position also becomes a testament to the good intentions of the Bush Administration and its lack of ulterior motives in pursuing its course in Iraq. Of course, again, there is nothing new about this kind of claim when it comes to American foreign policy. Rumblings of this sort were heard as various puppet regimes of the United States fell during the Cold War and, again, especially when it came to the collapse of the South Vietnamese "republic." Ingratitude with respect to the "gift of freedom" that was bestowed upon the Iraqis by the United States, mixed with a kind of patronizing bigotry regarding the incompetence of the subaltern people in question, merge in this particular view of American interaction with the once colonized world. The classic line supporting this interpretation of what took place in Iraq was provided by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who wrote: "We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it."
(...) there is something profoundly misleading about claiming that the United States somehow gave too much autonomy to its puppet-regime in Iraq. Every meaningful strategic military decision since the fall of Saddam was made by the United States. Paul Bremer and his team of advisors attempted to introduce a free market by fiat. But this decision would help only the thousands of American contractors and the few huge corporations close to the Bush Administration, like Bechtel and Halliburton, whose "reconstruction" projects were mostly marked by incompetence and staggering levels of corruption. More than three thousand American soldiers have been killed and roughly ten times that many have been wounded, and the defense budget for 2008 will be close to $650 billion dollars. The war is now costing $2 billion per week and total costs will exceed what was wasted on the debacle in Vietnam. It beggars reality to claim that the United States would spend what will ultimately amount to $2 trillion without controlling the allocation of resources and the most important political and military decisions of the war.
(...) It would seem that the mainstream media has a great deal of trouble dealing with the American exercise of power and the world's view of American hegemony. What remains unexplored is the presupposition not only that the United States had the "right" to engage in a "pre-emptive strike," and lie to the entire world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and supposed threats to the national interest in order to justify its policy, but that the rest of the world was -- or, at least, should have been -- grateful for the decision of the American government to pursue such an action. Or to put it another way, taken singly or together, the reigning explanations of how Iraq was lost leave untouched questions concerning the arrogance of power and the implications of understanding the United States as an "empire."
(...) The supposedly singular tragedy of 9/11 -- as if no other country had ever experienced anything as horrible -- also served to justify a demand for vengeance against "the Arabs" and the exercise of military might to extinguish what remained of the "Vietnam trauma." Such celebratory nationalism and provincial paranoia inspired a belief that the new "enemy" -- a convenient replacement for the communists -- was motivated more by hatred for the "American way of life" and its "freedoms" than by the policies pursued by the United States in the Middle East. This, in turn, helped generate a climate of contempt for all critics of American policy and inhibited a serious assessment of the looming dangers attendant upon the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
(...) No less than during the build-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, once again, the American mainstream media is abdicating its responsibilities. Its explanations of what happened in Iraq have raised no meaningful issues and yielded nothing of value for reflecting upon future events. The pity is that such a discussion is all the more necessary given that American diplomacy -- if that word still has any meaning -- is basically attuned toward three options: threats, sanctions, and military force. Bombing along the borders of Syria and Iran has already taken place and "warnings" of possibly "drastic" action have been extended to the Sudan. The propaganda machine is ready to be revved up at a moment's notice and it is only due to the weariness of the American public induced by failure in Iraq, and the over-extension of American troops, that yet another military conflagration has not broken out.
(...) There remains the naïve underestimation of self-serving economic and geo-political interests influencing the formation of American foreign policy. There remains the inability to grapple with the celebratory nationalism and paranoia that have played such a strong role in the history of the United States. All of this, which is so steadfastly ignored by mainstream interpretations of events, provides the backdrop for what took place in Iraq. The failure of American policy is not a function of what transpired following the "occupation." The road to ruin began with the first lie, the first bombing, and the first steps that led to the invasion of Iraq.

oh obama:
In his speech, Obama called for an increase in defence spending and an extra 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines to “stay on the offense” against terrorism and ensure America had “the strongest, best-equipped military in the world”. He talked about building democracies, stopping weapons of mass destruction and the right to take unilateral action to protect US “vital interests” if necessary, as well as the importance of building alliances.

the democratic option:
The Democrats did not send Bush an antiwar bill. They sent him tepid dead-in-the-water petro-imperial legislation that that would have funded Cheney and Bush’s oil occupation at more than $100 billion and set non-binding timelines for the partial withdrawal and imperial re-deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq. As the Fourth International’s Bill Van Auken rightly observed last week (Van Auken 2007):

“While media reports on the Congressional legislation routinely refer to it as a plan for the withdrawal of US troops from occupied Iraq and ending the war, the language of the bill makes clear that what is involved is a tactical ‘redeployment’ that would leave tens of thousands of US soldiers and marines in Iraq for years to come. The bill incorporates ‘benchmarks’ to be achieved by the Iraqi government that were spelled out by Bush himself as part of the escalation of the war initiated early this year. Included among them is the passage of new oil legislation that would open up Iraq’s vast reserves to exploitation by US energy conglomerates. The legislation proposes that ‘redeployment’ begin by next October—while giving no indication of what number of troops it proposes be withdrawn at that time—and be completed by March of 2008. This timetable is not binding, but merely a goal suggested by the legislation. The bill...would essentially allow the occupation and war to continue indefinitely, with US troops deployed to protect a massive new embassy being constructed in Baghdad to house a virtual colonial government and to guard ‘American citizens’ sent by the oil companies to reap massive profits off of Iraq’s oil fields. At the same time, under the cover of a struggle against ‘al-Qaeda,’...US troops would remain embroiled in a dirty counterinsurgency campaign aimed at crushing the resistance of the Iraqi people...The differences separating the Democrats and Congress and the Bush White House are not between an anti-war faction and a pro-war one, but rather between two pro-war parties, vying over the best tactical means of pursuing the US campaign of neo-colonial aggression in Iraq.”

(...) The way out of this significantly self-made dilemma, Brecher and Smith observe, is to acknowledge, expose, and denounce the occupation as wrong and to drop the imperial assumption that Iraq was “ours” to “lose.” As long as the Democrats believe or claim to believe that the criminal oil invasion was initiated with “the best of intentions” (see Obama 2006, pp. 290-309, 317; Street 2007) and worth winning (even if its launching was a “strategic blunder”), they will be (somewhat deserving) targets for the “defeatism” charge.
(...) As Tuft's University political scientist Tony Smith noted recently in the Washington Post, there's no real foreign policy difference between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to "doctrinal questions." The leaders of both parties are equally committed to U.S. world supremacy. Both wings of the narrow-spectrum U.S. party system strongly embrace U.S. interventionism, militarism and (when "necessary") unilaterialism in the name of spreading "democracy" and "free markets."
(...) If anything, the "neoliberal" Democrats' main foreign policy claim is that they can do a better job of conducting this imperialist foreign policy than the "neoconservative" Republicans. "We are the better, more effective and competent Men and Women of Empire" is the basic claim. Such was the essence of the John F. Kerry "Reporting to Duty" campaign.
(...) Democratic administrations invaded and imposed neo-slavery on Haiti (Wilson), intervened against the Russian Revolution (Wilson), needlessly atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Truman), and lied about Soviet intentions and the nature of post-WWII conflicts to “scare the Hell of the American people” in order to garner their support for a permanent war economy and set off the Cold War (Truman). Democratic administrations killed hundreds of thousands in Korea (Truman again), initiated and escalated the vicious imperial U.S assault on Vietnam (JFK and LBJ),invaded the Dominican Republic (LBJ), imposed the lion’s share of the U.S.-led economic sanctions that killed at least a half million Iraqi children (Clinton), killed thousands in a missile attack of Sudan (Clinton), bombed Serbia in the false name of humanitarianism (Clinton) and signed legislation ending poor peoples’ entitlement to public family cash assistance in the U.S. (Clinton).

ujp on the democrats bill:
The anticipated veto of the Iraq war funding bill demonstrates the extent of White House extremism. Bush is not rejecting a "bring all the troops home and end the war" bill but rather rejecting a compromise bill that would provide $100 billion to continue the war, would set only a "goal" of removing some troops by March 2008, would allow 60-80,000 troops to remain indefinitely, would not restrict a U.S. attack on Iran, would allow the 100,000+ U.S.-paid mercenaries in Iraq to continue with only insignificant restrictions, would require Iraq to accept a new oil bill, and would allow Bush to ignore suggested requirements for adequate training, equipping and rest of U.S. troops.
(...) More significantly, like the earlier draft the bill exempts from the "redeployment" four categories of troops which together could constitute up to 60,000-80,000 troops. They include training, counter-terrorism, and protection of U.S. diplomatic positions (such as the huge Green Zone) and personnel. It allows maintaining the over 100,000 mercenaries who back up U.S. troops in Iraq, calling only for 15% of the U.S. funding for mercenaries to be made contingent on certain benchmarks being met. Like the earlier bill it takes no steps to restrict the president's ability to attack Iran, and demands that the Iraqi government pass a new oil bill. (The oil bill under parliamentary consideration would not simply divide Iraq's oil wealth, the feature U.S. officials and media like to point to, but would privatize control of a huge proportion of Iraq's oil industry and resources in the hands of private international oil companies, with special privileged access likely for U.S. companies.) And like the earlier drafts it would allow Bush to simply announce his intention to ignore the Pentagon's own requirements regarding providing troops with adequate training, equipment, and rest between deployments.
(...) Congressmembers are not afraid that an end to funding, and thus an end to the war, will actually hurt the troops, but they are very much afraid of newspaper headlines and Sunday talk show hosts accusing them of abandoning the troops. There is a better chance that Congress could overcome its fear and thus make feasible this seemingly impossible scenario if the peace movement, speaking with and for the antiwar majority of the American people, maintains absolute clarity on our core demand to end ALL funding for the war. That includes opposition to all funding for the war regardless of rhetorical restrictions. Of course a decision to authorize $50 billion would be much less damaging than one authorizing $100 billion; but that does not mean we should support a bill authorizing $50 billion. Rather, our continued principled opposition to ANY funding for waging an illegal war will provide the best support to those in Congress who might be considering efforts to qualitatively reduce actual funding for the war, or to impose real and not just rhetorical restrictions on White House freedom to wage unlimited endless war. Congress is not the peace movement. It is an institution designed to make compromises; we help our friends most if we don't.

a private surge after a public withdrawal:
While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.
(...) The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
(...) While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"
(...) House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.
(...) David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."
(...) lthough contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian -- being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts -- and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.
(...) Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
(...) "These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."
(...) Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.
(...) As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments." ... But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.
(...) Consider the case of Blackwater USA. A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.
(...) At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.
(...) The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

on these democrats, and iraq --> iran (and Ritter's curious 'endorsement' of international law):
This new Democratic leadership has failed egregiously. Not only has the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, been unable to orchestrate any meaningful legislation to bring the war in Iraq to an end, but in mid-March she carelessly greased the tracks for a whole new conflict. By excising language from a defense appropriations bill which would have required President Bush to seek the approval of Congress prior to initiating any military attack on Iran, Pelosi terminated any hope of slowing down the Bush administration’s mad rush to war.
(...) I consider myself to be a friend of Israel, a status which has been demonstrated repeatedly through words and deeds from January-February 1991, when I was involved in the effort to stop Iraq Scud missiles from striking Israel during the 1991Gulf War, to the period between October 1994 and June 1998 when I served as the lead liaison between the United Nations weapons inspectors and Israeli intelligence, working to find a final accounting of Iraq’s proscribed weapons of mass destruction. I know only too well the precarious reality of Israel’s security situation, and am sympathetic to its need to proactively deal with threats before they manifest themselves in a manner which threatens Israel’s ability to survive as a nation-state.
(...) In this time of constitutional crisis [dear Scott, if we really use int. law as our barometer as you propose, when has the US not been in constitutional crisis?]

on Obama's 'peace' politicking:
Obama also called for a "surge of honesty" and insisted that he was still for a withdrawal from Iraq.
(...)
"That's not a surprise, the degree to which people are surprised is the degree to which they've been sleeping," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 and is running for president for the second time. "He's voted to fund the war at least ten times, each time, it's like reauthorizing it all over again. If they keep voting to fund the war, it's not credible to say they are for peace."