Month: June 2014

What exactly were we spending all this money on in Iraq?

by David Atkins

Let’s do a thought exercise for a minute.

Let’s take morality right out of the picture up front. Let’s pretend for a moment that imperialism is hunky-dory, that the invasion of Iraq was legitimate, and that we’re all neoconservatives.

I’d still want to know just what in the heck we did with all the money in Iraq:

The 300 U.S. advisers authorized to assist the Iraqi security forces will find an army in crisis mode, so lacking in equipment and shaken by desertions that it may not be able to win back significant chunks of territory from al-Qaeda renegades for months or even years, analysts and officials say.

After tens of thousands of desertions, the Iraqi military is reeling from what one U.S. official described as “psychological collapse” in the face of the offensive from militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The desperation has reached such a level that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is relying on volunteers, who are in some cases receiving as little as a week’s military training, to protect his ever-shrinking orbit of control.

“Over time, what’s occurred is that the Iraqi army has no ability to defend itself,” said Rick Brennan, a Rand Corp. analyst and former adviser to U.S. forces in Iraq. “If we’re unable to find ways to make a meaningful difference to the Iraqi army as they fight this, I think what we’re looking at is the beginning of the disintegration of the state of Iraq.”

We’ve spent the last many, many years in Iraq supposedly training and equipping their military to be able to function. That’s theoretically in the best interests of the neoconservative program: create a friendly, self-sustaining client state friendly to corporate oil extraction and able to hold off its neighbors while constantly in need of American munitions. That’s the neoconservative gameplan, after all, for everyone who isn’t just an outright war profiteering leech.

So what the heck has been happening over there? Where did all the money go? If we’re going to do immoral things, can’t we at the very least be competent in doing them? Or are immorality and incompetence both prerequisites for neoconservatism?

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Impeachment gets real, dudes

by digby

In case you were wondering which high crimes and misdemeanors Republicans believe President Obama has committed, South Dakota has led the way with the bill of indictment:

The South Dakota Republican Party passed a resolution on Saturday calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama.

Delegates at the party’s annual convention in Rapid City voted 191-176 in favor of the measure, which claims that the president has “violated his oath of office in numerous ways,” according to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

Specifically, the resolution cited the trade of five Taliban detainees for U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl, as well as Obama’s much-maligned campaign promise that people would be able to keep their existing health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and a recent EPA proposal that would curb emissions from coal power plants.

“Therefore, be it resolved that the South Dakota Republican Party calls on our U.S. Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president of the United States,” the resolution reads, according to the Argus Leader.

I think they missed the boat in not naming that Michelle Obama initiative to get kids to eat some vegetables. If that isn’t an abuse of presidential power, I don’t know what is.

Also too, whither Benghazi!™?

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Put a fork in him

by digby

… he’s done. Here’s more Cheney from This Week, this morning, when asked what he would do in Iraq today:

CHENEY: Well, first of all, Jon, I’d recognize that Iraq is not the whole problem. We’ve got a much bigger problem than just the current crisis in Iraq.

The Rand Corporation was out within the last week with a report that showed that there’s been a 58 percent increase in the number of groups like al Qaeda, Salafi jihadists. And it stretches from West Africa all across North Africa, East Africa, through the Middle East, all the way around to Indonesia, a doubling of the number of terrorists out there.

The first thing we have to do is recognize we’ve got a hell of a problem and it’s not just in Iraq. I worry about Pakistan. Just a couple of weeks ago in Pakistan, the Taliban, the same group that we just released five of the leaders of from Guantanamo, the Taliban raided Karachi Airport.

Why do I care about that?

Well, Pakistan is unique in that it has a significant inventory of nuclear weapons. We have evidence that the man who built the Pakistani program, AQ Khan, offered up recently and that was that the North Koreans have bribed Pakistani officials for sophisticated technology for enriching uranium and that the North Koreans now have some two — 2,000 centrifuges operating to enrich uranium.

We had North Korea try to provide Syria with a nuclear reactor.

The — the difficulty, the spread of the terrorist organizations is not recognized by the administration. The proliferation of nuclear capability and the possibility that it could fall into the hands of terrorists is not really being addressed at all.

And I appreciate the problems we’ve got in Iraq right now.

KARL: But — but…

CHENEY: But what I think we need is a broad strategy that lets us address this whole range of issues. And that involves reversing a number of the policies of…

KARL: But…

CHENEY: — the Obama administration.

KARL: But let me — let me ask you specifically on Iraq, because that — that’s the crisis confronting us right at this moment.

Would you in — would you take war — you know, air strikes against ISIS?

Would you move Special Forces into Iraq?

What would you do in Iraq?

CHENEY: Well, I — what we should have done in Iraq was…

KARL: No, no, what would you do now?

CHENEY: — leave behind a force — well, what I would do now, John, is, among other things, be realistic about the nature of the threat. When we’re arguing over 300 advisers when the request had been for 20,000 in order to do the job right, I’m not sure we’ve really addressed the problem.

I would definitely be helping the resistance up in Syria, in ISIS’ backyard, with training and weapons and so forth, in order to be able to do a more effective job on that end of the party.

But I think at this point, there are no good, easy answers in Iraq. And, again, I think it’s very important to emphasize that the problem we’re faced with is a much broader one, that we need to — an administration to recognize the fact that we’ve got this huge problem, quit peddling the notion that they — they got core al Qaeda and therefore there’s no problem out there.

Dick Cheney doing the wild evasion Watusi isn’t pretty. He’s clearly clueless. The only thing he knows how to do is scare the shit out of everyone about the boogeyman so they’ll give a blank check to the national security complex to do whatever it wants — and make a tidy profit at it. It’s his specialty.

There is almost nothing in his commentary that makes a lick of sense.

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Mass graves. Recently. In America.

by digby

Before Americans condemn people across the globe for burying their ugly secrets in mass graves, perhaps they ought to contemplate this horror:

The discovery of mass graves of unidentified immigrants in a Brooks County cemetery comes as Texas embarks on a new effort to beef up border security, a move some experts say will do nothing to stop deaths, or will cause even more deaths.

Records show deaths continued in Brooks County last year despite a state-backed security surge.

The University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute has tracked immigrant deaths for years, showing that border enforcement surges have correlated with spikes in deaths as immigrants sought more remote, and therefore more dangerous, pathways north. Despite a doubling of Border Patrol staffing in its Southwest sectors since 2005, Brooks County recovered a record number of immigrant bodies in 2012.

In the first two weeks of June, researchers with the Reuniting Families project, working to identify remains of hundreds of immigrants buried in the cemetery in Falfurrias, discovered that between 2005 and 2012, many were buried in mass graves — unceremoniously deposited in body bags, trash bags or no container at all.

I wish I believed that everyone in this country finds this to be a horrifying act that shows our disregard for these people as fellow human beings at least deserving of basic decency. But I don’t.

In fact, if you read the articles about this from the local press they seem to be much more concerned about the federal government failing to seal the borders like the Berlin Wall than they are about the horror of desperate people dying in the desert and then being tossed into mass graves like animals. I guess they figure these faceless, nameless people deserved what they got.

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QOTW: The Man Called Petraeus

by digby

Oh heck. John McCain’s not going to be happy about this:

“This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias, or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight.”

Oh, don’t worry the “bad guys” will be the shirts and the “good guys” will be the skins so we’ll be able to pinpoint them with our x-ray vision and only kill the right ones. And only kill just enough to send a message. Because we’re good and they’re evil.

Of course, the architect of the surge is dismayed that his temporary co-option of the Sunnis didn’t reverse a thousand years of enmity. But at least he recognizes that this is a sectarian war and not jihad aimed at America which rapidly congealing into beltway CW if the Sunday shows are any indication. So there’s that …

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The “soft on crime” zombie issue reanimates

By digby

…. with some modern twists:

Scott Lemieux makes a couple of important points today about the latest Hillary Clinton pseudo-scandal bubbling up from the toxic fringe. Yes, wingnuts are now fashioning themselves as latter day feminists, defending the rights of women against that horrible Hillary Clinton, the misogynist. (I have previously argued that the right was going to use the left’s concerns with rape culture and other feminist issues to blow back on Clinton, but I assumed it would by regurgitating Bill’s past not Hill’s. Of course, that could still be on the menu. It’s early days.)

Anyway, Lemieux discusses this emerging right wing tactic of condemning any lawyer who ever defended a bad person:

[N]ote the slavering authoritarianism underlying Continetti’s line of attack. When a someone guilty of a terrible offense gets off lightly because the state botches the evidence, we’re supposed to blame…the defense attorney? What’s worse is that this prosecutors-are-never-accountable-for-anything attitude extends all the way to the Supreme Court, and to cases where prosecutors are not merely incompetent but actively malignant. Nor is the principle at stake mere empty formalism. Throwing people in prison, whether or not the state makes its case, because the state just knows they’re guilty and the accused doesn’t have access to a decent defense is really not a good way of proceeding.

There are plenty of people who subscribe to this idea, even good Democrats who defend Guantanamo or feminists who reflexively dismiss the presumption of innocence when a woman is a victim, for instance. But it’s the right that has made a profit at it with attacks on the pointy headed liberals who are “soft on crime.”  Indeed, take a look at the recently revealed memos from Rahm Emmanuel in which he advised Bill Clinton to demagogue the “war on crime” for political purposes. (Clinton, incedentally, enthusiastically signed off …) It’s a perennial political attack from the authoritarian right which Clinton sought to “take off the table” by being a tough talking crime fighter but with some “new ideas.” Crime did fall down the list of big issues of concerns but as with some other issues that benefited from serendipitous timing (a tech boom during your tenure, for instance, making it possible to create a government surplus)crime has gone down for reasons having nothing to do with federal crime policy, thus benefiting the Democratic Party from its lack of salience.

This new tactic of attacking lawyers for having defended guilty clients in the past may be a sign that the wingnuts think this old issue has some life left in it. It’s classic “law and order” authoritarianism, mostly deployed in service of dog-whistling racism but perhaps we’re seeing a new twist: claiming the women victims as their own in the War on Women. (If they can throw in a little Willie Horton magic dust on that, I’m sure they’ll not hesitate.)

Lemieux gets to the underlying problem and illustrates how many liberals have sort of set the table for this kind of attack:

Second, this is an excellent illustration of why defending the death penalty or other excessive sentences by citing the preferences of the victim (or the loved ones of the victim) in a particular case is a poor idea. I don’t blame the victim whose attacker got off lightly for being upset with everyone involved, including Clinton. But when we assign responsibility we need to be more detached than a victim can be.

This desire to allow the victims to have revenge is a natural human impulse and it is present on all sides of the ideological spectrum. But it enables irrationality in a system that depends upon rules and procedures and dispassionate reason in order to achieve any semblance of justice. We’ve seen the laudable “victim’s rights” movement evolve into something that stands in the way of reason and it’s inevitably going to benefit the authoritarian mindset.

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Never mind about the past

by digby

Dick Cheney doesn’t want to look in the rear view mirror. This morning on ABC he whined petulantly about being asked to defend his disastrous reign:

“If we spend our time debating what happened eleven or twelve years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face,” Cheney said. “We’re missing the boat, we don’t understand that nature of the threat, and we’re unwilling to deal with it.”

Plus, we still need to find those weapons of mass destruction.

Somebody needs to tell Dick the story of the boy who cried wolf …

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Dow and S&P hit more record highs. Too bad it doesn’t help Main Street

by David Atkins

In case everyone missed it from Friday, the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 hit new nosebleed record highs:

Another week ends, meaning another week of gains and record-setting levels for the Dow Jones and the S&P 500.
Wall Street is reacting to comments from Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. Paul Nolte, a senior vice president and portfolio manager at Kingsview Asset Management, said Yellen’s comments were positive and a signal for the future.
“She’s telling financial markets, ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ we’re going to keep interest rates low,” Nolte told CNBC.
The Dow Jones industrial average closed at 16,947.08, a 25.62-point change and a record. For the week, it was up 1 percent.

The S&P 500 also hit a record, closing at 1,962.87. For the week, it was up 1.4 percent. Energy stocks were among the best performers. It was the S&P 500’s 22nd record close this year.

The NASDAQ gained 8.71 points to close at 4,368.04. For the week, it was up 1.3 percent.

It gets tiresome saying the same thing over and over again, but I wonder how long it’s going to take before people realize that what’s good for the asset markets isn’t necessarily what’s good for the broader economy. The old jokes about the “worst socialist president ever” are also still fully in force.

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On the fringe: The Discoverers

Triangulatin’90s style

by digby

New Clinton administration memos have been released, these featuring the sage advice of Rahm Emmanuel, urging the president to get tough on immigration and crime so they could take it off the table as GOP issues. Here’s one, featuring their beloved strategy of triangulating against the left and right on crime:

Reagan used to appropriate liberal rhetoric and use it for conservative ends. Clinton and Emmanuel, however, appropriated conservative rhetoric and also used it for conservative ends. Worked great.

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