This war is Bush's war and his only! We were just so naive!

by William D. Hartung

A few years back, when President George W. Bush described Libya’s decision to put aside its nuclear weapons program, he applauded the Qaddafi regime for abandoning its quest for “weapons of mass murder.”

When it became clear that Iran was seeking to develop its own capacity to enrich uranium, the Bush administration made veiled military threats by stating, “No options are off the table” in addressing Iran’s program.

Then after years of calling for sanctions and other “tough” measures, the administration engaged in serious negotiations with North Korea about its nuclear weapons programs.

This record of anti-proliferation activity – however uneven its application – certainly gives the impression that stopping the spread of nuclear weapons is a top administration priority. But a closer look at its policy on this issue suggests that nothing could be further from the truth.

Perhaps the clearest example of President Bush’s “do as I say, not as I do” rhetoric is the Department of Energy’s “Complex 2030” plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. With a potential price tag of $175 billion or more over the next two decades, the initiative calls for the replacement of every deployed warhead ...   more »

by William A. Collins

Read the paper
Every day?
News no longer,
Comes that way.

A professor recently informed us that the three newspapers in Nicaragua – one on the right, one on the left, and one in the mud – are all owned by the same conservative family. In Venezuela, all papers skew to the right, busily attacking Hugo Chavez. In Britain, they’re all over the place, and in the United States, they’re all no place. The only papers here that print regular serious opinions are the conservative offerings of Rupert Murdoch, Sun Myung Moon, and “The Wall Street Journal.”
Publishers, after all, have to watch what they say. They’re closely monitored by Wall Street, their own investors, big advertisers, and Alberto Gonzales, at least for the moment. And with the steep price paid for media companies nowadays, one can’t afford to alienate creditors, investors, or customers.

Television, of course, is worse. The advertisers are bigger and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is always lurking. Just allow an interviewee to suggest that the troops should come home right now and heads will roll. Even Public Broadcasting must be careful. Mr. Bush appointed a very conservative FCC chairman who controls ...   more »

John Nichols | The Nation

The question is not whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid flinched in their negotiations with the Bush administration over the continuation of the Iraq occupation.

They did. Despite some happy talk about benchmarks that have been attached to the Iraq supplemental spending bill that is expected to be considered by Congress this week, the willingness of Pelosi and Reid to advance a measure that does not include a withdrawal timeline allows Bush to conduct the war as he chooses for much if not all of the remainder of his presidency. This failure to abide by the will of the people who elected Democrats to end the war will haunt Pelosi, Reid and their party -- not to mention the United States and the battered shell that is Iraq.

This "compromise" legislation is such an embarrassing example of what happens when raw politics overwhelms principle -- and political common sense -- that House Democrats have divided the $12O billion measure into two sections. That will allow Republicans and sold-out Democrats to vote for the president's Iraq funding, while anti-war Democrats and their handful of Republican allies can vote "no." Then both ...   more »

The under-a-cloud weather report: A few scattered clouds here and there, but nothing major…

Col. Daniel Smith (U.S. Army, Ret.)

One of the “innovations” of the Soviet Red Army in the post-1917 struggle of the communists to consolidate the party’s control over the former tsarist realms was the introduction of political “commissars.” Their job was three-fold: prevent a counter-coup d’etat; “re-educate” former tsarist officers and enlisted men needed to fill the Red Army’s ranks so it could defend the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; and distribute Kremlin propaganda. Until 1942, commissars even had the power to countermand operational orders, undoubtedly as a hedge against any attempted coup. Reforms in the commissar system that year abolished the separate, parallel commissar chain-of-command established by Leon Trotsky and made the commissars “deputy commanders for political affairs.” When the USSR dissolved in 1991, this “commissar” position underwent another title change – to “deputy to the commander for educational work.”

Such blatant mingling of politics with military matters could never happen in the United States, right? After all, the president – a.k.a. the commander-in-chief – has insisted throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that the generals in the field, not the politicians in Washington, make battlefield decisions.

Well, don’t bet the farm against domestic politics overriding military judgments ...   more »