and whilst the addled featherbrain continues to lie to the American people, back in the real world ...... 

from the Centre for American Progress …..

Divide and Conquer

Since Sunday, at least 13 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq. At least 52 Iraqis were killed yesterday. Costs of U.S. operations in Iraq are spiraling out of control. The Bush administration's response: a coordinated PR campaign to demonize their critics. Two days ago, Vice President Cheney said critics of the administration's policy in Iraq are seeking to "satisfy the appetite of the terrorists." Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared his critics to those who sought to appease Adolf Hitler. Today, President Bush will join the fray with a speech to the American Legion that will reportedly accuse "the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield." Asked to substantiate these claims, the White House could not name any significant political figure who "has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone." The approach is drawing bipartisan criticism. Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT), who supports a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops, said that Cheney and Rumfeld's rhetoric was "'over the top' and unhelpful." Shays added, "The president should be trying to bring the country together and not trying to divide us."

The White House claims their position on Iraq is being distorted by opponents. Specifically, they object to those who "accuse the president of advocating 'stay the course' in Iraq." The White House "rejects the phrase and regularly emphasizes that it is adapting tactics to changing circumstances, such as moving more U.S. troops into Baghdad recently after a previous security strategy appeared to fail." Where did anyone get the idea that the White House supports a "stay the course" strategy? White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, 8/17/06: "[Y]ou...cannot be a President in a wartime and not realize that you've got to stay the course." Snow, 8/16/06: "[T]hat's why the President is determined to stay the course." President Bush, 7/11/06: "As a matter of fact, we will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course." Vice President Cheney, 6/6/06: "[W]e have to stay the course." The United States needs to adjust its strategy to meet new realities on the ground in Iraq -- a "stay the course" strategy will only serve to undermine U.S. interests. With these new dynamics, the case is growing stronger for a policy of strategic redeployment.

While the "series of speeches" Bush is planning to defend his Iraq policy is garnering significant media attention, the tactic is old news. Washington Post, 3/11/06: "Bush Goes on Offensive To Explain War Strategy: Speeches to Combat Public Pessimism" Fresno Bee, 6/19/05: "President spotlights Iraq war successes; Bush plans summer offensive to tout progress against insurgency" Washington Times, 5/22/04: "Bush to define Iraq strategy in major speeches" Washington Post, 10/11/03: "Cheney Goes on Offensive over Iraq: Unyielding Speech Is Designed to Regain Support." None of these efforts has succeeding in rallying support for the war. The Wall Street Journal notes, Bush's upcoming speeches "might in some ways sound less upbeat than prior rhetorical campaigns on the issue. According to a recent Newsweek poll, just 31 percent of Americans support President Bush's handling of the issue. While past addresses often stressed improvements on the ground, that theme is likely to be less prominent in coming weeks."

The other aspect of the latest push is to attack media coverage. The coverage isn't negative because things are going badly, it's because the press is being duped by terrorists. On Monday, Donald Rumsfeld said "he is deeply troubled by the success of terrorist groups in 'manipulating the media' to influence Westerners." Rumsfeld has a new strategy to get more positive coverage: buy it. The Department of Defense is "put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq." According to a public relations professional, "They want it [news] to be received by audiences as it is transmitted [by them], but they don't like how it turns out. "The 12-18 person team would monitor the news and "propose four to eight public relations events per month, such as speeches or news conferences, including 'preparation of likely questions and suggested answers, themes and messages as well as background, talking points.'"

A few places to go and visit...

From the washington Post
[http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/2006/08/29/combat_antiamericanism/comments.html#c609821|OUR QUESTION]
Posted at 11:48 AM ET, 08/29/2006
Should it be a goal of the U.S. to reduce that hostility and, if so, what's the best way to do it?

Posted at August 29, 2006 01:14 PM
» Deep Ray, Wappingers Falls | Permalink
The question presupposes that the Bush/Cheney regime actually... etc.... Posted at September 1, 2006 09:05 AM » Andy_uk | Permalink Does America care what the rest of the world thinks? - Really? You have all the wealth, weapons and no viable conmpetitor to keep you "honest". etc.

Posted at September 1, 2006 10:25 AM
» Zoltan, in Paris, from Hungary | Permalink
"Should it be a goal of the U.S. to reduce that hostility ?"
Well, do you like to be hated and treated as idiots ? If no, then you should try to reduce that hostility. If yes, or if you don't care, then don't bother with it and continue bullying the rest of the world.
"and, if so, what's the best way to do it?"
Stop thinking you're superior. Concrete steps:
- stop thinking that the USA is the greatest democracy. India is, and some could argue that the USA is no democracy
- stop saying "God bless America" etc.

Posted at September 1, 2006 12:20 PM
» ahmad, amman, jordan | Permalink
The west should stop the 'Cold hollocaust' it has launched upon the palestinains since 1948, I urge western people to visit the west bank and see for themselves how the jewish fascists who you call settlers treat the palestinains in palestine, see the only aparthied democracy in the middle east at work.etc.
--------------------------
From the NYT
Pentagon Releases Grim Report on Iraq
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: September 1, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/world/middleeast/01cnd-military.html?hp&ex=1157169600&en=1fe8dd0fc7c09a05&ei=5094&partner=homepage|Iraqi casualties soared] by more than 50 percent during the roughly three-month period ending in early August, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains “potent and viable,” the Pentagon noted today in an comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.
In a grim 63-page report, the Pentagon chronicled bad news on a variety of fronts. One telling indicator was the number of weekly attacks, which reached an all-time high in July.
The American-led coalition suffered the brunt of the attacks, but an increasing number are being directed against civilians. In Baghdad, for example, civilian targets accounted for 22 percent of all the attacks, up from 15 percent in April. And the attacks on Iraqi troops and civilians caused many more deaths than did those on American troops.
“Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shia extremists each portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups,” the report noted. “The Sunni Arab insurgence remains potent and viable.” etc
read more at the NYT
-----------------------------
From the New York Times
Europe Is Not Ready to Impose Sanctions on Iran
By DAN BILEFSKY and STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: September 1, 2006
BRUSSELS, Sept. 1 — The European Union said today that it was too early to impose sanctions on Iran for defying a United Nations deadline to halt uranium enrichment.
Speaking in Lappeenranta, Finland, at an informal meeting of foreign ministers of the union’s member states, Erkki Tuomioja, the Finnish foreign minister, said the union was determined to [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/world/middleeast/01cnd-iran.html?hp&ex=1157169600&en=25ce436923cbd3b2&ei=5094&partner=homepage|use diplomacy] to bring Iran into line, rather than resort to the sanctions that Washington has pushed harder for in recent days.
“For the E.U., diplomacy remains the No. 1 way forward,” said Mr. Tuomioja, whose country now holds the rotating presidency of the union. He said at a news conference that “this is not the time or place” for the international community to impose sanctions on Iran.
Russia, too, expressed wariness today about moving ahead with sanctions. Together, the statements by the union and by Russia cast doubt on the prospects for the Bush Admisnistration’s efforts to quickly punish Iran for refusing to suspend enrichment.
In Moscow, officials expressed regret that the Aug. 31 deadline had passed without an agreement by Iran to halt its efforts to enrich uranium, a prerequisite for build nuclear weapons, as some Americans believe Iran intends to do. But at the same time, the officials made it clear that Russia did not support sanctions or other steps to isolate Iran’s leadership.
That view seemed to be widely shared across Europe, despite consternation over Iran’s defiance of a U.N. Security Council resolution.
read more at the NYT
--------------------------
From the Guardian
Bush demands action as Iran snubs UN
Ewen MacAskill and Oliver Burkeman in New York
Friday September 1, 2006
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1862696,00.html|The Guardian ]
President George Bush demanded that there be "consequences" for Iran after it ignored a UN security council deadline yesterday to suspend part of its nuclear programme. Washington wants UN sanctions imposed on Tehran as quickly as possible, but the security council is seriously divided.
read more at the Guardian

Aljazeera.net interviewed the [http://www.cseindia.org|CSE]'s Shachi Chaturvedi. (http://www.cseindia.org/)

Aljazeera.net: What were the high pesticides residues present in the cola products? Are they fatal to human consumption?
Shachi Chaturvedi: We tested 57 samples collected from across India (12 states, accounting for some 30% of the country's bottling plants), and found pesticide residues that were 22-24 times above the levels in all the samples. We found Lindane, Chlorpyrifos, Malathion and Heptachlor.
The bottles were tested using a methodology which, three years ago, was examined and endorsed by the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC).
Moreover, the presence of pesticide residues was additionally confirmed with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and all its spectra confirm pesticide residues.
Pesticides are used to kill pests, and contain extremely toxic elements. They get into our food chain and keep bio-accumulating in our body over a long period of time. A host of studies done across the world have pointed to the link between pesticides and diseases such as cancer, neurological disorders, foetal problems etc.

When you say levels, do you mean normal safety levels?
By levels we mean the standards finalised by Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), but which have not been legally notified. We have taken these standards as the benchmark against which we have tested the soft drinks for pesticide residues.
Our position has been and will always be notification of standards for pesticides in the final product, soft drinks. And we maintain this position.

Has the Indian government taken note of this?
It claims it has. But it has not yet done what we are asking for: notifying the standards for pesticide residues in soft drinks, so that soft drink companies are forced to meet these standards and provide clean, safe products to consumers.
read more at [http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3BDCB8BC-D4AF-4BDF-8C93-290C5BF4072F.htm|Al Jazeera]

From the Australian

[http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/paulkelly/index.php/theaustralian/comments/strongpaul_kelly_blog_strong_us_policy_makes_iran_the_winner/|Paul Kelly] | US policy makes Iran the winner
Friday, September 01, 2006
DESPITE America’s military superiority in the Middle East, the balance of power in the region is turning against both the US and Israel, with grave implications for the West and for its allies such as Australia.
The magnitude of Iran’s strategic gains in the five years since the 9/11 attack on America is still not grasped. Iran, in fact, is the major winner from President Bush’s war on terrorism, a dramatic and unintended consequence.
Given that the US and Israel regard Iran as the single most dangerous terrorist threat in the world today, this is an astonishing outcome - almost difficult to comprehend.
read more at the Australian
_______________________________
Gus... Actually no Paul... unintended consequence? Sure, if you are the moron in the white house... If you are the intelligent thinking man in the street, there is no two way that what is happening now was going to be the result of the "war on terra and the war in Iraq"... expected consequences? Yes! We were warning the warmongers about it back in 2002!

See Saddam Hussein was a dictator. A Sunni man controlling a country made up of 60 per cent Shia (the main group in Iran AND the ruling group there). In order to rule with his "minority" he had to adopt pretty stiff form of oppression. He basically considered the Shia in his country as "terrorists" or at least always trying to oust him so they could implement a fundamentalist government, "democratically elected" since they had the numbers... Apart from that, he was ruling with a certain libertarian outlook, including fostering science and the advancement of women and other stuff like that... Even in his ministries he had some Christians running the show... The fact is that Hussein was the major bastion of resistance against Iran, even after having made truce following the long war between the two countries that the West was "more or less sponsoring" against Iran. But then our moron in the White House, desirous to get rid of Hussein for puddly WMDs reasons, most of them manufactured by the CIA, with the help of a few Shia dissidents who were also funded by the CIA, went on and removed his only hope of containing the rise of fundamentalism in the region... That's stupid, isn't it? Because then you have not only the problem of Iran to deal with, but you also have a fidgety 60 per cent of the population of Iraq, who support Iran and many Sunnis who resent you for breaking the china in their store for no good reason. Yes I know "freedom this and freedom that" but that ain't going to work the way the imbecile in the White House thinks, no matter how many times he spruiks "we shall prevail"... Yes, the sad part in all this is that we (many of us here and many intelligent people everywhere) KNEW this was going to be the result of the Iraq war fiddle... We knew that already in mid 2002 when the construct of the hoax of the WMDs was exposed... but not taken up by the media who was most eager to see some biffo rather than search for the truth (which was available). . Sad. We also were exposing that there was a slow but steady modernisation of Islam happening , even despite the Osama Bin Laden of this world — and Osama only went on the rampage because he wanted to stem the tide... And what does our El Stupido in the USA do...? Declare a war on terror that appears more or less as a crusade against Muslims which in turns multiplies by a factor of a hundred the numbers of fundamentalists... who in turn join the ranks of "terrorists"... Fantastic result for Osama to have had an idiot in charge of the USA...

Now what do we do in regard to Iran? First we do not bomb it. Second the US needs to eat a bit of humble pie and NEGOTIATE , even with fundamentalists, in a smarter way than they have done so far... Then... I hear some people hear like rumbling Rumsfeld saying: "Appeasement!" No it's not. It's trying to understand what's going on without sticking facile labels like evil and so on on the stuff... That can only INFLAME the problem... Think about it...

Borrowed, till it pops up elsewhere:

>>>>>>>> 

September 3, 2006Op-Ed Columnist Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT BUSH came to Washington vowing to be a uniter, not a divider. Well, you win some and you lose some. But there is one member of his administration who has not broken that promise: Donald Rumsfeld. With indefatigable brio, he has long since united Democrats, Republicans, generals and civilians alike in calling for his scalp.

Last week the man who gave us “stuff happens” and “you go to war with the Army you have” outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who “ridiculed or ignored” the rise of the Nazis in the 1930’s and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a “moral or intellectual confusion” and fail to recognize the “new type of fascism” represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of “Defeatocrats” but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.

What made Mr. Rumsfeld’s speech noteworthy wasn’t its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That’s old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld’s performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America’s fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.

Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — “beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks” — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had “disappeared.” American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld’s Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.

In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is “a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.” He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary’s own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.

Mr. Rumsfeld also suffers from intellectual confusion about terrorism. He might not have appeased Al Qaeda but he certainly enabled it. Like Chamberlain, he didn’t recognize the severity of the looming threat until it was too late. Had he done so, maybe his boss would not have blown off intelligence about imminent Qaeda attacks while on siesta in Crawford.

For further proof, read the address Mr. Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon workers on Sept. 10, 2001 — a policy manifesto he regarded as sufficiently important, James Bamford reminds us in his book “A Pretext to War,” that it was disseminated to the press. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America” is how the defense secretary began. He then went on to explain that this adversary “crushes new ideas” with “brutal consistency” and “disrupts the defense of the United States.” It is a foe “more subtle and implacable” than the former Soviet Union, he continued, stronger and larger and “closer to home” than “the last decrepit dictators of the world.”

And who might this ominous enemy be? Of that, Mr. Rumsfeld was as certain as he would later be about troop strength in Iraq: “the Pentagon bureaucracy.” In love with the sound of his own voice, he blathered on for almost 4,000 words while Mohamed Atta and the 18 other hijackers fanned out to American airports.

Three months later, Mr. Rumsfeld would still be asleep at the switch, as his war command refused to heed the urgent request by American officers on the ground for the additional troops needed to capture Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora. What would follow in Iraq was also more Chamberlain than Churchill. By failing to secure and rebuild the country after the invasion, he created a terrorist haven where none had been before.

That last story is seeping out in ever more incriminating detail, thanks to well-sourced chronicles like “Fiasco,” “Cobra II” and “Blood Money,” T. Christian Miller’s new account of the billions of dollars squandered and stolen in Iraq reconstruction. Still, Americans have notoriously short memories. The White House hopes that by Election Day it can induce amnesia about its failures in the Middle East as deftly as Mr. Rumsfeld (with an assist from John Mark Karr) helped upstage first-anniversary remembrances of Katrina.

One obstacle is that White House allies, not just Democrats, are sounding the alarm about Iraq. In recent weeks, prominent conservatives, some still war supporters and some not, have steadily broached the dread word Vietnam: Chuck Hagel, William F. Buckley Jr. and the columnists Rich Lowry and Max Boot. A George Will column critical of the war so rattled the White House that it had a flunky release a public 2,400-word response notable for its incoherence.

If even some conservatives are making accurate analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, one way for the administration to drown them out is to step up false historical analogies of its own, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s. In the past the administration has been big on comparisons between Iraq and the American Revolution — the defense secretary once likened “the snows of Valley Forge” to “the sandstorms of central Iraq” — but lately the White House vogue has been for “Islamo-fascism,” which it sees as another rhetorical means to retrofit Iraq to the more salable template of World War II.

“Islamo-fascism” certainly sounds more impressive than such tired buzzwords as “Plan for Victory” or “Stay the Course.” And it serves as a handy substitute for “As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” That slogan had to be retired abruptly last month after The New York Times reported that violence in Baghdad has statistically increased rather than decreased as American troops handed over responsibilities to Iraqis. Yet the term “Islamo-fascists,” like the bygone “evildoers,” is less telling as a description of the enemy than as a window into the administration’s continued confusion about exactly who the enemy is. As the writer Katha Pollitt asks in The Nation, “Who are the ‘Islamo-fascists’ in Saudi Arabia — the current regime or its religious-fanatical opponents?”

Next up is the parade of presidential speeches culminating in what The Washington Post describes as “a whirlwind tour of the Sept. 11 attack sites”: All Fascism All the Time. In his opening salvo, delivered on Thursday to the same American Legion convention that cheered Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush worked in the Nazis and Communists and compared battles in Iraq to Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal. He once more interchanged the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center with car bombers in Baghdad, calling them all part of the same epic “ideological struggle of the 21st century.” One more drop in the polls, and he may yet rebrand this mess War of the Worlds.

“Iraq is not overwhelmed by foreign terrorists,” said the congressman John Murtha in succinct rebuttal to the president’s speech. “It is overwhelmed by Iraqis fighting Iraqis.” And with Americans caught in the middle. If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is that we not forget how the administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11. The number of American dead in Iraq — now more than 2,600 — is inexorably approaching the death toll of that Tuesday morning five years ago.

 

From the new York Times

To Stay Alive, Iraqis Change Their Names

By EDWARD WONG
Published: September 6, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 5 — There was nothing out of the ordinary about the young man clutching a sheaf of papers at the birth certificate office, except for his name: Saddam Hussein al-Majid.

“All three of your names match his,” the clerk at the desk said with a laugh, referring to Iraq’s deposed leader. “That’s unbelievable!”
Mr. Hussein shrugged in exasperation. “What can I do?” he said. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/world/middleeast/06identity.html?ei=5094&en=e4c55485592060d2&hp=&ex=1157515200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all|His parents] had chosen the name, not he.
Now he was trying to avoid paying with his life for that decision. He wanted to change the first name on his birth certificate to Sajad, favored by Shiites. Mr. Hussein, a Shiite Arab, was all too aware that militiamen from his own sect might assume he belonged to the former ruling Sunni Arab minority.
The man in line behind him, another Saddam, wanted to change his name to Jabar, one of Islam’s 99 names for God.