(See part 1 and part 2.)

When I looked at the Lancet study, saw who had done it, how it had been done, and where it had been published, I quickly gained confidence in their number of 655,000 excess deaths since the invasion of Iraq..

The study was based on a survey done between May and July 2006 by a joint team of people at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the School of Medicine of Al Mustansiria University in Baghdad using standard methods. These excerpts from their paper details how they collected the raw data and their analyses.

In this survey, sites were collected according to the population size and the geographic distribution in Iraq. The survey included 16 of the 18 governates in Iraq, with larger population areas having more sample sites. The sites were selected entirely at random, so all households had an equal chance of being included. The survey used a standard cluster survey method, which is a recommended method for measuring deaths in conflict situations. The survey team visited 50 randomly selected sites in Iraq, and at each site interviewed 40 households about deaths which had occurred from January 1, 2002, until the date of the interview in July 2006. We selected this time frame to compare results with our previous survey, which covered the period between January 2002 and September 2004. In all, information was collected from 1,849 households completing the survey, containing 12,801 persons. This sample size was selected to be able to statistically detect death rates with 95% probability of obtaining the correct result. When the preliminary results were reviewed, it was apparent three clusters were misattributed. These were dropped from the data for analysis, giving a final total of 47 clusters, which are the basis of this study. (my emphasis)

The designers of the study seemed to have gone to some lengths to make sure that they had a truly random sample.

A series of completely random choices were made. First the location of each of the 50 clusters was chosen according the geographic distribution of the population in Iraq. This is known as the first stage of sampling in which the governates (provinces) where the survey would be conducted were selected. This sampling process went on randomly to select the town (or section of the town), the neighborhood, and then the actual house where the survey would start. This was all done using random numbers. Once the start house was selected, an interview was conducted there and then in the next 39 nearest houses.

In order to determine trends in the death rate , they split the time up into three periods and the results they obtained were as follows:

For the purpose of analysis, the 40 months of survey data were divided into three equal periods—March 2003 to April 2004; May 2004 to May 2005, and June 2005 to June 2006.

Following the invasion the death rate rose each year.

• Pre-invasion: 5.5 deaths/1000/year
• March 2003-April 2004: 7.5 deaths/1000/year
• May 2004-May 2005: 10.9 deaths/1000/year
• June 2005-June 2006: 19.8 deaths/1000/year
• Overall post-invasion: 13.2 deaths/1000/year
. . .
The [pre-invasion] rate of 5.5 deaths/1000/year will be considered as the “baseline” crude death rate, making the assumption that without conflict this rate would have continued at this level up to the present time, or even dropped somewhat (most likely).

The post-invasion excess death rate was:

• March 2003-April 2004: 2.6 deaths/1000/year
• May 2004-May 2005: 5.6 deaths/1000/year
• June 2005-June 2006: 14.2 deaths/1000/year
• Overall post-invasion: 7.8 deaths/1000/year

As there were few violent deaths in the survey population prior to the invasion, all violent deaths can be considered “violent excess deaths.”

The post-invasion violent death rate was:

• March 2003-April 2004: 3.2 deaths/1000/year
• May 2004-May 2005: 6.6 deaths/1000/year
• June 2005-June 2006: 12.0 deaths/1000/year
• Overall post-invasion: 7.2 deaths/1000/year

Percentage of all (not just excess) deaths due to coalition forces:

• March 2003-April 2004: 14%
• May 2004-May 2005: 21%
• June 2005-June 2006: 16%
• Overall post-invasion: 7.2 deaths/1000/year

Deaths due to unknown forces:

• March 2003-April 2004: 3.2 deaths/1000/year
• May 2004-May 2005: 6.6 deaths/1000/year
• June 2005-June 2006: 12.0 deaths/1000/year
• Overall post-invasion: 7.2 deaths/1000/year

Conclusion

While the actual value may be somewhat higher or lower than this number, the precision of these results is adequate to conclude that loss of life in this conflict has been substantial. (my emphasis)

The authors compare with other major conflicts and rightly conclude that the final figure of over 600,000 excess deaths puts the Iraq war right up there with the others in the scale of violence.

As with other recent conflicts, the civilians of Iraq bear the consequence of warfare. In the Vietnam War, 3 million civilian died; in the Congo, armed conflict has been responsible for 3.8 million deaths; in East Timor, an estimated 200,000 out of a population of 800,000 died in conflict. Recent estimates are that 200,000 have died in Darfur over the past 31 months. Our data, which estimate that 654,965 or 2.5% of the Iraqi population has died in this, the largest major international conflict of the 21st century, should be of grave concern to everyone.

What should be of especial concern is that the number of people killed by the actions of the US and coalition forces is so high. Overall 31% or 186,300 of the violent deaths were attributed to their actions and 13% or 78,130 of the violent deaths were due to air strikes which are still going on at a high rate. For those people who still cling to the fond hope that modern armaments, “smart bombs”, and “surgical” strikes have minimized the deaths of civilians, these appalling numbers should make for sober reading. We cannot blithely dismiss this level of death as “collateral damage”, the unfortunate and accidental by-product of a well meaning invading force.

But don’t hold your breath that the media is going to give the Lancet study the attention it deserves. As Norman Solomon points out:

American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the suffering at the other end of the Pentagon’s missiles, bombs and bullets. And there’s a strong tendency to brand documented concerns as unfounded speculation – a media reflex that suits war-crazed presidents just fine.

(See part 1)

Let us take one by one the “criticisms” that are being made against the Johns Hopkins study about the levels of deaths in Iraq. I put the word in ironic quotes because these are more accurately labeled as attacks, since the word criticism implies a certain level of considered and thoughtful response, which has been totally lacking so far. (The actual paper can be read here (.pdf).)
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I don’t think anyone other than the standard issue Bush cultist will deny that the Iraq invasion has been a disaster on many levels. It has alienated the world, it has enraged Muslim sensibilities, and it has strained the American military to the breaking point. And the worst part is that the administration has nothing to offer other than to “stay the course.” It seems clear to me that even Bush and Cheney must have realized that they have no options left, failure stares them in the face, that there is nothing they can do to succeed in Iraq (whatever “success” might mean) and it seems like their only goal is to bluff and try and wait it out until they leave office so that someone else will have to make an ignominious retreat out of that country. This is, in essence, what their “stay the course” policy implies. They can then try and blame their “cut and run” successor for “losing” Iraq. The fact that this policy will result in numerous more pointless deaths mean nothing to such cynical people.
[Read more…]

Some people now look to the US Supreme Court to overturn the torture-approving legislation passed last week by the Congress. Some members felt that it was unconstitutional but voted for it anyway, perhaps fearing that they would be charged with being ‘soft on terrorism.’

Depending on any single agency to defend fundamental rights on our behalf is a dangerous strategy because those agencies are susceptible to pressure.

Even though the present Supreme Court is already very sympathetic to the idea of giving the administration all the power it wants even when it is skating very close to the constitutional edge, the present administration is taking no chances that the courts will derail its efforts to do what it wants. We already see the administration’s efforts to intimidate the court so that it will go along with the administration’s wishes or, in the event that it does reject this legislation as unconstitutional, laying the groundwork to ignore the decision of the court.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales already fired the opening salvo last week, by implying that if the courts overrule this legislation, they are imposing their personal views and should expect harsh criticism.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush’s anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president’s judgments in wartime.

He said the Constitution makes the president commander in chief and the Supreme Court has long recognized the president’s pre-eminent role in foreign affairs. “The Constitution, by contrast, provides the courts with relatively few tools to superintend military and foreign policy decisions, especially during wartime,” the attorney general told a conference on the judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.

“Judges must resist the temptation to supplement those tools based on their own personal views about the wisdom of the policies under review,” Gonzales said.

And he said the independence of federal judges, who are appointed for life, “has never meant, and should never mean, that judges or their decisions should be immune” from public criticism.

“Respectfully, when courts issue decisions that overturn long-standing traditions or policies without proper support in text or precedent, they cannot — and should not — be shielded from criticism,” Gonzales said. “A proper sense of judicial humility requires judges to keep in mind the institutional limitations of the judiciary and the duties expressly assigned by the Constitution to the more politically accountable branches.”

Although this warning to the justices was quite blunt, Newt Gingrich, former speaker and supposed seeker for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2008, was even blunter. He argued that the government has the right to simply ignore the verdict of the court.

Supreme Court decisions that are “so clearly at variance with the national will” should be overridden by the other branches of government, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says.

“What I reject, out of hand, is the idea that by five to four, judges can rewrite the Constitution, but it takes two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the states to equal five judges,” Gingrich said during a Georgetown University Law Center conference on the judiciary.

It takes approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the 50 states to adopt an amendment to the Constitution, the government’s bedrock document.

Gingrich, a Republican who represented a district in Georgia, noted that overwhelming majorities in Congress had reaffirmed the Pledge of Allegiance, and most of the public believes in its right to recite it.

As such, he said, “It would be a violation of the social compact of this country for the Supreme Court to decide otherwise and would lead, I hope, the two other branches to correct the court.”

This notion that someone can somehow divine the “will of the people” is always the one that is used by demagogues to ride roughshod over the institutional checks and balances that have been painstaking built up over the years. The constitution does not recognize the vague “social compacts” that Gingrich refers to. In fact, constitutions are deliberately designed to prevent the temporary passions that can engulf a people at certain times from creating lasting damage. In times of great stress, it may well be the “will of the people” to round up suspects and shoot them without trial, just like they used to summarily lynch black people. The whole point of the rule of law and constitutional protections is to restrain those who would act in the heat of the moment.

People like Gingrich and other enablers of authoritarian regimes like the one currently controlling the White House are always eager to dismantle these constitutional protections because they hinder their ambitions to achieve greater power and control over their people.

I am constantly amazed at how this government is doing the same thing that the Sri Lankan president did following his election in 1977. It is almost as if there is some kind of secret listserv that all authoritarian leaders can sign on to so that they know what they need to do to circumvent constitutional protections and grab more power. That Sri Lankan president too constantly asserted that the “will of the people” supported whatever he wanted to do and proceeded to systematically rewrite the constitution to give him more power. He too set about intimidating the Supreme Court by issuing harsh criticisms of their decisions and organizing demonstrations in front of the judge’s homes.

John Dean, who was White House counsel to President Nixon and thus witnessed the authoritarian mindset close up, says in an interview in the October 2006 issue of The Progressive magazine that this administration, especially Dick Cheney, has been determined to expand presidential powers. He says he “can’t find in history any other Presidency that has made it a matter of policy to expand Presidential powers.” He adds, “To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! I can’t even get there mentally.”

The interview ends with him saying “I fear for the [democratic] system. And I fear for our liberties.”

In order to understand the dynamics of what is going on currently we have to develop a new framework with which to analyze events.

First of all we have to realize that the real enemy of an authoritarian government is not some external threat but the very people it is supposed to be governing. Their real goal is to cow, intimidate, and otherwise subdue their own population so that they will not resist the actions of the government.

In the current case, we are repeatedly told that the enemy the country is facing is terrorism and these kinds of torture legislation are the weapons it needs to fight it. But the actions of this regime are easier to understand if we realize that we, the people, are the real enemy of the administration, and the fear of terrorism is the weapon used to control us.

In order to resist the steady evisceration of basic liberties and the constitution, we cannot depend on our elected representatives or the judiciary to take the lead and fight for those rights. They are too craven to lead. They will only follow. The only way to safeguard civil liberties and constitutional freedoms is by everyone loudly and vocally valuing them, protecting them, and using them. The words of Judge Learned Hand are always worth remembering and repeating:

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

If Judge Learned hand were alive today, I wonder what his verdict would be.

It is quite amazing to me that the Bill of Rights, that shining jewel in the US constitution that is a landmark in the conceptualizing of the fundamental protections that any civilized society should afford its people, is now seen as some sort of quaint anachronism, something that can be dispensed with at the whim of an authoritarian government that claims that it, and it alone, knows what the “will of the people” is.

POST SCRIPT: Exposing the posturers

The Daily Show highlights the hypocrisy and posturing of Senators John “Straight Talk Express” McCain, Lindsey Graham, Arlen Specter, and John Warner on the detainee bill.

Republican senators Arlen Specter and John McCain and Lindsey Graham are media favorites who get a lot of positive attention for seeming to stand up for the right thing even though they almost invariably capitulate to the White House. (McCain in particular has this totally undeserved reputation as a ‘maverick’ and ‘straight talker’ and ‘moderate’ when in fact all he does is talk and does not back it up with action that would make such a reputation truly deserved. To me he seems like any other Bush-kowtowing hardliner.)
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In yesterday’s post I spoke about the qualitative change that has occurred in this country as a result of the passage of the legislation last week that took away almost all the rights on which a truly free society is built.

Some people may be consoling themselves that these drastic actions will be only taken against “other” people, non-US citizens, and that they themselves are safe. But Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale and author of Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism, writing in the September 28, 2006 issue of the Los Angeles Times warns us not to be so complacent:

Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops “during an armed conflict,” it also allows him to seize anybody who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Not to worry, say the bill’s defenders. The president can’t detain somebody who has given money innocently, just those who contributed to terrorists on purpose.

But other provisions of the bill call even this limitation into question. What is worse, if the federal courts support the president’s initial detention decision, ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials.

Legal residents who aren’t citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president’s suspicions.

We are not dealing with hypothetical abuses. The president has already subjected a citizen to military confinement. Consider the case of Jose Padilla. A few months after 9/11, he was seized by the Bush administration as an “enemy combatant” upon his arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. He was wearing civilian clothes and had no weapons. Despite his American citizenship, he was held for more than three years in a military brig, without any chance to challenge his detention before a military or civilian tribunal. After a federal appellate court upheld the president’s extraordinary action, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, handing the administration’s lawyers a terrible precedent.

The new bill, if passed, would further entrench presidential power. At the very least, it would encourage the Supreme Court to draw an invidious distinction between citizens and legal residents. There are tens of millions of legal immigrants living among us, and the bill encourages the justices to uphold mass detentions without the semblance of judicial review.

This act provides a dramatic gauge of how far has this nation’s concepts of justice have sunk since the times when the constitution was first drafted (leaving aside for the moment the problem that those noble early concepts of justice did not extend to black people). For example, Thomas Jefferson said in his first inaugural address: “Freedom of the person under the protection of the habeas corpus I deem [one of the] essential principles of our government.”

Jefferson had little sympathy for those who would suspend these basic rights at the first sign of any trouble saying in a letter to James Madison that he felt that habeas corpus should be preserved even if there is an insurrection or rebellion within the country, which is a far, far, greater threat than anything faced today in the so-called war on terror. He pointed out the history of such suspensions which indicated that it was usually done for the consolidation of power by an authoritarian government rather than for genuine concerns about security, saying:

Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested may be charged instantly with a well defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.

It is a sign of how debased the political discussion has become in this country that if Jefferson has spoken such words today, he would be reviled as a wimp and a mollycoddler of Islamojihadifascists (or whatever the current demonizing term being used to make people cower in fear), as ‘not supporting the president’ by ‘giving him the tools he needs to fight terrorists.’
POST SCRIPT: It could be worse, I suppose

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow sums up the current state of affairs.

Last Thursday saw the day when the US as a nation formally decided that it no longer accepted the basic human rights that have been the foundation of its civil society since the time it adopted the Bill of Rights. In particular, the nation went on record as declaring that habeas corpus was expendable and torture was acceptable. Of course, torture has been practiced in the past by individuals, even individuals acting on behalf of the government. But when those things were revealed most recently at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we could at least try and argue that these were the abhorrent actions of a few ‘rogue elements’ and ‘bad apples’ and did not represent the ideals of the people as a whole.

But when the House of Representatives and the Senate last week passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 allowing these things, and when the president signs these practices into law, then we can no longer use such excuses. These people were all elected to their offices and can claim that they represent the people of their regions. Hence by passing this act America, as a nation, has now formally gone on record as saying that the Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions are all expendable, subservient to whatever measures, however extreme, the president deems necessary to fight his ‘war on terror.’ The American people, through their elected representatives, are in effect giving the president the powers eagerly sought by dictators.

In this Washington Post news report from September 28, 2006 we can read a description of the legislation.

Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday, are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.

The bill rejects the right to a speedy trial and limits the traditional right to self-representation by requiring that defendants accept military defense attorneys. Panels of military officers need not reach unanimous agreement to win convictions, except in death penalty cases, and appeals must go through a second military panel before reaching a federal civilian court.

By writing into law for the first time the definition of an “unlawful enemy combatant,” the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have “purposefully and materially” supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death.

At the same time, the bill immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of last year. It gives the president a dominant but not exclusive role in setting the rules for future interrogations of terrorism suspects.
. . .
Tom Malinowski, the Washington office director for Human Rights Watch, said Bush’s motivation is partly to protect his reputation by gaining congressional endorsement of controversial actions already taken. “He’s been accused of authorizing criminal torture in a way that has hurt America and could come back to haunt our troops. One of his purposes is to have Congress stand with him in the dock,” Malinowski said.
. . .
University of Texas constitutional law professor Sanford V. Levinson described the bill in an Internet posting as the mark of a “banana republic.” Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said that “the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it’s not clear that most of the members understand what they’ve done.”

The New York Times wrote a primer on the legislation in its editorial on September 28, 2006:

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

The craven Democrats not only did not filibuster this bill in the Senate, some of them even voted in favor of it. In the House, ‘liberals’ such as Sherrod Brown (now running for the Ohio Senate seat) and Ted Strickland (now running for Ohio governor) also voted in favor of it, thus reinforcing my long-held view that traditional political labels have ceased to have meaning in terms of policy positions that are favored by the pro-war/pro-business party.

(Incidentally, Strickland is also an ordained minister in my old church (Methodist) which suggests that for some ‘liberal’ clergy, torture is just fine with their idea of what Jesus stood for. The minister in the Methodist Church I grew up in, Rev. Arnold Cooper, passed away last month. He was a wonderful, humane man who had a great influence on me. He would have been revolted at the thought of a fellow clergyman in his church even thinking of condoning torture.)

[UPDATE: I stand corrected by Tom Maley in the comments. He is right that Strickland did not vote for or against the bill, but was absent. I have been trying to see if Strickland has made any statement either way about the bill but have not been able to find any mention of it, not even on his blog. So while his silence on such a major issue is disturbing, Strickland deserves my apologies for not verifying the facts of his vote. I should not have been depending on second-hand information.]

What this action has done is to make us all accomplices in these terrible things, while providing amnesty for those administration officials who actually carry them out. History is not going to judge us kindly.

POST SCRIPT: The Iraq war, lie by lie

The lies of this administration regarding the Iraq war are so numerous that one can be excused for feeling overwhelmed trying to keep track of them. Mother Jones has provided a great indexed timeline here. It is a terrific resource for anyone who cares about unearthing the truth that is being buried under high drifts of official duplicity and uncritical media reporting.

It should be clear to everyone by now that the Bush administration and the neoconservative clique that is egging him on are pushing for military action against Iran. To my mind, the decision has already been made and what is being sought now are ways to drum up national and international support.

Just as they used the nuclear weapons scare to gin up support for the illegal, immoral and, as it turned out, ill-fated invasion of Iraq, they are returning to that same plan to see if it can work its magic again. Once again, the mainstream media is falling into its role of letting the range of debate be restricted to those narrow areas of strategy chosen by the White House and the members of the pro-war/pro-business party and its think tanks, and not giving wide publicity to the kinds of fundamental questions and information being offered by people like Gordon Prather and Charley Reese.

The task for the Bush White House is harder than it is with Iraq. Despite the repeated claims that Bush is receiving a “bounce” in the polls from the 9/11 anniversary or this or that speech, the fact is that Bush’s approval numbers seem to quickly settle into the range the range between the mid 30’s and the very low 40’s depending on who is doing the polling.

The war in Iraq has dragged on for three and a half years with no end in sight. It has resulted in huge numbers of civilians (estimated in the hundreds of thousands) there being killed either by US military action or as a result of the lawlessness and sectarian strife that is raging. Then there is the steady drip of US troop deaths, averaging around two a day, that now totals over 2,500.

The US and its allies have clearly lost control of large segments of the country such as Anbar province and are now reduced to digging trenches around Baghdad to provide at least a semblance of stability to the part of the country most visible to the international world. Despite that, the rate of killings in Iraq in the last two months have reached an average of over a hundred per day.

This is similar to Afghanistan where the resurgence of the Taliban and warlords have reduced the US-backed President Karzai to being effectively just the mayor of the capital Kabul. It is always a bad sign when a governing authority is struggling to merely maintain security in the capital city of a country.

Given that the US military is stretched so thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, you would think that the prudent course would be for the US to reject out of hand any fresh military ventures such as invading Iran, and instead hunker down and see how to salvage at least some kind of face-saving withdrawal out of Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid the ignominy of defeat in both those countries. Otherwise it will be faced with what looks to be increasingly like a pullout reminiscent of the helicopter evacuations from the roof of the Saigon embassy in the last days of the Vietnam war, images that lasted for a long time after the end of that debacle.

But in thinking this way, you would be like the colleagues of Sledge Hammer, urging rational and thoughtful actions to someone who is bent on using force and violence as the first option.

In this case, Sledge Hammer Bush is being urged to go for broke by the neoconservative clique around him and who have access to the media through the grandiosely titled Project for the New American Century. They made no secret of their plans to create the modern day equivalent of a new Roman Empire with far-flung American bases controlling every important strategic interest, and the Middle East with its vast oil reserves was a prime target for intervention. All they needed were excuses to go to war, which were trumped up against Iraq and are now being similarly manufactured against Iran. They needed national support for these imperial ambitions, and the strong emotions unleashed by the events of 9/11 were conveniently hijacked for that purpose.

The plan called for overthrowing the governments of Iraq, and then Iran, with Syria in the sights as well. Of course, Saudi Arabia, with the world’s largest oil reserves was always the biggest prize but its government was already friendly and compliant to the US, and having equally friendly governments in the other countries would ensure that it continued to be so.

That warmongering group is getting increasingly frustrated with how their grand plans have ganged agley. It must have seemed so easy on paper. First you invade Afghanistan, then you invade Iraq, and then Iran (nicely sandwiched between those two countries) would fall like a ripe fruit to a kind of pincer action. The planners seemed to be confident that the overwhelming US military might would easily overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq (which was a correct prediction) and that the people of those countries would be so delighted with the overthrow of their despotic governments (a mixed but fairly correct prediction) that they would eagerly accept US suzerainty over their countries, which was the one prediction that went disastrously wrong.

It turns out that people in general tend to not like being ruled by other countries. Having a foreign troop presence on a seemingly permanent basis inevitably leads, over time, to a resistance movement that will seek to expel it. This would not come as a surprise to anyone who has had any experience or knowledge of the history of colonial rule, but seems to be a lesson that powers with imperial ambitions have to learn from direct experience.

The danger is that the Bush/neoconservative axis is running out of time and options to achieve the next objective of overthrowing the government of Iran. Not only does the Bush administration have little more than two years left in office, the congressional elections of November run the real risk of the Republicans losing their dominance in the House of Representatives or the Senate or both. What that would mean is that the opposing faction of the pro-war/pro-business party would have the majorities and take over the chairs of some key committees. While the Democratic Party is also pro-war, and some of its leaders (like Hillary Clinton) are barely distinguishable from the neoconservatives, there are a few people in key committees who might use their increased clout to slow down and even stop the rush to war.
This is why I am somewhat fearful of the period between now and the elections. If the neoconservatives around Bush feel that time is running out and their plans to invade Iran could be thwarted as a result of the elections, we might see some bad decisions being made between now and then. Of course, it seems clear that the US does not have the troops to invade Iran the way it was done in Iraq, and other countries are not likely to supply them. Furthermore, even if such a decision were made, it would take time to set up a ground war. The Time magazine report that minesweepers are being prepared to be sent to the Straits of Hormuz is a disturbing sign that preparations may be already underway.

The current weakness of the US military’s position, with its conventional forces being bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, raises the possibility that the temptation might arise to use so-called tactical nuclear weapons, horrifying as that possibility is.

Sometimes I can reassure myself that nobody could be that insane to seriously contemplate invading Iran, let alone use nuclear weapons for that purpose. But then I realize that we have Sledge Hammer Bush in the White House, for whom the most violent and reckless option always seems to be the most attractive. It must be clear even to him that if Iraq is what defines his presdency, he will go down as one of the worst presidents in US history. The temptation will be strong to throw the dice once more, to make “success” in Iran (whatever that is) make up for his blatant failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No reasonable person would contemplate something so stupid, of course. But we must remember that we are dealing with the determination of the neoconservatives imposing their will on a weak President. It was not for nothing that former CIA agent Ray McGovern said that during the time of former President George H. W. Bush (for whom he used to provide the daily CIA briefing) these people were called “the crazies” and were kept at arm’s length.

With Sledge Hammer Bush, the crazies have found their soul mate.

POST SCRIPT: Another episode of Religious People Behaving Badly

Jon Stewart explains the controversy over the Pope’s recent remarks that inflamed some Muslims.

In the mid-1980s there was a very funny comedy show on TV called Sledge Hammer which, alas, lasted for only two seasons. (I hear that it is now available on DVD.) The title character was a police detective who was an over-the-top parody of all the hard-boiled, tough detectives ever portrayed, taking particular aim at the iconic Dirty Harry, the character portrayed by Clint Eastwood in a series of highly popular films of that period.
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Over a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts pointing out that in important political issues, one should pay close attention to not what is being discussed or argued over, but to the questions that are not asked. (See here and here for those posts.)

The success of the media propaganda model (see here, here and here) is not in how it answers particular questions but in how it frames the debate. The real service that the media serves in advancing the interests of the pro-war/pro-business party is in narrowing the boundaries of the discussion, so that important but awkward questions are not asked and thus the official narrative is not seriously challenged.
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