The State of George W. Bush's Union.  (01/24/07)

"All I am saying is give war a chance."  This corruption of The Beatle's sixties antiwar anthem seems the morning after his State of the Union message to pretty well summarize the main focus of Bush's latest round of attempts to justify and prolong the war in Iraq.  His surge of sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq to clear and hold nine districts of Baghdad and al-Anbar province looks like too little, too late, since that solution should have been tried two or three years ago with the addition of several hundred thousand soldiers.  But then Bush has been flying from the seat of his pants since before 9/11, even if he failed to show up for that part of his Air National Guard (Texas and Alabama) training during the Vietnam war, so maybe we should give him several more months, or two or three years, to see if he and his chicken hawk cronies have finally got it right this time.  Only one phrase stood out for me, probably in the first sentence of his speech, when he said the mission (his or someone else's) was to "guard America against all evil."

I have several problems with statements like that one.  George W. Bush certainly believes he became President (I always hesitate to say he was elected to the office in 2000) to protect the US from evil after 9/11, if not before, but that activity, whatever it might involve, does not square with anything I ever learned in a civics class or found expressed in the Constitution with regard to the duties of the chief executive.  Guarding against evil is not a recognized function of any member of our federal government.  It might be something people in the hierarchy of the Church regard as a sacred duty, and I have no problem with anyone wasting their time that way if that is what they think they have to do, but when elected officials make that their primary, in not only, purpose I begin to fear they have strayed far from their elected path.  Waging war to guard the country against evil might work well in video games about the coming apocalypse but again it seems to have no place in a serious pursuit of governance.  Even if Bush believes he was elected to fight evil, someone should explain to him the difference between waging war to spread Christianity in Muslim nations and dealing with issues of secular concern that have spiraled out of control into armed conflict.  While it might be true that the Islamo-fascists are motivated by religious ideology, that does not mean we should respond to them in the same cut of cloth.

Several developments have surfaced since Bush's State of the Union speech that seem relevant to the war on terror.  The Congressional Budget Office issued an estimate of how much the "surge" was likely to cost.  Bush claimed $7 Billion.  The CBO says it will be more like $27 Billion.  The primary source of the difference is that it takes at least one support soldier for every combat soldier in the field--most people say it takes two support troops.  To put 21,500 combat personnel on the ground in Baghdad, another 20 to 40 thousand soldiers in support of them will also have to be sent.  Bush continues to ignore that aspect of the "surge."  It is news he does not want to hear.  General Casey, when asked about the discrepancy, seemed to imply that no "new" support units were going to be necessary for the 21,500 soldiers in the "surge."  It sounded like he was saying they were already in place and therefore could not, or should not, be included in any new cost estimates.  What it sounds like to me is that the so-called "surge" is really a con job being done with smoke and mirrors coupled with tricks of accounting that obscure whatever is actually being done--if it follows previous plans for the war in Iraq, then nothing much is happening or will happen.

A second point was the publication of the "summary" of the National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq.  The NIE paints an incredibly pessimistic outlook for success in Iraq.  It states pretty clearly that, even if the sectarian violence were to be brought under control in Baghdad, which is not likely to happen any time soon, there is little or no reason to believe that reconciliation between Sunni and Shi'a is possible.  The Estimate cites the absence of leadership on both sides for movement toward unity in the Iraqi government to explain their view.  They also said that calling the violence a civil war was inadequate as a description of the true state of the conflict because there are many more than just two sides fighting each other for supremacy.  One reason Casey may have said in his congressional testimony that only half as many troops as Bush was sending in the "surge" were going to be enough was because he, and Bush, already knew what the NIE was going to say and they decided to preempt the report, as in a pre-emptive strike against the enemy, in the hope that doing so would discredit it before anyone had a chance to read it.  Some Republicans who support the war claimed it was a biased account written by liberal Democrats who have always voted for failure in Iraq because they hate Bush and love terrorists, etc.  They are more subtle now than they were before the Mid-Term elections but they still harbor the same twisted views of opposition to Bush's debacle.

A final element of war strategy from the Bush/Cheney perspective that I found accidentally is the information that the American Enterprise Institute, which has long been the primary neoconservative think-tank, is, and always has been, funded by Exxon-Mobile.  Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy (pp.68--96), stated that Saddam Hussein was prepared and planning to award Iraq's oil reserves to French, Russian, and Chinese oil companies for development in 2001, if and when the UN sanctions were lifted by the international community.  Since those sanctions were largely initiated and maintained by the US and UK, Saddam was planning to cut British and US oil companies out of participation in the future of Iraq's oil production.  Prior to the war Exxon-Mobile was on the verge of serious financial difficulty because its oil reserve holdings, the crude product that fuels its profitability, were on a downward spiral to insolvency.  Three and four years into the war in Iraq and Exxon-Mobile has recorded back-to-back best, highest profit margins in the history of any US corporation with $36 Billion in 2005 and $39.5 Billion in 2006.  Not bad for a company on the edge of bankruptcy.  So, what's up with this?  Dick Cheney holds a secret Energy Task Force conference in early 2001 (pre-9/11), claims executive privilege for every aspect of its deliberations (including which energy companies participated), is upheld by the Supreme Court after flying Antonin Scalia to his dick blind in Louisiana to hunt ducks on Air Force One (see "Duck Cheney's Dick Blind"), uses 9/11 to get blanket approval for his, and Bush's, war in Iraq, overthrows the evil and savage dictator Saddam Hussein, because he had WMD (which were never found), and watches Exxon-Mobile post the highest profits in US history.  Oh, by the way, the only true and steadfast support for the war in Iraq, as well as most of its planning, has its origin in neoconservative ideology which lives at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank funded by Exxon-Mobile.  Then, when the war spirals into a civil war catastrophe, Bush concocts a "new way forward" authored by neoconservatives whose salaries are paid by the AEI (Exxon-Mobile), Frederick Kagan and General Keane, against the advice of every person and study group and commission and committee on the planet wherein he escalates US troop commitments to the blood-soaked streets of Baghdad.  The most disgusting aspect of this history is that an investment approaching $1 Trillion of US taxpayer money, and 3,114 American lives, so far, has returned a profit equal to .0755% ($75.5 Billion) to a company that has not invested anything at all in the cost of producing that profit; in fact, Bush/Cheney pushed an energy bill through Congress, the fruits of Cheney's Energy Task Force, that gave away millions of dollars of taxes to Exxon-Mobile in the form of corporate welfare.

Should Bush/ Cheney be impeached?  I'm thinking dragged out of the White House on the end of a rope and hung, by their feet, from a very tall tree on Pennsylvania Avenue.  After an hour or two, they should be forced to walk, crawl, or drag themselves back to Crawford and Wyoming, respectively, or to some other "undesignated" location.

In "Katrina and the War in Iraq" I suggested that many more than 1300 people died in New Orleans during the destruction of the city.  The higher number of 10,000 is one I have suggested.  You have to justify a claim like that one and explain how the government managed to suppress the truth.  I ran across another possible piece of that explanation yesterday.  After the Congressional hearing in New Orleans, which was looking mostly at why the recovery has been so slow, where it can be said to exist at all, a population figure was given for Orleans Parish that placed the number of people living there on August 28, 2005, the day before Katrina's landfall, at 444,000.  This number is odd because after Katrina, and for the following year at least, the only number I ever saw was 462,000--a number apparently based on the 2000 census, perhaps?  How is it possible to conceal 10,000 casualties in a national disaster?  If you under-report the population affected by the disaster by 18,000 people, which is what has been done here, there is no discrepancy between the number present overall before the event and the number who survived after the fact.  The point here is that you do not need to account for people who never existed as part of the population in the first place.  As it stands, there are 8,000 extra people accounted for in the difference between the two figures.  What is really frightening about the discrepancy is the possibility that 18,000 is closer to the mark than 10,000 is.  If your purpose was to conceal 10,000, why give yourself so much leeway in the excessive amount, since 8,000 too many is just as suspicious as 8,000 too few.  Someone knows how many people died in Katrina.  Documents exist that verify the number.  18,000 is not too many.  That many people could have perished.  I base that belief on my knowledge of the city and the way people behaved during four previous hurricane evacuations prior to Katrina.  There were at least 100,000 people in the city on August 29, 2005.  Only about 60,000 were "rescued" and evacuated after the storm.  Many of the 40,000 who have not been formally counted managed to get out of the city on their own.  No one has said what happened to the rest.