McCain’s disastrous economic policies are imprinted with George W. Bush’s legacy and thrown in his face with this new ad from the Obama campaign.

The ad will hopefully remind voters that unless they change who’s in charge economically, they’ll keep getting what they’re getting economically.

But loud and clear, it states Obama’s for the middle class - a tune he should trumpet as much as possible.

Crown Prince of Gonzo Journalism, Matt Taibbi, has published a piece in Rolling Stone that demands reading. It offers a ruthless, raw perspective on the kind of campaign McCain is running, and how it resonates with the tortures he - and America, collectively - endured in the Vietnam era.

Then as now, the crime of the Obama class in the eyes of a wronged veteran like McCain wasn’t that they caused these wartime sufferings; it was that they didn’t cheer them as righteous and necessary, and unhesitatingly support the sending of more soldiers to the same fate. In the present day, it is George Bush who got us into this new Vietnam-like mess and revived the specter of tortured prisoners, but McCain’s anger isn’t focused in that direction. He’s not mad that it’s happening again, not looking to blame the people who actually started the fire. Instead he seems re-energized by the fact that we are all back in that same hell, back to living the PTSD-inducing nightmare that McCain himself never got to leave — and if it takes dumbing down his act and playing to the Rush and Hannity crowd to give his story a happy ending this time around, he won’t hesitate. So if you thought Hillary was bad, buckle your seat belts: The really dumb stuff is just beginning.

It also presents the blood-chilling notion that the same demons of willful ignorance, vanity born of desperate fear, and anger born of spiteful pain have their chains around the necks of the American voter. If Matt Taibbi’s America - McCain’s America - is the America that will be pulling the poll levers this November, expect the worst.

Expect another victory for those too scared, too spiteful or too spineless to accept certain bitter truths about their country - chief among them being that it is time for change.

I will never forget that it was John “Let The Eagle Soar” Ashcroft’s Justice Department that spent taxpayer dollars on covering up Lady Justice’s bosoms. Yet more and more these days, Ashcroft is also being indelibly identified as a man who stood by his principles against torture and warrantless spying in an administration that was scrambling for these and other perversions.

An article yesterday revealed that Ashcroft had made a list of five candidates to lead the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 - an office responsible for overseeing the legality of DoJ deeds - only to have the White House shoot down his candidates and insist on appointing a chief architect of pro-torture, pro-warrantless spying policy.

In an angry phone call hours after Ashcroft’s list reached the White House, President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., quickly dismissed the candidates, all Republican lawyers with impeccable credentials, the sources said. He and White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that Ashcroft promote John Yoo, a onetime OLC deputy who had worked closely with Gonzales and vice presidential adviser David S. Addington to draft memos supporting a controversial warrantless wiretapping plan and detainee questioning techniques.

Ashcroft’s response, despite ailing health and an uphill battle, was to dig in his heels. He fought hard for a compromise candidate, Jack Goldsmith by name. And it was Goldsmith who went on to help expose and undo a lot of the grim deeds of the Gonzales-Yoo policies.

This has brought an interesting distinction to light for me. This distinction is one that I anticipated to develop after the Bush administration, but considering how long and eventful the administration has been, I suppose it was crafted rapidly. It is the distinction that even among the cliquish Neo-Conservatives, as in practically any group, there are moral true believers and there are self-serving hypocrites.

John Ashcroft is, apparently, a man that does indeed walk the walk. He surely has a few skeletons in his closet, but by all indications he struggled to stick by the Constitution, even when the agenda of his cohorts was pulling hard in a dangerous new direction. He may have wanted to chip away at civil rights progress - there is no painting him as other than a staunch enemy to the ACLU, pro-choice movements and drug users - but apparently believed in his gut that there were certain lines America did not cross.

I would imagine in Ashcroft’s clean-cut, picket-fence America, they may have locked up the hippies, but they did not torture.

On one level, I’m happy to hear it. It’s nice when someone with dramatically opposing views turns out to have fought the kind of fight I’d want fought.

On the other, it strikes me as an eviscerating tragedy that because a fanatical social conservative doesn’t sink so low as to okay sexual assault as a means of interrogation, he stands out as an exceptional hero in an administration the greatest country in the world has lived under for eight of its most critical years.

Oil hit $144 a barrel today, making good on a threat reportedly issued by Osama bin Ladin back in the good old days. Back then, of course, it was some over-inflated bogeyman intended to represent the extremity of evil he was capable of.

Now, we call it, “the results of a short-sighted energy policy.”

”If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ”He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.

Gasp. The horror. The article from October, 2001 went on to predict things would be stable, but one never knows what Middle East instability might lead to. Best not rock the boat!

…Most Western politicians and oil industry experts say they believe assurances from the Middle East that oil supplies will stay stable as the American-led attacks on terrorist groups continue. But in such a profoundly changed world, they concede, anything is possible. [Ed. Note: Emphasis mine.]

“Anything,” such as, I don’t know, an enormous war in the Middle East that cost more than Vietnam from ‘65 to ‘73 and a soaring debt devaluing the currency oil is valued in.

Do not be fooled, dear reader - your pump-side woes are not due to lack of supply! If we drill in ANWR, offshore and Dinosaur National Park, we’ll still only affect the oil market marginally and get a touch more crude out of the bargain. And the people selling your local Gas-O their petrol have plenty of crude. Supply is not the problem behind the prices.

The problem is two-fold. One part is explained easily enough: Nations with booming industrial growth - remember, all those jobs we shipped overseas? - like India and China are willing and able to out-buy us.

Second is also clear, but a bitter pill for many proud Americans to swallow: Yes, the corporations are screwing you on the price.

Soaring oil prices lifted Chevron Corp.’s annual profit to $18.7 billion in 2007, the fourth consecutive year that the San Ramon company made record amounts of money.

Exxon Mobil, the country’s largest oil company, reported on Friday that its 2007 profit hit $40.6 billion, a 3 percent increase from 2006, while sales passed $404 billion. No American business has ever scored a higher profit. [Ed. Note: Again, emphasis me.]

So does this mean Osama won? Did he use some strange ray to influence the oil companies to raise the prices, or secretly connive with the Chinese to take all the blue-collar jobs and use the money they generated to buy up American debt?

No, actually, that was America that did it to itself.

On the latter point, just about everybody in the political establishment this side of John Edwards beats the “free trade” drum. And on the former, I’m sorry, but you elect an oil man and his Vice-oil man, and you’ll get a government by and for oil men. It’s a simple matter of who you’re accountable to, and after spending his life surrounded by, supported by, loved by people in the oil and oil-related industry, I doubt the guy’s going to do other than pour money into their pockets.

I would love to be proved to the contrary, but nothing in our energy and fiscal policy I’ve found will do that.

So yet another of bin Ladin’s fiery doomsaying has befallen us thanks to our democratic will - or duping, depending on your outlook on the American on the whole. We chalk that up along with being bogged down in Afghanistan and unable to solve a single major foreign policy crisis - North Korea, Darfur, Iraq, Palestine - since 9/11.

Compared to Osama’s fatwas, Karl Rove and his charts just don’t even rate.

Keith Olbermann presented Obama’s FISA vote choices in a positive light in his latest Special Comment:

Either option is fine by me, given that neither option sees a piece of legislation that is, in essence, retroactive legitimacy for law-breaking - so long as Obama becomes President, that is. But then, so much of the healing this nation needs depends on that.

Today, a voice of prophecy from within the upper rungs of the US Evangelical community announced that a principal monster in recent American history is on the decline.

I often muse on monsters, and on what people at the times of their decline must have felt and thought when at last they realized that the monsters were no longer there, no longer real - at what point did scholars accept that the scrawl on a map reading “Here There Be Dragons” was only figurative? When were the braids of garlic taken down from the doors, the salt used simply to flavor food rather than cast away demons? When did we finally, as a people, give up on the idea of finding a giant?

There must have been a comfort to it, but with it, a certain degree of willful disbelief - an instinct that demanded that the monster was real, their impotence just another sinister deceit, their dread violation imminent. There must be those who believed the only fact that mattered was keeping the door barred and the cross clenched tight.

I’m trying not to be one of those. I’m trying to believe that James Dobson is soon to fade from the political scene.

In his article, “Dr. Dobson Has Just Handed Obama Victory,” Frank Schaeffer, novelist, Evangelical and former religious right member, declared that Dobson was on his way out:

Dobson is one of the Evangelical religious right old guard. He’s to the right what Nader is to the left.

For those of you unaware, Dobson is the head of ‘Family Research Council,’ a media network and political action group that four cornerstones: The eradication of all forms of legal abortion, sex education and birth control; the blanket ban of gay marriage and gay rights; the mandate of Christian prayer and teaching in public schools and services; and severe punishments for criminals.

It is little surprise, then, that Dobson became to George W. Bush what Billy Graham was to Nixon. His power was more considerable, in fact, with his prayers welcoming Bush to office on the inaugural day and his pay-off coming hours later as Bush cut off funding to all human rights groups abroad that had the audacity to mention contraception, thus causing more abortions, AIDS babies and unwanted pregnancies.

Since then, Dobson has been a guiding light, helping Bush lead America back toward the dark ages. Principally, his role has been to deliver the Evangelical vote as a bloc, giving the administration and its cronies in the GOP that crucial dependable sliver of voters that kept them winning elections, much to peoples’ shock.

But the political winds have shifted, and with them, Dobson’s fortunes. His followers have been scattered like wheat, you might say, as the Evangelical community fragments into the dozens of diverse political positions it once was before the era of the Religous Right’s yoke.

This transformation, compellingly depicted in the CNN Special, “God’s Warriors,”
may surprise many accustomed to seeing “concerned Christians” as a tongue-clucking, gay-sex-obsessed voting bloc. We now have the bizarre offshoots of Pastor Hagee’s eschatalogy-made-policy ministry, Cizik’s “Green like Jesus” movement, and numerous other reassessments of what it means to be both old enough to vote and born-again. I eagerly await the release of “The Faith of Barack Obama” by Evangelical author Stephen Mansfield, who wrote a similar piece on George W. Bush, rallying readers to examine and endorse Obama as a “true Evangelical.”

Mansfield’s principal concern is not policy, but the sincere synergy with a person of sincere faith. That is a priority many Evangelicals share. It may, in turn, harken an era of shared political will between the future President Obama and the Evangelical community at large, as they come to embrace his vision of a more universal, tolerant and social Christianity.

Soon, we might find ourselves marveling at the very notion that such monsters as Dobson could have even existed in Evangelical America.

A development on the global security scene today underscored just how many disasters President Bush, in his arrogant ignorance, has piled upon our nation - his removal of sanctions against North Korea and pending removal of them from the State Department list of terrorism sponsors.

To what do they owe this jaw-dropping generosity?

North Korea is planning the televised destruction of a 65-foot-tall cooling tower at its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The cooling tower is a key element of the reactor, but blowing it up - with the world watching - has little practical meaning because the reactor has already been nearly disabled.

In case you’re not so intimately familiar with the history of the Bush administration’s relationship with the North Koreans and their nuclear weapons program that your skin crawls to hear of this, here’s a quick summary:

Clinton followed the lead of the South Korean government in dealing with North Korea, slowly dismantling sanctions as the North Koreans visibly dismantled their WMD and rocket program.

Bush rolled in and cut off the civilian nuclear technology that had been being sent to Korea under the “Agreed Framework,” as it was called. Then he spouted off about North Korea being part of the infamous and utterly incomprehensible “Axis of Evil.” He swore up and down about North Korea’s wicked deeds, and North Korea promptly kicked every form of surveillance out of their country, cranking the WMD programs up to full speed. Bush did nothing but bluster.

For six years.

Six years passed with Bush insisting on multi-lateral talks and sanctions and in essence just yelling over the 38th parallel as the North Koreans sped their development of missiles that could hit America and nuclear weapons to completion. Then, amazingly, right after the nuclear test, North Korea said it was open to nuclear disarmament talks with the UN and the parties the US had brought to the table.

Time to rejoice? Not exactly. Inspectors are back in North Korea, being directed where the Koreans want to direct them. In return, the Koreans have received aid and a lifting of financial restrictions.

And surprisingly, about this time, North Korean nuclear components started showing up in other countries - Syria, namely.

The Bush administration’s reaction? Give North Korea more concessions than even Clinton did by removing sanctions and taking them off the terrorism sponsor list. In his own words:

“I’m pleased with the progress. I’m under no illusions. This is the first step. This isn’t the end of the process. It is the beginning of the process.”

Actually, Dubya, it’s at a place even further back than the beginning. It’s the beginning of the process to get back to somewhere near the beginning of the process: A point where North Korea didn’t have nuclear weapons, didn’t have inter-continental missiles, wasn’t selling nuclear programs to unstable Middle Eastern nations and was actually held accountable for their deeds by the watch list.

I sometimes wonder if the President makes decisions entirely counter to reality. Before, North Korea was getting the big carrot of light-water reactors from the US, and could be observed, and so he cut them off and antagonized them as much as possible. Now, North Korea has the ability to make nukes and is selling them to other countries, so they get a stamp of approval from the State Department and we open trade with them.

It’s such typical behavior by the coterie in the White House today - and of the man who, in pursuit of the White House, so slavishly and irrationally parrots them, John McCain. Meaning, it’s typical bully behavior; picking on the weak and talking tough, but simpering and crawling as soon as someone shows a little muscle.

McCain’s all too ready to sound off about takin’ the fight to the terrorists in Iraq indefinitely, but ask him if he’s willing to go the whole hog and actually look for Osama where he lives, and suddenly the Admiral’s son is puling about how it’s just too complicated.

Bush puts all of America’s strategic chips in his cash cow of an anti-ballistic missile program, fanning the fires of an arms race just at the time the USSR’s old stockpiles are crumbling and Pakistan’s selling country-killing tech to anyone who’ll buy, but then has the gall to suck up to Russia and North Korea.

Both men need to learn a basic tenet of warfare: Do not talk the bloody talk unless you are prepared to walk the bloody walk.

Where does their kind of behavior get us? Taking one step forward at a place leagues worse than the beginning we started at.

The US Army’s greatest adversary of the 21st century has presented itself plain as day. No, it’s not Kim Il Jong’s blizzard of surplus Soviet tanks. It’s the Bush White House.

Here’s the story. It’s one you might’ve heard before. The wars of the Bush administration have seen more outsourcing of military functions to the private sector than ever before. Funny thing is, the privatization has led to profiteering:

Since 2005, the Army Criminal Investigation Command has opened 168 investigations related to contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, according to spokesman Chris Grey.

The US Army’s good at producing simple solutions, though you wouldn’t know it from their paperwork. When faced with the daunting task of trying to regulate the rampant corruption, over-charging and mismanagement of Private Military Contractors (PMCs), they came up with a chain of command to impose oversight.

After all, since virtually nothing has been done to the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater by the White House, the Army has the right - nay, the responsibility! - to protect itself. Right?

Wrong, according to the Office of Management and Budget, who specifically refused to allot the $1.2 million for the five Generals the Pentagon had recommended the Army put in place.

This is abyssmal. At least a billion dollars is known to have been overcharged, and billions more were granted or proposed under suspicious circumstances. The very least the Army could do is appoint someone to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, and the White House deliberately shoots it down.

It’s been noted that the disaster in Iraq has not been a disaster for Bush and Cheney’s friends at Halliburton, DynCorp and other PMCs. It has, in fact, been for the close friends and co-investors of these men, an enormous financial windfall. It’s been the jackpot.

And whatever their ultimate motives, their actions this week were clearly geared to keep it that way.

Post Script: So as to not to seem as though I am making insubstantiated accusations of collusion, I will be composing a post detailing the interrelation between VP Cheney, Bush and the PMC sector. I assure you, dear reader, that my accusations of a connection are substantiated.

President Bush never gives up.

Not on his allegiance to the corporations he foisted on the lawless and ravaged Iraq. Not on his intellectually bankrupt advisors. Not on the legitimization of domestic spying without inter-branch oversight and of torture.

And today, he used the occasion of celebrating Israel’s anniversary to remind us that he hasn’t given up on trying to influencing American politics when he equated Barack Obama’s policies of engaging our enemies in diplomacy with the kind of appeasement that led to World War II.

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama … to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before … As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

I have no idea what histories he has been reading, but apparently he hasn’t been reading them right.

As Obama pointed out in his response to the comments, diplomatic engagement with enemies who called for our obliteration was the keystone of Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan’s strategies to win the Cold War. The nails in Communism’s coffin were not won by the kind of six-shooter braggadocio Bush spouts off - they are named ‘Cuban Missile Crisis negotiations,’ ‘opening up talks with Beijing and Moscow,’ and ‘Glasnost/Perestroika.’

Some measure of consolation can be taken in the President’s disastrous disapproval ratings. But disapproving of his performance doesn’t immediately suggest disapproving of his message, his values or his competence. And to the extent that this message could have any resonance with the public, voicing it verges on criminal irresponsibility.

Even if one imputes noble motives to Bush, one has to recognize his words as fear-mongering for an invalidated and hateful cause. In short, its not only stupid, as history proves; it’s using people’s fears to defend stupidity.

The disturbing thing is that, as I note, even people who disapprove of him might find truth in what he said, because it stirs their basic fears and aggressions. It inspires the lowest common denominator in people - the distrust of the neighbor and the malice that comes from that distrust - something we all share and that our “better angels,” notably faiths like Christianity, define goodness as being able to rise above.

We can take little solace that those primal fears will be consistently overcome. But I hope that when a terrified, confused public weighs those fears against the worth of Bush’s words, they remember the most important lesson of his Presidency:

That if any President’s beliefs and strategies were discredited by history, it was those of George W. Bush.

Tonight, a special comment from Keith Olbermann had me transfixed. Its subject, Bush and his feelings about Iraq. I present it here:

It is unforgiving and furious. No doubt this will offend some.

Yet whether one’s attitudes lean toward a reinforcement of our presence or a redeployment from that maelstrom to the other Bush war - Afghanistan - or home, this much seems certain: America grapples with disasters abroad, and bravely so. Perhaps we do the nature of the situation a disservice by being so polite about it. Perhaps, like is the case on the front lines we are indelibly engaged on, ‘unforgiving and furious’ is what is called for.

The Chinese curse - “may you live in interesting times” - comes to mind when I reflect that tonight is the last time we will hear a State of the Union Address from one of the most interesting Presidents America has ever had. George W. Bush, for all the mysteries and mistakes that characterize his tenure in office, will surely say that “the state of the nation is strong.” And in many regards, the news of the day suggests that even if we are not yet strong as we might be, our inner strength will see us there.

Our military efforts are increasingly successful. This is largely due to the military leadership of David Petraeus and the tens of thousands serving under him, whose aptitude and innovation have allowed him to circumvent the idiocy, vanity and avarice of the politicians in charge of him. Every significant accomplishment - most significant of all being the coalition with the militias we fought against - was in spite of, not because of, our political leaders. Today, we are closing in on what might be the elimination of al-Qaeda’s major tactical assets in Iraq.

U.S. commanders have described Mosul as the last major Iraqi city with a significant al-Qaida presence, although they have warned insurgents remain a potent force in rural areas south and northeast of Baghdad.

But the military has said Iraqi security forces will take the lead in the city — a major test of Washington’s plans to someday shrink the American force and leave it as backup for Iraqi security forces.

Al-Qaida and its supporters would find themselves without a major base of operations if ousted from Iraq’s third-largest city, which occupies transport crossroads between Baghdad, Syria and other points.

At home, another kind of circumvention of the politically perditious is going on. Following an eviscerating victory over Clinton in South Carolina that saw him more than doubling her numbers and even claiming nearly double the percentage of the white vote he was expected to get, Barack Obama is gathering scads of endorsements from the people who count. A trend is becoming increasingly obvious - the moneyed and shiftless support Clinton, the intelligent and dynamic support Obama. We see this in the plethora of poets, philosophers and policy gurus that have thrown their support behind Barack, and the media moguls, corporate officers and radicals who favor Hillary.

“In addition to trouncing Clinton by a more than 2-to-1 margin in South Carolina on Jan. 26, Obama, an Illinois senator, has locked up two key endorsements. Caroline Kennedy, announcing her support yesterday, likened Obama to her father, President John F. Kennedy; Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the few Democrats with a national following, announced his endorsement today.

Also, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who described Bill Clinton as the U.S.’s “first black president” a decade ago, announced her support for Obama. In a letter to Obama released by his campaign, she said he has displayed “wisdom” that makes him “the man for this time.”

And so we continue to gather our strength - we set the wise against the wealthy, and the confident against the corrupt - and we hope that it will be enough. I believe that we can demostrate that it is, even though we have stumbled and been tripped many times by the likes of W. and Hillary. Tonight, we will hear that we can.

In a week and a day, we will have to prove it.

It’s now all but official: We’re going to attack Iran in the not-too-distant future. That’s what President Bush indicated this morning in an address to the world: With Orwellian doublethink logic - the same that goaded the country into Iraq - the President’s argument went that in order to prevent World War III, we would have to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons at any cost, even by going to war.

“We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel,” he said. “So I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

So the premise is that in order to prevent disastrously widening the war on their terms, we best widen it first. Setting that dangerous policy aside for a moment, it takes a lot of hostile assumptions to get to Bush’s perspective at all.

The first assumption is an easy one, considering the media is parroting it loudly and incessantly: The assertion that Ahmadinejad wants to turn Israel into a seething nuclear soup. That’s a misunderstanding, and not a minor one - not a “shrug your shoulders”, “what’s the difference” mistranslation. It’s that little distinction between accusing him of advocating anti-Semitic genocide and advocating a position even some Israeli parliament members support: Namely, Ahmadinejad’s position is not “wiping Israel from the map” with some impossible shower of IRBMs he does not and will never have - it’s that Arabs in Israel should be given voting rights and should then force a referendum to how Israel should be constituted: As a segregated Jewish state with a non-voting population or not.

TIME: You have been quoted as saying Israel should be wiped off the map. Was that merely rhetoric, or do you mean it?

Ahmadinejad: People in the world are free to think the way they wish. We do not insist they should change their views. Our position toward the Palestinian question is clear: we say that a nation has been displaced from its own land. Palestinian people are killed in their own lands, by those who are not original inhabitants, and they have come from far areas of the world and have occupied those homes. Our suggestion is that the 5 million Palestinian refugees come back to their homes, and then the entire people on those lands hold a referendum and choose their own system of government. This is a democratic and popular way. Do you have any other suggestions?

Even taking that into consideration though, we see that Mahmoud is no friend to the ADL and Likud Party. There’s no doubt that Iran considers its chief rival in the region to be Israel, and vice versa. But to get to where President Bush wants people to go takes a further assumption - namely, that Iran’s building a nuclear weapon.

Iran certainly has incentive to do so. After all, Israel - which attacks without warning or recompense - has nuclear weapons. Being “the other nuclear armed state” would give it clout, which it certainly wants. And, lastly, as North Korea has proven, once you have nukes, you can do practically anything you want, even extorting the US. But just how close is Iran to getting one of these bad boys?

We’ll mark off the steps. First, they need a nuclear plant. That’s allegedly where they want to start - getting a nuclear plant to overcome their sole, crippling energy concern: That even though they have lots of oil, they have few means to refine it, and so are suffering the same energy crisis as any other nation that’s not weathly nearly beyond measure. Once they have the plant, they need to equip it with the means of producing weapons-grade fissionable material. After that’s done, they need a bomb program. And once, at last, they have a bomb - mind you, this would take several years - they need to get the delivery systems. This entire process is extremely expensive in terms of treasure and time.

“Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community,” ElBaradei said in an interview with Italian RAI television. The IAEA director called for international leaders to “give peace a chance,” underlining that no hidden radioactive substances or underground production sites had yet been found. However, he admitted: “Iran has not yet completely revealed all the aspects of its nuclear programme.”

Here we are again: The IAEA urges peace and says the threat’s ages away, and Bush and other Western leaders act as though a gun’s to our head with the hammer cocked. And most importantly, as with Saddam’s WMD program, just about every intelligence source without bias doubts the claims that Iran’s doing this. The only reason America believes this is what’s going on is because the White House has been saying, over and over and over, that this is the case. So while, for the reasons above, it’s not entirely unreasonable to say that Iran may want such a program, we are not nearly at the crisis point the Administration wants to put us at. As with Saddam’s “smoking gun”, it’s a matter of the President and his cadre insisting on something only they and a few others are supposedly convinced of, for reasons that are in no way immediately important beyond furthering their political doctrine.

This brings us to the last assumption we must make in order to accept - as many frightened Americans will - the perspective Bush spoke from this morning. We’ve covered that Ahmadinejad doesn’t want to annihilate all Jews in a fiery blast. We’ve covered that we’re years, billions and a whole of wariness away from even a potential fiery blast. The final assumption is that any of those conditions would leave to World War III.

Even if Ahmadinejad wanted to incinerate Israel, why would he do so when suicide would be the result? Does anyone have a doubt that an attack against Israel or the US - especially one with nuclear weapons - would lead to anything else besides Iran’s total devastation by our nuclear arsenal? Even if Iran was stone nuts enough to do it, that “war” would be a very brief exchange indeed - about the time it would take for two fistfuls of Titan class ICBMs to travel from silos in the southeast seaboard to Tehran.

No, the real World War III would have to involve the world - and that would not be too far fetched. Bush has already led us from the rosy glow of liberalist 9/11-era global sympathy - back when Iranians wept on America’s behalf, terrorism was a law-enforcement issue, the world thought us unbeatable and Russia was declawed by the disarmament process - to an era where our nation is loved but our politics are almost universally despised. The ABM Treaty is gone, our war chest and military reserves are gone, and Russia is resurgent, shaking hands with Mahmoud and stomping its feet on Serbia’s behalf again. For an actual world war, we are busily brewing a lot of the proper ingredients.

Avoiding World War III should concern us. And unilateral action, overstating threats, twisting rhetoric to the end of terrorizing the public and fomenting fear of another pre-emptive war abroad is just the opposite of “avoiding.”

The power to legally spy on most of the other nations of the world’s electronic communications is now within the US intelligence community’s grasp.

The President wanted to expand the surveillance powers to include those communications after the FISA court ruled he couldn’t. The Democrats produced a bill to comply, but that included an oversight of the program. This didn’t float - the President said he’d veto it, and so support in the House dried right up. Then a bill largely developed by the White House was presented, has passed the Senate, and will reach the House just as soon as possible.

These measures do address a major opportunity our intelligence community was missing - namely, that a lot of the emails and other electronic traffic in the world rout through US-based providers, and so warrantless scanning those servers would be a gold mine. Not being able to was like extending our 4th Amendment protection to the world at large.

The element of oversight - some kind of legal provision to ensure that the Executive is being as trustworthy as it says - might have had a place in all this. Fortunately for any who don’t think that oversight’s due, or even allowable, the Democrats were the defenders of that measure, and have toppled over with their usual puling aplomb:

Senate Democrats reluctantly voted for a plan largely crafted by the White House after Mr. Bush promised to veto a stricter proposal that would have required a court review to begin within 10 days.

The Senate bill gives Mr. Bush the expanded eavesdropping authority for six months. The temporary powers give Congress time to hammer out a more comprehensive plan instead of rushing approval for a permanent bill in the waning hours before lawmakers begin their monthlong break.

…In the House, Democrats lost an effort to push a proposal that called for stricter court oversight of the way the government would ensure its spying would not target Americans.

I don’t even really oppose the expansion of FISA powers. I do object to having to search this story out, then having to search for the details of the compromises and details of the bill’s powers. I do object to matters of Constitutional protections being almost an afterthought to the louder rows over such crucial legislation as the SCHIP program and cigar tax.

And though I often feel glad that the Democrats are so toothless, venal and flaccid, it is nevertheless a bit shameful to see them taking a kind of “whatever you want” attitude when it comes to oversight of the compromise of Constitutional civil liberties.

The situation in Iraq may seem a muddle, but only when viewed through the lens of expectations. If one views it as a failed military venture that can only produce decay, recent developments will seem unbelievable. If the assumption is that it is a noble expedition wherein a gain in one field means a gain overall, it will seem worthy of general optimism. With either perceptive, perplexity will linger, because neither grasps the simplicity of the situation - that Iraq, like any state or any conflict, has both revolutionary victories and cataclysmic inherent problems.

Here is a clear picture of what may seem mixed results.

The Surge Strategy is beginning to attain its initial aims. The spike in violence that resulted from increased, aggressive contact with the enemy has left their casualties mounting while ours have begun to level off. We effectively secure ground, while still maintaining an aggressive posture against enemy strongholds that the new focus away from Sunni extremists in general has permitted. At the risk of sounding trite or overly simplisitic, it is a fair assessment to say that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is “on the run“. This does not mean they cannot retrench. Additional forces are required to truly condemn them to a fate of eradication or effective neutralization. But these forces have been demanded and are being made available - both from the United States and from the Iraqi Army.

Military successes are certain. There remain three significant elements that will continue to plague Iraq, and all three are largely political. One is that Iran and Saudi Arabia continue to flood their “supporters” - read, armed extremists - in the country with arms and manpower. Without this problem staunched, the enemy’s numbers and strength will readily regenerate. The second is that bombings like the one today will continue to inflict mass civilian casualties, ruining any veneer of real security enjoyed by the Iraqis in mixed-ethnic neighborhoods, most notable Baghdad and its environs. This problem, funded by the prior element and facilitated by corruption within the security structure in that area, will be effectively impossible to truly end without cutting off its source. Lastly, Iraqi military forces lack two key components - experienced leaders, depleted by de-Baathification and attrition, and gear, withheld by the federal government’s executive, Maliki.

There is a trend in all of these injurious elements. Namely, that politics is to blame. Convenient as it is to say that the Democrats in Washington are “cutting the forces off at their knees” like Sean Hannity did today, they have not actually blocked any spending on the war. The goods have been slow in getting there, and to the Maliki government’s credit, the Iraqi budget does include defense spending. Nevertheless, Baghdad has been less of a conduit than a clogged funnel.

The sectarian violence of the streets pales in its damning effects to the sectarian will perpetuated in the Iraqi parliament. Those unfortunate enough to be unpopular with the government - notably the Sunni - are starved and deprived, according to the Inspector General of Reconstruction in Iraq.

How long will the American and Iraqi people be forced to endure this de facto tyranny? We must take a fierce look at the Iraqi government’s leadership and bear in mind that the traditional objective in warfare is to deny the enemy its means to fight. In Iraq, that means is born of poverty, fueled by desperate lack, and conducted by local extremists who see a sectarian showdown as the only real means of securing a fair existence. We need to recognize that the source of this problem is the deliberate stalling in government by a sectarian leader with near total power. And we need to demand of ourselves an answer to those who would fill the extremists’ ranks inspired by the question, “what else do we have to hope for but to secure a victory by force?”

Another question that will be far more audible and explicit in the days to come will be, “how long will this go on?” We are only now beginning the month-long recess of the Iraqi parliament. Even after their return, the frustration with no reconciliation legislation or measures being effective pursued by Maliki’s leadership shows no signs of abating. In fact, it is inspiring even legislators of the more extreme opposition to simply give up on the process. Petraeus’ report will not be redemptive or damning to the effort. It will show improvement in the war, but repeat the clear message about the situation given by the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, in his confirmation hearings this week: That the critical element is reconciliation and the diplomatic engagement of the countries surrounding Iraq.

So, “how long?” considering all these indicators show no sign of conclusion? Likely for a much longer time yet. And this is both good and worrisome.

It is good because the leading opposition to the war in the US Congress - the Democrats, have shown by deed and by leaked strategizing - that short of total submission to their proposed policy of a legislated withdrawal, they will not forcibly affect a change in strategy. Petraeus’ report cannot deliver a sense of total victory nor a promise of total defeat, and so anti-war Republicans will not be any more induced to simply toe the Democratic line. In short, Congress will do nothing different.

Sadly, it is not Congress who needs to do something different. It is good that they continue funding the war effort, for the military is doing good work. But neither solves the situation. Only the Executive branch’s direction can do that. We critics can grumble about Congressional callousness to the Iraqi plight or poll-driven ambivalence over war support, but we would be complaining about eventualities - Congress does not conduct the war, nor the diplomacy with Baghdad, Tehran and Riyadh. They may keep the ship sailing, and mutter mutinous things, but it is the captain who steers the ship.

And what is the captain doing? President Bush spoke with Maliki, who fed him platitudes about realizing how important reconciliation is. The State Department spoke with Iran, who also agreed on the importance of stability in Iraq. And nothing, forseeably, will happen. Many scoff at diplomacy with Iran out of a notion that Iran’s agenda would keep them an enemy of ours no matter what. Can a similar measure not be applied to Maliki and his Shiite DAWA party?

The course is clear. The military is doing great, but it is merely strengthening the skin of a cancerous body. If the United States does not prescribe some political surgery, and soon, Iraq will just continue to die and scores of men and women, American and Iraqi, will daily die along with it.

The surgery in question should be an irresistable political demand that high-level officials of the United States Executive meet with the key legislators in the Iraqi Parliament and not recess until all critical reconciliation laws are passed and the means to enact them established. Like the Constitutional Convention of the US’ history, the legislators and officials should be forced to remain in each other’s company until all objectives are reached. This need not be done with an “or else” - threats of withdrawing troops or aid need not enter into the situation. When the inner court of the leader of the free world comes to town with uncompromising dialogue, the Parliament will listen. Attendance will be mandatory for the same reasons voting was. And if both sides boycott the talks, the US should reserve the right to dissolve the government it created as fatally flawed.

There is but one authority on earth that can deliver that prescription.

Let us pray for the sake of the sick, desperate and dying that he decides to do so.

In anticipation of the July 15th briefing I here encapsulate the developing events in Iraq. Partly this is to compile a list of significant events in order to figure whether progress is being made in the slightest. But before we begin to measure, it’s worthwhile to figure out how to measure.

[Ed. Note: Thanks to REM for correction on the Churchill quote.]

Despite their convenience, body counts have never been a good indicator of how a war’s going - ours or theirs. Measuring the enemy’s body count certainly doesn’t work, as Vietnam well proved. A staggering amount of Vietnamese were killed in the latter phases of the war, even after Nixon’s victory resulted in a shift from troop level increases to withdrawal, and still it did nothing to shatter the enemy’s resolve. Similarly, going on the basis of our own casualties is again a bad indicator.

There are two reasons for this, and while neither has much to do with the basis of anti-war advocates’ arguments, both strike against the foremost reason they have been gaining in strength of late - namely, the mounting number of American dead “despite” the Surge. What people must realize is that the mounting dead are not an unexpected byproduct of the Surge, but in many ways the result of it.

The first reason for this is that more troops means more contact with the enemy, and more contact means more death. Sometimes this is more death all around, but in a counter-insurgency like Iraq, it could mean just against the occupier. The purpose of this is not purely suicidal, however - the intent is always to use those troops to hold more ground, either to secure against the enemy or to encircle and destroy them.

The second reason is that it is usually when a side is pressured by its adversary that it throws more forces into the fray with more determined and cunning tactics. This has been the case in almost every major war of late - World War I had the German Spring Offensive in response to the United States entering the war, World War II had the notorious Battle of the Bulge as well as similar offensives in the south and in the east, Korea had Pork Chop Hill, Vietnam had the Tet Offensive and the Gulf War had the Battle of 73 Easting. In each instance, the enemy makes a resolute effort to inflict harm so that they’re not overwhelmed fatally. I cannot emphasize enough how high the carnage climbs in the last phases of successful wars - especially our last successful example of nation building from that list, World War II.

One could easily look at that list and say, “Yes, but we lost in Vietnam and didn’t achieve much in Korea”. The critical difference in success is not the body counts, nor when in the process of the war they occurred, but in the political strategy and aims, and in the resolve to see the war through.

World War II was massively expensive in its final phases, in both men and treasure. Body counts soared on all sides, and the US teetered near bankruptcy considering its war debt. So in the end it was moral resolve that saw that conflict through to a successful end as much - if not more so - than any other factor. Considering the resolve shown by the enemy, who truly fought to the last as we occupied their homeland with devastating force, it could have been a very near thing.

We lost in Vietnam because we chose to pull out. Tet was a horrible, even crippling blow to many of the North Vietnamese forces, particularly their irregulars, the Viet Cong. But rather than exploit this, we kept pressure on them at consistent levels and then, a year later, switched to a strategy of withdrawal.

That having been said, pulling out is not always a bad thing. In Vietnam it was arguably the right thing, because what it would have taken to win at that late phase would have been a strategy too aggressive for the American psyche and American coffers to endure - essentially an invasion and occupation of the North. Korea was a similar situation, wherein we had neither the resources nor the raw manpower to invade our real adversary above the contested 38th Parallel - the People’s Republic of China. So even though political strategy and the will to see it out is the critical factor in turning the late phase bloodbath into grounds for a victory parade or for decades of hand-wringing, people need to be honest about what the cost of victory will be. There is no doubt that America, with its awesome resources, can pay it. The question is whether it wants to.

Right now, the manpower and capital of the Surge is being poured into a single strategic purpose. It is not the annihilation of the al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, even though that’s part of it. It is not securing all of Baghdad or the contested areas either, though providing a more permanent security presence in critical areas can, is, and should be going on. It is giving the Iraqi Parliament and the areas of the country that they need to apply their political will to in order to create an infrastructure some protection.

In order to judge our success in Iraq, we must not look at the body counts. The “suicidal surge” is an accurate characterization. That is the nature of war. It is always suicide. We may wrap it in flags and anthems and endless reels of action films but in the end result, no matter what is written on the note there is still a body on the floor. In Iraq’s case, 3,600 American bodies. But in order to judge the success of that sacrifice, we need to judge not the sacrifice itself but the end it was made for.

We need to judge the political progress being made.

And, sadly, though our troops have been committed to the fight in record numbers and our ethics, possibly our ultimate security, have been compromised as we arm both Shiite and Sunni militants - as we give every indication tactically that we will defeat the hard line insurgents at any cost - there has been no such political commitment. The surge has us putting our troops in terrific risk, both in conventional battles and by essentially massing up so that insurgents can bomb us more effectively, and yet both our political leadership and the Iraqis have shown no such embrace of risk, no such devotion to victory. This is the truly sickening and sad thing about Iraq. We’re demanding that our sons and daughters step in front of bullets and bombs so that partisan strife can continue. Eight Americans died while Bush was hosting Putin for two days of fun in the sun in Kennebunkport.

That is not oversimplifying or over dramatizing. There is no doubt the ABM quarrel with Russia is a matter of grand significance, but can any American think there is a more pressing issue than Iraq? And since we can, objectively, set aside the bearing the casualties of the Surge have as a measure of the war’s outcome, can we all subjectively agree that it seems the political solution those casualties are being sacrificed for is under served by both sides?

Bush has done extremely little as regards dealing with the Iraq parliament this year. Granted, it is the Iraqis in parliament themselves who need to reconcile and share power, and it is they who’re dragging their feet, but then we must consider why we’re loath to force them to move. Why are we content to perpetuate this seemingly ceaseless cycle of butchery in order to prop up a government that is not just practically but willfully dysfunctional?

Just like in the last phases of World War II and of Vietnam - of our proudest war and our most shameful - we are scraping the bottom of the war chest. The expense to our treasury is enormous, and the term “war economy”, spoken with an ominous and despair tone, is becoming increasingly familiar. The expense in terms of damage to the minds and bodies of our service people is also crippling on a mass scale, as the Walter Reed, VA compensation and recruiting failures have shown. Things are breaking down. The same holds true for the strongholds of al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia. But to what end are we stacking up the bodies in record amounts? Bush seems to be evading the Iraq issue rather than tackling it with all he has. Certainly the Congress has been fixated on it of late. But both sides talk merely of the military aspect. It is the political failures of the Iraqi parliament that must be at the center of each argument.

And, just as only direct, sustained force can win tactically, only direct, sustained political intervention is going to get things moving in the halls of power in Baghdad. Until then, we can pile our corpses as high as we’d like to buttress those walls. Without providing a strong center with political will, it lets the universal chaos of war drift across the fine line between success and simple suicide.