Remora

DEMS WAKE UP FROM YEARLONG SLEEP, ASK "WHA'S HAPPENING?"





Which should be the headline to the NYT piece on the hearing held to determine the 'price' of our beautiful occupation of Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz is the lead administration meretrician on the case (hey, shouldn't there be such a word? Meretrician -- it is an apt description for the present administration's way with figures). He comes a day after Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army let the cat out of the bag "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq." Wolfowitz, a man who has made a vast study of war -- why, he's read several books on the subject by various Kagans -- is, of course, shocked that we would ever listen to some old no doubt senile duffer sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who actually served in the military -- a service devoutly to be avoided by the key members of this administration when they were in their machine gun bearing primes. Here are a few grafs:

"Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.

"We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion ."

And, from the end of the article, the ever more Rumsfeldian Rumsfeld:

"Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.

Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I've already decided that. It's not useful."

The word fascist is over-used, mainly to describe theocrats of Osama bin Laden's pursuasion -- but surely the blending of bullying and rhetoric, here, the overtness of the lie and the incorrigibility to shame when the lie is found out, carries delicious hints of Mussolini.

Now, to wake up the Dems about this kind of thing, you have to creep up behind them and say Boo. You have to do that for about three years. They are the party of Rip Van Winkle, Li'l Abner, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.



David Corn, doing the wrap up about the intellectual corruption rampant among the Dem establishment that lead up to the fatal vote last year allowing Bush to assume war powers as he will, drew up the painful chronicle of the business, killing the softly with their own quotes, these Dem senatorial types who voted Bush while claiming they were voting for, oh, the UN or something. And he put his finger on the reason the Dems failed in the midyear elections:





"My apologies. I should realize that war -- or pre-war -- does not always adhere to logic. But the meta-message of the Dems also is grounded in a fallacy. They argue Bush cannot be trusted to oversee the U.S. economy. Yet, at the same time, the Democrats -- meaning almost every national elected Democratic leader and 60 percent of the Democratic Senators and 40 percent of the House Democrats -- maintain Bush can indeed be trusted to precipitate and carry out a war. An insensitive, country-club-hanging corporate-lackey who will say anything and screw the middle-class to help out his rich pals, on one hand. But a wise and outstanding (moderate and deliberative, as Biden would say) defender of the nation who deserves loyalty and support, on the other. Can Democrats spell "disconnect"?"

....

We've been reading a book by the Washington Post correspondant, Nathan C. Randall, about the Kurds: After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Randall writes about the refugee rush after the last war and reminds us that the end of the Kurd disaster came when the French -- the French -- came out and pressed upon the reluctant Bush administration the decision to push back Saddam H. from the three provinces of Northern Iraq. Kouchner,Mitterand's junior minister for humanitarian affairs, did the groundwork to prepare this with Ankara.

What strikes us about this is that if the Bush administration had really wanted international support for a war against Iraq, it would have been very easy to build on this history. France would have had a much more difficult time opposing an action that incorporated a strong French precedent. History is woven out of gaps: and we think this gap is significant. Since it has been universally un-recalled, we wonder if this isn't motivated -- a piece of the unconscious floating behind a piece of amnesia. One of the goals, it seems, of the Bush people is to wean the country from the naive trust in such organizations as the UN -- which has been the object of rightwing vituperation since its founding by Roosevelt and various covert communists in his administration oh so long ago. If the Bush's really wanted to build a case that would convince France, the obvious move would be to cite precedents to which the French were not only party, but prime mover. But the more general Bush objective has obviously been to squelch any precedent for buffering American hegemony. When Aznar, Spain's prime minister and Bush's only friend in Spain, asks that Donald Rumsfeld be stifled, he is obviously thinking that the rulebook says, hey, we listen to our allies because, uh, they are our allies.
That rulebook was written by Walter Lippman and Emily Post.
The Bush's rulebook was written by Mario Puzo.