1 Boring Old Man

Sixty-three years ago, June 6th, 1944, the Allied Invasion Force landed on the beaches of Normandy France and began the process of ending the occupation of Europe by Nazi Germany. It is a glorious and glorified piece of American history – a piece we can all be proud of. The man who led that invasion went on to become a two term President – a Republican named Dwight D. Eisenhower. He is an American hero. I think he respected the soldiers he sent to die on those beaches.

I was two and a half years old then. I didn’t know it happened. But I do remember vividly a little bit later when everyone was in the streets beating pans and cheering, I was afraid. My mother, noticing my alarm, told me that it was okay – "The war is over!" I didn’t know that wars got "over." I guess I thought they just "were." So, her reassurances didn’t help. I think I was wiser then than I knew. Wars just "are," it seems to me still.

George Bush and Dick Cheney are my peers, maybe younger. All of us grew up with the heroism of the men on the Normandy Beaches standing in front of us. Some grew up with fathers who’d served in that War – George W. Bush being such a person. My dad was a chemist in a TNT plant, and I always wished he’d been a real soldier. Then there was the Korean War. We cut out pictures of jet planes from the newspaper and pasted them in scrapbooks. We arranged plastic G.I.’s on the lawn in mock battle and read comic books about heroic soldiers fighting Red Chinese invaders. It didn’t feel quite the same as WWII – Korea. It was darker, less heroic. President Truman fired General, McArthur, and people boo’d at the newsreel. It was part of the "Cold War." We had air raid drills and got under our desks practicing for the coming thermonuclear destruction [that would have vaporized the desks and everything underneath them]. On D-Day, we celebrated our former valor.

On my first visit home from Medical School, a friend who was in the Army brought home a West Point graduate. They talked about a place called Viet Nam, and told me a childhood friend, David, had died there. It was the days before the Internet. I went home and looked it up. It was a place the French had been driven out of. That’s all I could find in the encyclopedia. By the time I finished my medical training, it was an unpopular war – and I spent my three years in the Air Force on a fighter base feeling guilty about being a soldier. I was in Europe, working in a hospital, having a nice paid overseas vacation. I felt kind of guilty about that too. I thought often of my friend’s early death in Viet Nam.

Now, when I hear the President and the Vice President [people who didn’t even serve the way I did – suiting up and going to work every day in the military], touting slogans that were appropriate on this day, sixty-three years ago, I feel an overwhelming feeling of outrage. We stood for something back then – something very right [or at least opposed something very wrong, because it was very wrong]. And slowly, over my years, that has eroded – each war less justified, more capricious, until now – a war to be ashamed of.

Iraqi Lawmakers Pass Resolution That May Force End of Occupation This Year

While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush’s permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament –now representing a majority of the body — continue to make progress toward bringing an end to their country’s occupation.

The parliament today passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the UN mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure.

The law requires that any future extensions of the mandate, which have previously been made by Iraq’s Prime Minister, be approved by the parliament. It is an enormous development; lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition’s mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now.

Bush Feels ‘Terrible’ for Libby

President Bush feels "terrible" for the family of I. Lewis Libby but does not intend to intervene now in the case of the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was sentenced to prison Tuesday, the White House said.

Bush was informed by aides of Libby’s sentencing in Washington to 2 1/2 years in prison after he got on Air Force One to fly from the Czech Republic to Germany for the G-8 summit of industrialized nations.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino came back on the president’s aircraft to relay Bush’s reaction to the sentence.

"The president said he felt terrible for the family, especially for his wife and kids," Perino said.

"He says he feels terrible for them, he’s sorry for all that they’re going through," she added. Asked if Bush included Libby in the statement, Perino replied, "Yes."

She said that he would not comment any further at this time.

Bush was informed of the sentence just after Air Force One took off from Prague for Germany. He was given the news by chief of staff Joshua Bolten and senior counselor Dan Bartlett.

"The president has not intervened so far in this or any other criminal matter, so he’s going to decline to do so now as well," Perino said.

Bush has made no secret of his fondness for Libby who was a presidential aide as well as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The president, who leaves office on Jan 20, 2009, has never ruled out a pardon for Libby.

I suppose the best thing about the Libby Trial and sentencing was Judge Reggie Walton’s handling of things. He didn’t allow the ludicrous Memory Defense, and in his sentencing statement he was very clear that he was sentencing a guilty man. Libby’s plea – "It is, respectfully, my hope that the court will consider, along with the jury verdict, my whole life" – is not consistent with our judicial tradition. Walton respectfully reminded Libby, "Mr. Libby failed to meet the bar. For whatever reason, he got off course." Unfortunately, Scooter Libby was not "off course" from his or his boss’s perspective. He was definitely on course – the course mapped for him to follow.

This case is a National Tragedy. The Chief of Staff for the Vice President of the United States of America lied to a Federal Investigator to protect his boss, the Vice President of the United States, from prosecution for deliberately revealing the identity of an American Undercover C.I.A. Agent who was working on trying to find out about an enemy’s Nuclear Bomb Program. That identity was revealed to discredit the Agent’s husband who criticized the Administration for lying – lying to get us into a war that has also turned out to be a National Tragedy.

In fact, this whole Administration is, and will always be, a National Tragedy. I’m tired of following it, tired of reading about it, tired of thinking about it. We all are. Who wants to live in a time of National Shame? Who wants to walk down the street and see that over half of the people you see there voted for these people, twice? Who wants to know that if there were an election tomorrow, a lot of them would still vote for these people?

We all bear the responsibility for allowing Scooter Libby, for the invasion of the Department of Justice by political hacks, for the torture of prisoners, for the invasion of a country that was no threat to us, for the death of Americans and Iraqis for no good purpose. We should be throwing the tea in the Boston Harbor and actively working to end the nightmare, before it worsens. Instead, we left it in the hands of people we were supposed to trust, and in this case – they came through. Thanks Judge Walton, not for the verdict. Thanks to Patrick Fitzgerald and some honest jurors for that. Thanks to Judge Walton for just doing his job.

Dark days these, but Libby’s Trial is at least a sign that we’re not totally dead inside.

The former U.S. attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who is now a high-ranking Justice Department official, added that he was not particularly familiar with the part of the Justice Department manual that prohibited suits just before elections, even though it is underlined to emphasize its importance.

Graves, like Schlozman a Bush administration appointee, also testified Tuesday in a hearing devoted solely to Missouri. Graves made it clear he disapproved of some of the actions of the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City — and elsewhere in the country — since his departure. But it was Schlozman’s appearance that sparked fireworks. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., screamed at Schlozman, saying in 30 years on the panel he had never seen a witness so unprepared and unresponsive.

• 30 Months Detention
• $250000 Fine
• 400 hours Community Service
• 2 year Supervised Release

US can forget about winning in Iraq: top retired general

The man who commanded US-led coalition forces during the first year of the Iraq war says the United States can forget about winning the war.

"I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will — not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat," retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez said in an interview.

Sanchez, in his first interview since he retired last year, is the highest-ranking former military leader yet to suggest the Bush administration has fallen short in Iraq.

"I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time," Sanchez told AFP after a recent speech in San Antonio, Texas.

"We’ve got to do whatever we can to help the next generation of leaders do better than we have done over the past five years, better than what this cohort of political and military leaders have done," adding that he was "referring to our national political leadership in its entirety" – not just President George W. Bush.

Sanchez called the situation in Iraq bleak, which he blamed on "the abysmal performance in the early stages and the transition of sovereignty."

He included himself among those who erred in Iraq’s crucial first year after the toppling of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Sanchez took command in the summer of 2003 and oversaw the occupation force amid an insurgency that has sparked a low-grade civil war in Iraq.

He was in the middle of some of the most momentous events of the war, among them the dissolution of the Iraqi army and barring millions of Baath Party members from government jobs: two actions seen as triggering the rebellion among Sunni Muslims, who fell from power with Saddam.

Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials.

Under the deliberately fuzzy diplomatic formula hammered out between former President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1971, the United States agreed that there is only “one China” —with its capital in Beijing.

But right-wing Republicans in particular continued to embrace Taiwan as an anticommunist bastion 125 miles off the Chinese coast, long after their own party leaders and U.S. big business embraced the communist regime.

With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, some of Taiwan’s most fervent allies were swept back into power in Washington, particularly at the Pentagon, starting with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

They included such key architects of the Iraq War as Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, and Steven Cambone, Rumsfeld’s new intelligence chief, Wilkerson said. President Bush’s controversial envoy to the United Nations, John Bolton, was another.

While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian.

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

“This went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”

Feith, now teaching and working on a book at Georgetown University, responded that Wilkerson’s “remarks are not even close to being accurate. They are phrased so vaguely and sweepingly that it is impossible to deny them with precision, but they are not right.”

Sixteen American troops died in Iraq in the first three days of June, marking a bloody start to the month as the U.S. military presses on with its crackdown on sectarian violence in Baghdad.

A total of 127 American troops died in May, the third worst total for U.S. forces since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Fourteen of the latest deaths were reported on Sunday alone by the U.S. military.

I hadn’t consciously connected these two stories [right…, Rice Insists Cheney Supports Diplomacy for Iran and heaven help us…, Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush’s Choices on Iran Conflict], but Josh Marshall did:

Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich are currently competing for the first annual 1boringoldman Most Dangerous Person on the Planet award. As afraid as I am of Newt, Cheney is in the lead…