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Archive: POLITICS

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Moyers on Freedom

Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control-a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.

And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: "inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life."

Much more at Truthout.org

Nigeria

Needless to say, very few Americans know anything about Nigeria, and even fewer care about the country. But given that we suck 9% of our oil imports from the West African nation, and that the percentage is likely to rise sharply as the Middle East becomes a less reliable source, perhaps more of us should care.

More to the point, Nigeria is a truly horrific, extreme case study of how the vast majority of the population in petro-rich, third-world countries are affected. Michael Watts, the Director of Centre for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, elaborates:

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great Polish journalist, once wrote that 'oil is a fairy tale and like every fairy tale a bit of a lie'. The terrifying oil explosion that engulfed a Lagos neighborhood following Christmas Day--the current death toll is almost 300--says less about vandals who hot-tap the exposed pipelines running through the city's abject slum world than the venality, waste and corruption of a Nigerian petro-capitalism fuelled by windfall profits and modernity's addiction to the automobile. The horrific pictures of charred human carcasses being dragged from the burned-over wreckage of the Awori area of Abule Egba, a suburb of Lagos, is a bleak testimony to the total failure--the great lie--of secular national development in post-colonial Nigeria. The spectacle of an oil nation in which desperate poor city dwellers scramble to scoop petrol and kerosene from ruptured or tapped pipelines stands at the heart of the abject failure of many oil states, what Stanford political scientist Terry Karl calls 'the paradox of plenty'.

Nigeria produces over 2 million barrels of oil a day (currently valued at roughly $40 billion per year) which accounts for 90% of its export earnings and 80% of government revenue. Nigeria also supplies 9% of US imports and is the pillar in the US post 9/11 African oil strategy of the Bush administration which anticipates that the Gulf of Guinea will provide perhaps 25% of US imports by 2015. A multi-billion dollar oil industry is however a mixed blessing at best, and for most Nigerians nothing more than a fairy tail gone awfully wrong. To inventory the 'achievements' of Nigerian oil development is a salutary exercise: 85 percent of oil revenues accrue to 1 percent of the population; over three decades perhaps one quarter of $400 billion in oil; revenues have simply disappeared; between 1970 and 2000 in Nigeria, the number of people subsisting on less than one dollar a day grew from 36 percent to more than 70 percent, from 19 million to a staggering 90 million. According to the International Monetary Fund, oil 'did not seem to add to the standard of living' and 'could have contributed to a decline in the standard of living'. The anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu (one of the few bright lights on a dark political landscape), claimed that in 2003 70% of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted; by 2005 it was 'only' 40%. Over the period 1965-2004, the per capital income fell from $250 to $212 while income distribution deteriorated markedly. Since 1990 GDP per capita and life expectancy have, according to World Bank estimates, both fallen. This isn't pretty.

What, then, is the real story behind the horrors of Abule Egba? Let's begin with the fact that in the days before the explosion, fuel was almost impossible to find in Lagos and other cities across the country. Massive lines at gas stations during the holiday period were in large measure the produce of a hugely inefficient and corrupt local refining industry that functions, if at all, well below capacity. The brutal reality of life in the Nigerian petro-state is that fuel for everyday use is one of the country's scarcest commodities.

Watts' full article can be found in Counterpoint

HAgel On the proposed "Surge"

"It's Alice in Wonderland," Sen. Chuck Hagel, second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me in describing the proposal. "I'm absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly."

Hagel is one of the only Republicans to emerge from the previous Congress with any credibility at all. His comment above, in stark contrast to those made by political opportunists, is along the lines of what he has been saying for some time.

The quote was taken from this Bob Novak column in the Washington Post

Taking Secrets to the grave

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"

Robert Fisk elaborates in The Independent (U.K.)

Juan Cole has much more at Salon

Politics as usual

In the U.S., that is:

Gale Norton is back providing oversight of energy development issues on public lands in the American West, this time as a key legal advisor for a major global oil company.

Months after she resigned her cabinet post as President Bush's Interior Secretary—and then seemed to disappear from public view—the Coloradan apparently has accepted an offer to serve as counsel for Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

Shell, one of the world's largest producers of oil, was also one of the companies that Norton's Interior Department routinely engaged on matters of drilling in sensitive ecological settings.

[snip]

The timing of Norton's career move is certain to raise eyebrows from government watchdogs and environmental groups that long have asserted that Norton, her former deputy at Interior J. Steven Griles, Vice President Dick Cheney through his national energy strategy task force, and Congress gave energy companies preferential treatment by opening up coastal areas as well as western and Alaskan lands to increased oil, gas, and coal development.

This sort of (all too common) occurrence is one of the truly insidious, intrinsic problems with our political system.

Read the rest – if you can stomach it – at New West (via TPM Muckraker)

The Ever expanding "war on terror"

The United States will never win the “war on terror,” in part, because George W. Bush keeps applying elastic definitions to the enemy, most recently expanding the conflict into a war against Muslim “radicals and extremists.”
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With almost no notice in Official Washington, Bush has inserted this new standard for judging who’s an enemy as he lays the groundwork for a wider conflict in the Middle East and a potentially endless world war against many of the planet’s one billion adherents to Islam.

Indeed, it could be argued that the “war on terror” has now morphed into the “war on radicals,” allowing Bush to add the likes of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the leaders of Syria and Iran to his lengthening international enemies list.

Bush’s twists and turns in defining the enemy in the “war on terror” started more than five years ago, in the days immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Amid the nation’s anguish, Bush spoke in grandiloquent and quasi-religious terms, vowing to “rid the world of evil,” a patently absurd task that never received the ridicule it deserved.

Robert Parry's full piece at Consortium News

Small Stories

In my experience, the best insights into the terrible set of complex problems facing Israelis and Palestinians can often be found in simple anecdotes. Here's one, told by Father Firas Aridah, a Jordanian Roman Catholic priest:

Aboud is a small village northwest of Jerusalem, five kilometers from the Green Line, Israel's pre-1967 border. The Christian history of Aboud is said to date from when Jesus and the Holy Family passed through Aboud en route from the Galilee to Jerusalem. There are remains of nine ancient Christian Churches here that are visited by pilgrims from around the world.

Local tradition holds that Aboud's residents received the Christian faith from Jesus himself, who is said to have preached here.

Aboud has approximately 2,200 residents. About 900 are Christians and the rest Muslim. The village is a model of respect among religions. Christians and Muslims have lived here peacefully together for centuries. Aboud's Catholic school educates Christians and Muslims. Since last December, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Christians and Muslims have held a prayer vigil every Friday for Aboud.

Two Israeli settlements already sit on land owned by Aboud's residents. The first was founded in 1980 as a military base, then converted a year later by the Israeli government into a settlement for Israeli civilians. The second settlement was established as a military base in 1982. Both now occupy hundred of acres of Aboud's land, confiscated without any compensation.

Israel's wall will cut off Aboud from an additional 440 hectares, or 1,100 acres, of village land. I deeply understand Israel's security needs, and its obligation to protect its citizens. I doubt, however, whether separating villages like Aboud from their land, olive trees and water will improve Israel's security, and whether the wall's route in Aboud was truly chosen for security purposes.

Aboud's residents will suffer from the wall through the loss of water and olive trees. Since 1967, Israel has severely restricted Aboud's use of the West Bank's richest aquifer, preventing the drilling of wells to access fresh water beneath the village. Therefore, Aboud's residents must purchase their water from Israel's national water company.

Aridah's full piece can be found in the International Herald Tribune

So often...

"You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end." The ninety-eight-year-old George F. Kennan, sitting in the Washington nursing home as the war came on, knew from eight decades of experience to focus first of all on the problem of what we know and what we don't know. You know, though you spend your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis, lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who depend on the Americans not only for their livelihoods but for their survival. You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is similarly limited, and that what they convey is itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to please their interlocutor. But though you know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those grueling twenty-hour days eventually lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what's happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know.

Much more from Mark Danner in his excellent piece in the NY Times Review of Books

The Troop Surge: Impending Republican Disaster?

Publius certainly thinks so:

In debating the wisdom of “the surge,” people should remember that real lives are at stake. These are not poker chips or blackjack wagers, but real people who will die. That’s the first point. But there is — as always — a political point here too. Putting aside the question of whether the surge is good military strategy, it’s shaping up to be disastrous political strategy for the GOP.

If I were a GOP operative, a few things would stand out to me right now. First, 11% of the public — 11% — support the surge. Bush’s Iraq approval/disapproval numbers are 28/70. And perhaps most ominously, Congressional Democrats (Lieberman excluded of course) unanimously oppose the surge, while Republicans are acting wishy-washy on it.

Read more at Law and Politics

repercussions of violence

Two in three children in Iraq have simply stopped going to school, according to a government report.

Iraq’s Ministry of Education says attendance rates for the new school year, which started Sep. 20, are at an all-time low.

Statistics released by the ministry in October showed that a mere 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to roughly 75 percent of students who were attending classes the previous year, according to the Britain-based NGO Save the Children.

Just before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003, school attendance was nearly 100 percent.

Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily have more

Further Outrage

Via Steve Clemons:

John Bolton when he served as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security was famous for pounding intelligence officials hard until they coughed up intel reports and "frames" that fit the political objectives he had in mind.

The practice of politicizing intelligence in the Bush White House seems to be continuing with "friends lists" and "enemies lists" determining who should be rewarded or punished in the "secrets-clearing process" in cases where former goverment officials publish materials on U.S. foreign policy debates.

In an unprecedented case, the White House National Security Council staff has insinuated itself into a "secrets-clearing" process normally overseen by the CIA Publications Review Board which screens the written work of former government officials to make sure that state secrets don't find their way into the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, or in other of the nation's leading papers, journals, and books.

Flynt Leverett, a former government official who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and on the National Security Council staff of the George W. Bush administration, is now a senior fellow and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation.

Steve's full post, including Leveretts powerful statement

The Holocaust Deniers

One of the interesting takes which I've read on Iran's convention of Holocaust deniers comes from Tony Karon:

No, this is not another one of those idiotic diatribes by Americans or Israelis who know nothing about Nelson Mandela, but use their fantasy picture of him to add authority to their claims that the Palestinians should embrace whatever Israel deigns to offer them. For the record, in making peace with the apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela did not significantly compromise on the ANC’s core demand – he agreed to end the armed struggle only when the white minority had conceded to the principle of democratic majority rule after decades of trying in vain to force the national liberation movement to settle for less.

Still, there is a very, very important lesson that the Palestinian national movement and its Arab allies – and certainly, those in Iran who claim to speak on its behalf – have failed to learn. Mandela made it his business, as a responsible leader of a national liberation movement fighting apartheid’s unique form of colonialism, to understand the motives of the system’s die-hard supporters. Not simply their tactics and strategies, but the historical narrative within which they constructed their system of minority rule as an “historic necessity” by which they could justify the suppression of others. Because all systems of oppression are ultimately founded on fear, and their claim to offer protection to their adherents from the things they most fear.

Tony's full piece at Rootless Cosmopolitan

Intelligent and witty leaders (Those were the days)

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one."

–George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second...if there is one."

–Winston Churchill, in response

Small Men

William Lind, in the current issue of The American Conservative, writes a strong warning about the dangers of a U.S. attack on Iraq :

The Bush administration, for its part, will be tempted to do what small men have done throughout history when in trouble: try to escalate their way out of it. The White House has already half-convinced itself that the majority of its troubles in Iraq stem from Iran and Syria, a line the neocons push assiduously.

[snip]

The U.S. military’s answer, as is too often the case, will be air power. It is true that American air power could destroy any Iranian armored formations it caught in the open. But there is a tried-and-true defense against air power, one the Iranians could employ: bad weather. Like the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, they could wait to launch their offensive until the weather promised a few days of protection. After that, they would be so close to our own forces that air power could not attack them without danger of hitting friendlies. (This is sometimes know as “hugging tactics.”) Reportedly, the Turkish General Staff thinks the Iranians can and will employ this second option, no doubt in combination with the first.

Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the fact that, just as the French high command refused to consider the possibility of a German attack through the Ardennes in 1940, Washington will not consider the possibility that an attack on Iran could cost us our army in Iraq. We have made one of the most common military mistakes—believing our own propaganda. Over and over, the U.S. military tells the world and itself, “No one can defeat us. No one can even fight us. We are the greatest military the world has ever seen!”

Lind's full piece

The Criminal Justice System in America

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia. The US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. The American incarceration rate is seven times higher than that of European countries. Either America is the land of criminals, or something is seriously wrong with the criminal justice (sic) system in "the land of the free."

In the US the wrongful conviction rate is extremely high. One reason is that hardly any of the convicted have had a jury trial. No peers have heard the evidence against them and found them guilty. In the US criminal justice (sic) system, more than 95% of all felony cases are settled with a plea bargain.

Before jumping to the conclusion that an innocent person would not admit guilt, be aware of how the process works. Any defendant who stands trial faces more severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea bargain. Prosecutors don't like trials because they are time consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant's lawyer and family convince the defendant that a jury is likely to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many charges and that the penalty will be greater than a negotiated plea.

The criminal justice (sic) system today consists of a process whereby a defendant is coerced into admitting to a crime in order to escape more severe punishment for maintaining his innocence. Many of the crimes for which people are imprisoned never occurred. They are made up crimes created by the process of negotiation to close a case.

This takes most of the work out of the system and, thereby, suits police, prosecutors, and judges to a tee. Police do not have to be careful about evidence, because they know that no more than one case out of twenty will ever be tested in the courtroom.

Paul Craig Roberts' full article can be found at Counterpunch

The Radical nature of 21st century conflicts

John Robb, who has been on the forefront of analyzing the rapidly evolving techniques employed by modern, non-state fighters, neatly summarizes the main problem with current American conventional wisdom:

As the debate over the value of the Iraq study group's report rumbles on, it's important to reflect on larger frame within which this debate is taking place. This frame, little discussed, encapsulates nature of the threat we face in Iraq and will be increasingly likely to face in the future. With Iraq, we can catch a glimpse of the new class of threat that will increasingly define our future (and given that even a glimpse is enough to stump the establishment should be a dire warning). This new class of threat is characterized by its bottoms up pattern of growth rather than the familiar competition between nation-states. It percolates upwards through catalyzed organic growth until it overwhelms our ability to respond to it.

Robb delineates what he sees as the main threats

The Iraq Study Group Report

One of the most insidious aspects of the ruthless domination of the Republican right during the past six years is that the extremity of their policies and behavior has virtually insured that any initial steps now taken to correct America's course will be insufficient.

Take the report just issued by the Iraq Study Group, for example. While the report has forced the Administration to slightly alter its rhetoric, the practical impact and implications are, predictably, very discouraging.

Chris Floyd, who never pulls punches, has a few things to say about it:

Listen, if you start listening to actual Iraqis, you might as well hang it up right now. Because poll after poll shows that actual Iraqis overwhelmingly favor a single option for the U.S. military forces in their country: cut and run, the sooner the better. That's what they want; but of course, they're just like children, aren't they, the precious little primitive critters. And everybody knows you can't give children everything they want. It's not good for them. So we have to hold the Iraqis' hands until they can toddle on their own -- and we have to slap their hands if they don't do what we know is best for them.

Or as the Baker boys themselves put it: "If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government." Nice little country you got there, Hassan; too bad if something, like, happens to it, eh? I think you'd better play ball. See these here milestones we've concocted on the padded chairs in our paneled boardroom? You better meet 'em, chop-chop -- or we can make your life...difficult. You savvy?

The Iraq Study Group's report simply confirms, yet again, the bedrock truth of the war: the American Establishment has no intention of leaving Iraq, ever, and no intention of having anything but a pliant, cowed, bullied puppet government in Baghdad to carry out whatever the Establishment decides is in its best interests on any given day. Iraq was invaded because large swathes of the American elite thought they could make hay of it one way or another (financially, politically, ideologically or even psychologically, for those pathetic souls who get their sense of manhood or personal validation from their identification with a big, swaggering, domineering empire). And U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, indefinitely, at some level, because the American elite think they can make hay of the situation one way or another. The war is all about -- is only about -- what the American elite feel is in their own best interest, how it aggrandizes their fortunes, flatters their prejudices, serves their needs. That's it. The rest is just bullshit and murder.

And here's a terse summary from an article in the Washington Post:

"It is a report to solve American problems, and not to solve Iraq's problems," said Ayad al-Sammarai, an influential Sunni Muslim politician.

The crux of Floyd's piece, however, has to do with that old "canard" that the war in Iraq was always about oil. Read the whole thing, and decide for yourself.

Pre-war reporting; pre-war failings

I've been using ratios recently to illustrate some points, and while the cluster is coincidental, I couldn't resist using one more:

4175:1

That's the ratio of articles written about Iraq in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 2002 and 2003 (i.e pre-war), and those in which the possibility of civil war resulting from a U.S. invasion was seriously addressed.

Think about that for a moment. There were many serious observers who expressed concerns about that possibility (or probability), yet such views were only expressed meaningfully in a total of four of 16,703 articles written on Iraq in the two most influential American newspapers during the run-up to the war.

Eric Boehlert, arguably the best political media critic in the country, has all of the details on this grossly overlooked national media failing at mediamatters.org

The War on Drugs

Given the epic foreign policy disaster which Iraq represents, I haven't given much space recently to the domestic outrages perpetrated by the Bush administration. But the story of Guillermo Ramirez Peyro is required reading. Glenn Greenwald provides a superb summary, and you can also read this important article from The Guardian (U.K.).

Amongst the comments in response to Glenn's post, was this remarkable one written by a police officer:

Glenn,

Thank you for highlighting the article in The Observer. I completely agree with your analysis. At the same time, I would like to point out the work done by Dallas Morning News reporter Alfredo Corchado (acorchado@dallasnews.com) who has written a number of stories about this intolerable situation beginning in mid-2004 (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/ longterm/stories/jd071804.4579eb20.html).

As I approach my 30th anniversary in law enforcement, I can state my firm personal opinion that the so-called "war on drugs" has been a completely grotesque and wasteful sacrifice of human lives, human effort and ethical governance. It is absolutely true that there are a variety of psychoactive substances, both indigenous and manmade, that human beings can negligently use to the detriment of themselves and those around them. Being the sister of an alcoholic, I'm intensely aware of how the complex interplay of unknown biological propensities, personality and environment can manifest themselves in behavior that is patently self-destructive. Drugs (including alcohol) truly can facilitate bad behavior. However, only the willfully blind would assert that every individual who uses a drug for a recreational purpose is being destructive. Alcohol is a perfectly legal recreational drug which is associated with some truly horrific outcomes. However, we tried prohibition and it failed.

That said, my personal view is that the law should focus on the publicly threatening bad behavior, such as impaired driving, and leave the issue of those who are actually harming themselves through self-medication as a medical issue. Unfortunately, the law currently embodies a set of moralistic biases that have little to do with actual logic. As a result, we see outcomes such as this where the government tolerates actual individual crimes of murder in an effort to wage "war" on the diffuse harm of recreational drug use.

Diana Powe

More fun with ratios: 5104:1

As of this summer, the FBI had 30,626 employees, including 12,617 special agents. And what do you suppose the total number is of those who have advanced Arabic language skills? Six. That's right, six! Furthermore, only 33 of the FBI’s 12,000 agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic.

Mind-boggling.

The full story can be found at the MSNBC site (via cunningrealist)

A Ratio of 1:14

There are plenty of legitimate concerns about excessive surveillance by the authorites in the U.S., but this is shocking:

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said.

Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored.

Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV.

Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.

The full article can be found on the BBC site

Delusional Democrat, Sane Republican

Do you suspect that I might have transposed the two? Not in this case:

LIEBERMAN: I believe that America is a mighty enough nation that we should never fear to talk to anyone. But anyone who believes that Iran and Syria really want to help us to succeed in Iraq, I just is missing the reality. Asking Iran and Syria to help us succeed in Iraq is like your local fire department asking a couple of arsonists to help put out the fire. These people are flaming the fire. They are the extremists. They are supporting terrorists in Iraq, in Lebanon and of course in the Palestinian areas.

SCHIEFFER: Senator Hagel is shaking his head.

HAGEL: That’s not the point. Of course the Iranians and Syrians are not going to come to our assistance. Of course not. But they are going to respond in their own self-interest. All nations respond in their own self-interests. Tallyrand once said that nations don’t have friends. They have interests. He was right. It’s not in the interest of Syria or Jordan or Iran to have a failed state that would be a complete mess for the middle east.

Why did the Iranians help us in Afghanistan? Why did they cooperate with us in Afghanistan on intelligence matters and other issues? Because they didn’t want a failed state next to them which comes with all the problems. They didn’t want heroin moving into their borders. What we’re not getting here, is we’re not getting a full and comprehensive wide-lens appreciation of interests.

From Sunday's Face the Nation (via thinkprogress)

Euphemisms

Given that Bush and his cronies continue to resist the use of the phrase "civil war" to characterize the current situation in Iraq, perhaps they should try this excellent alternative offered recently on The Daily Show:

"faith-based melee"

Rafael Correa

Just in case you haven't been following the political scene in Ecuador, there have been some interesting (and amusing) recent developments. Steve Lendman reports:

Yesterday afternoon, populist candidate Rafael Correa was officially declared the winner of Ecuador's run-off presidential election and will take office as his nation's new leader on January 15. He defeated Washington-supported billionaire oligarch and banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa gaining a likely 58% majority to his opponent's 42% with over 90% of the votes tallied. Narciza Subia, one of seven Supreme Electoral Tribunal judges made the official announcement saying "Rafael Correa is the new president of Ecuador. The (electoral) trend is not going to change." Earlier, Correa was jubilant at a news conference saying "Thank God, we have triumphed. We are just instruments of the power of the people. This is a clear message that the people want change."

And change is what Rafael Correa promised his people he'd deliver pledging a "citizens' revolution" against the country's discredited political system based on "the fallacies of neoliberalism" and exploitive Washington consensus doctrine supporting the interests of capital at the expense of the public welfare. Correa wants to change that using the language of his friend and ally Hugo Chavez by calling for "socialism for the twenty-first century." He wants to prioritize social spending, the way it's done in Venezuela, and plans to renegotiate the country's debt, or even consider defaulting on it, to provide the funds to do it. He also wants no part of a one-way so-called "free-trade" agreement with the US saying "We are not against (international trade) but we will not negotiate a treaty under unequal terms with the US."

Correa is also dismissive of George Bush, a man he clearly holds in contempt having called him "dimwitted" during his campaign. Reporters also asked him to comment about Hugo Chavez calling Bush "the devil" in his September UN General Assembly speech. He replied "Calling Bush the devil offends the devil. Bush is a tremendously dimwitted president who has done great damage to the world." Mr. Correa wants good relations with his dominant northern neighbor but won't allow it to be on the same business-as-usual one-way basis it's always been up to now. Beginning in January, everything will change if Correa delivers on what he says he intends to do.

Lendman's full post

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