With the economy sinking like a torpedoed cruise liner, we leave NAFTA and Free Trade behind because Hillary has decided it is time to discuss thresholds for Commander-in-Chief. Little wonder: Any discussion of the economy that does not begin with trade policy is like debating which brand of aspirin we should purchase for a dying patient.

Hillary’s duplicity on Free Trade is a well-chronicled record. Husband Bill was, of course, the Free Trade champion who pushed NAFTA into law. Said the former president at the NAFTA signing ceremony (12/8/93): “We are on the verge of a global economic expansion that is sparked by the fact that the United States, at this critical moment, decided that we would compete, not retreat.”

If Hillary was opposed to NAFTA it was a well-kept secret. In Living History (2003), the Senator stated: “Creating a free trade zone in North America . . . would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our economy was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization.”

As late as October 4, 2007, Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Appearing before free trade supporters, she has praised the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement . . . but speaking to a union audience as a presidential candidate, Clinton said NAFTA hurt workers.”

Even now, Clinton’s trade policy amounts to little more than a “time out” on Free Trade — presumably, a temporary pause that will end when she is elected president.

In fairness, there is room for doubt on Barack Obama’s Fair Trade credentials as well, but it is richly ironic that he should take the hit in Ohio for the kind of “wink and nod” approach that Clinton has practiced all along.

The Senator from New York has the New York media in her back pocket yet Hillary is allowed to cry foul on alleged media bias favoring Obama.

So now Hillary says it is time to move on and the media fall in line. She declares that the candidacy of the ancient Republican John McCain means that the general election will be all about national security. Despite the grave misgivings of Republican military leaders, she further declares that McCain has passed the commander-in-chief threshold but her opponent has not.

Hillary’s analysis is wrong on so many counts it is difficult to know where to begin. First and foremost, Senator John McCain is a leading supporter of the Neoconservative foreign policy that has delivered the catastrophe in Iraq. He is a fervent defender of the Bush Doctrine of aggressive warfare and military domination. His first response to every foreign policy crisis since Beirut in 1983 has been aggressive provocation. His criticisms are invariably that we need more troops, more bombing and greater destruction. He famously blames the American people for bailing out on Vietnam with only 58,000 American and three million Vietnamese dead.

If John McCain were president today, we would likely be at war with Iran, Syria and Lebanon. We would be dangerously close to war on any number of fronts in Latin America and the Cold War would be infinitely closer to its second coming.

What is it about the foreign policy credentials of John McCain that Hillary Clinton so admires? Could it be that she is in fact a lot closer to McCain’s war mongering than she is to her own stated positions on diplomacy and withdrawal from Iraq?

Hillary was wrong on her vote to authorize the Bush war in Iraq (the fact that she neglected to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq prior to her vote is even more revealing). She was wrong on her vote to authorize military intervention in Iran (by declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization). She was wrong in her unqualified defense of Israel in its aggressive and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon. She was wrong in her blanket defense of Israel in its bombing of a suspected military site in Syria. She was wrong again in her aggressive provocation of Venezuela and Ecuador when Columbia violated Ecuadorian sovereignty with a military strike inside its borders — a provocation that may have endangered three American hostages.

Time and again, Hillary Clinton (not unlike John McCain) has demonstrated that her first response to any crisis is a knee-jerk threat rather than a reasoned response.

Who do we want to answer that mythical red phone in a middle of the night crisis?

I can think of no one I would want to answer that call less than John McCain unless it is Hillary Clinton trying to prove she’s as tough as McCain.

The real threshold we are fast approaching is the one beyond which supporters of Barack Obama will not support Hillary Clinton under any circumstance.

One last thought: When someone as thoughtful, authoritative and fundamentally non-political as Pulitzer prize winner Samantha Power decries Hillary as a monster — even in a political context — it deserves a second thought.

Now, let’s get back to trade policy. I propose a debate moderated by Fair Trade Journalist David Sirota and Free Trade Economist Paul Krugman.

George W. Bush is to George H.W. Bush as Al Qaeda is to Al Qaeda in Iraq: They are related only in name. Granted, the father is related to the son by bloodline but if it were in the father’s power to disown the presidency of the son, he would do so for the son has shamed the family and laid waste to the Bush legacy just as he has shamed the nation and its legacy in the world.

On Tuesday, July 24, the president gave what he must have considered a major address to convince a doubtful America that he was right all along. Iraq is the first front in the war on terror. The Al Qaeda of Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden (the one that we implanted there in the war against the Soviet Union) was indistinguishable from Al Qaeda in Iraq. We did not choose the wrong nation for the wrong reasons. We were not motivated by our unquenchable thirst for oil and the obscene profits to be garnered from an endless war. Al Qaeda in Iraq was not our creation; it existed there all along — only in spirit form.

Apparently, Al Qaeda was a ghost in Iraq, unseen, unheard and unnoticed (although there are reports of AQ types stepping on Iraqi soil) until the American invasion fleshed them out and transformed them from ethereal constructs to a fighting force.

The president cleverly rebuts the notion that terrorism in Iraq represents a self-fulfilling prophecy because neither he nor his trusted advisors foresaw anything of the kind. As you may recall, the White House neocons predicted parades and flowers and triumphant elections and constitutions that granted complete control of Iraqi oil to international oil and energy corporations — nothing but glitter and happy endings.

The problem with the president’s argument (aside from the fact that it has been thoroughly discredited) is that his advisors did foresee foreign fighters in Iraq. If you start a war in a Muslim nation, they will come and the people of the occupied land will welcome them until such time as the invaders are vanquished. If the neocons did any homework at all (and we must assume they did), they foresaw a civil war that could be exploited to the advantage of the occupying power.

The problem with the president’s argument is that we knew Al Qaeda in Iraq would be a natural byproduct of the invasion and occupation and that that inevitable development would provide yet another pretext to fool the American people and continue the war.

What the neocons did not foresee was the effectiveness of the insurgency against the raw military might of the invaders. What they did not foresee was a nationalist resistance to an occupying force that outranks deeply held sectarian divisions. What they did not foresee was that four and a half years into the war, America in Iraq would be losing ground at a horrific price and the American people would lose faith.

The neocons failed to factor in the passions aroused by an aggressive and immoral war. To the neocons, who wear the mask of ideology to hide their lust for power and treasure, the loss of innocent lives has never been a significant consideration. They care no more for the lives of innocent civilians, volunteer soldiers, private contractors or soldiers of fortune than they do for the integrity of the nation. To the neocons it is all about the bottom line and for most of them, despite the national and humanitarian costs, the bottom line is a hefty profit.

The casualties of this war are mounting with every passing day. We have lost faith in our president. We have seen through the lies. We have seen the hands behind the throne. We have seen our constitutional rights under siege. We have seen abuses of power so egregious we can no longer bear to watch. We are losing confidence in the electoral process to correct the most catastrophic blunder we have ever witnessed.

We recall what the president said at the beginning of the neocon campaign of imperial conquest: “You are either with us or against us.”

If he can only convince the people that everyone who opposes us is Al Qaeda, then the neocons will have accomplished their primary goal: perpetual war.

The president speaks and we no longer hear his words:

“The facts are that Al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they’re fighting us in Iraq and across the world and they are plotting to kill Americans here at home again.”

No, the Al Qaeda terrorists that killed Americans on 9/11 are still in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan — our sometime ally. They are plotting to attack us more than ever because we are responsible for hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost. Their numbers are growing because we chose the path of blind vengeance, invading a nation that had nothing to do with the original crime. They are planning to attack us because we have implanted permanent military installations in the oil rich land of ancient Mesopotamia — just as they attacked us for planting military bases on the holy lands of Saudi Arabia.

“Those who justify withdrawing our troops from Iraq by denying the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its ties to Osama bin Laden ignore the clear consequences of such a retreat.”

No, those who justify continuing a war by fabricating a connection of the events in Iraq to the events of 9/11 ignore the catastrophic consequences of our own actions. The threat of Al Qaeda is real and must be addressed not with the indiscriminate hammer of war but with the careful and calculated scalpel of justice. If we had taken appropriate and timely action in Afghanistan, we would have captured or killed Osama bin Laden and marginalized both his cause and organization. Instead, we moved on to richer spoils. We committed the cardinal crime of nations — aggressive war — and transformed a terrorist into a folk hero.

No, the only ties Osama bin Laden has to Al Qaeda in Iraq are common hatred and a common enemy. Before the war, he had even less. He was verboten in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. His path to the Persian Gulf was blocked by both Iran and Iraq. Now, thanks to the Bush neocon war, he has gained an audience for his message of hatred and retribution but no more than that. He is at this moment in history less of a threat than an American president with his finger on the trigger of nuclear annihilation.

Our president believes I am a fool for not seeing the “enemy” in Iraq as he does: the enemy of all humankind.

“[It’s] like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and saying he’s probably just there to cash a check.”

If Iraq is the bank, then the man with the mask and a gun is our president — and what he has done has caused a great deal more harm than emptying the treasury.

Historians will attest that July 2nd is our true Independence Day. It was the day the declaration of independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. Two hundred and thirty one years later, as we observe an assault on our democratic ideals on all fronts — from
executive usurpation of monarchical powers to a judicial aristocracy to congressional abdication of war powers — it is fitting that we celebrate not the act of independence but the ceremony.

We have become a nation that embraces the façade of freedom, justice and democracy even as our elected leaders and their judicial appointees betray those core principles at every conceivable turn.

It is fitting that on July 2nd — true Independence Day — our president, without doubt the worst in our nation’s history, announced the commutation of the prison sentence of convicted liar Lewis “Scooter” Libby in an act so brazen and defiant of judicial process that even the
president’s staunchest supporters must blush at its implications.

Reminiscent of Gerald Ford’s pardon of disgraced former president Richard Nixon (a contingency we now know was broached by Nixon’s advisors prior to Ford’s selection to replace the ousted vice president Spiro Agnew), we need not wait 20 or 30 years for the Freedom of Information Act to reveal what we already know: There was a quid pro quo.

Scooter Libby, vice president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, lied and obstructed justice in the Valerie Plame case (the exposure of a CIA agent on a political vendetta) because he held a trump card in the vest pocket of his three-piece suit. He was curiously stoic, undaunted and
unafraid during the trial because he knew he would never have to spend a day in prison, he would never want for money, and he would emerge from his day in court the new Oliver North — not a disgraced traitor to all the republic holds dear (namely, an independent judiciary and the
rule of law) but rather the “patriotic” darling of the new right.

Scooter Libby held himself above the law because he knew that the president would deliver what the vice president demanded: unequal justice.

On this Independence Day, we truly have much for which we can be grateful:

* Most of us will never be detained, renditioned or tortured, without reasonable cause or judicial review.

* Most of us will not be sent to foreign lands to fight wars of aggression that congress never declared for other nations’ oil.

* Most of us will not lose our livelihoods for speaking out against abuse of power.

* Most of us will not lose our homes to the deadly combination of a natural disaster (triggered by global climate change) and government indifference.

* Most of us will never have to worry about minorities claiming our spots in institutions of higher learning for the gates are already closed to all but the privileged class.

* Most of us are not dissidents, activists, Muslims or of Middle Eastern descent and will not be rounded up with the usual suspects to be tried, convicted and incarcerated without the possibility of pardon, commutation or parole, on trumped up charges like Mumia Abu-Jamal or
Leonard Peltier.

* Most of us will never evade our tax responsibilities with offshore accounts or phony shelters.

* Most of us will not knowingly sacrifice our living wages, health care and retirement benefits to a new world order of the corporate elite.

* Most of us will never find ourselves above the law and beyond the consequences of our actions.

* In America, land of forgotten freedoms and neglected rights, few of us will ever appreciate the kind of privilege that our president, vice president and their loyal minions in the White House presently enjoy.

For those of us who remember our nation’s founding and the sacred promise it held forth to the world, we will not hold up our flags this Fourth of July Independence Day with patriotic pride but rather with patriotic shame.

The idea that [the vice president] is ‘not an entity within the executive branch’ and thus exempt from a presidential order is both ludicrous and chilling.

– SF Chronicle Editorial, June 26, 2007

We interrupt this fair and balanced discussion of vice president Dick Cheney’s astounding claim of immunity from executive orders on the grounds that he is not in fact a member of the executive branch in order to bring you the pending release of naughty girl Paris Hilton from the LA county jail.

The people want to know.

I confess the vice president’s claim is, on its face, the most absurd assertion to come out of the White House since Franklin Pierce consulted tea leaves before signing the Missouri Compromise on the grounds that an alignment of heavenly bodies in the house of Jupiter promised a peaceful resolution of the slavery problem. Nevertheless, the fact that the vice president felt compelled to make such a claim cries out for an investigation into exactly what he is hiding.

I confess I do not understand America’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with celebrity but having seen Ms Hilton’s Whopper commercial, I understand the girl is hot — talentless perhaps, but hot. Nevertheless, when important political discourse is interrupted for twenty minutes of waiting for Paris Hilton to emerge from 23 days in the county jail, something is dramatically wrong.

The question that arises is: Does the media have a responsibility to inform its consumers on the burning issues of the day or must it pander to the lowest common denominator of public obsession at every possible opportunity?

Where were you when OJ drove his white Ford Bronco down an LA highway?

America wants to know.

The vice president has usurped the power of the president, led the nation into catastrophic war, employed the energy industry to dictate energy policy, exerted executive privilege to deny congressional oversight, legitimized torture by executive decree, abolished the foundation of western law (habeas corpus), exposed a CIA operative on a political vendetta, implemented a massive illegal spying operation with an end run around the Justice Department, and reduced the chief executive to an afterthought, yet America needs to know every footstep of Hollywood’s darling naughty girl.

We get it, Mr. Cheney: you can trash the constitution and lead us all through the gates of hell because the people care more about the vagaries of Paris than the treacheries of Washington.

Maybe it is so: We get what we deserve but I do not believe we deserve
what the media deliver us in the name of “Breaking News.”

Do we watch because it is there or is it there because we watch? If we
were not subjected to 24-7 coverage of mining disasters, Hollywood
crimes and misdemeanors, misbehaving sports figures, racist misspeaks,
celebrity breakups, runaway brides, shark attacks or family tragedies,
would we really miss it?

Someone has to begin playing the grownups in this society and
titillation stories, gossip and personal tragedies have no place on
programs that pass for news and informative discourse.

If Dick Cheney does not wish to be a part of the executive branch, let
us oblige him by removing him from office.

As for Paris Hilton, leave the girl alone.

They were known as the alchemists, purported holders of the secret knowledge of transmutation, and they were wined and dined by the crowned royals of medieval Europe. Their company was sought, their attendance rewarded, their words treasured as prescient jewels, their speculative musings preserved as if they could unfold the mysteries of life.

Inevitably, it ended badly for the alchemists because the root and core of their artful deception charading as science was as false as a wanton lover.

History will attest that the alchemists were able to perpetuate one of the greatest frauds in recorded time because the dream was universally appealing and the people, even the educated and privileged, were willing to suspend logical thought for the promise of a miracle.

The concept of turning common metals into gold has never lost its pull on the human psyche. The gullibility of our peculiar species will always grab hold of the grandest, most majestic and magical of dreams.

The alchemists left a lasting mark: a legacy of faith and its betrayal. They delivered a powerful message concerning the infinite capacity of the irrational to triumph over reason.

We are where we are in Iraq (and to varying degrees on global warming, oil dependence and Afghanistan) because we forgot the lesson of the alchemists: No matter how fanciful the words, no matter how mystifying the act, no matter how many luminaries join the chorus of concurrence, when you begin with common lead, you will have no more than common lead
at the end of the process.

When you begin with raw greed and naked injustice, there can never be a “victory” that will remove the stain of original sin. In fact, the greatest shame is to believe that anything resembling victory can be achieved at all.

We are where we are in Iraq because we believed the promise of our president. We are where we are because we wanted to believe that our leaders were bound by a code of honor, a mythical guarantee that we would only go to war for a just cause. We would only sacrifice the
lives of our warriors for a war of virtuous transformation, for democracy, freedom and national security. We would never go to war for greed and domination.

We wanted to believe that our president would value human life greater than any treasure to be found beneath Arabian sands.

Now, after four blood filled years, after all the lies have been stripped of their lofty décor, after rendering a once prospering nation to utter ruin, after causing more death and destruction than a thousand terrorist attacks, we allow the war to drag on year after year with the promise that somehow we can transform a desert into an oasis, a swamp into a garden, a cesspool into a wonderland or a cemetery into a temple of faith.

We are where we are because too many of us refuse to believe that we could invest so much in blood and treasure without reward.

Like the royal head of state that has squandered the king’s treasure on his alchemist dignitary, it is easier to grant another day, another month, another year, than to admit that the royal intellect is defective.

We are where we are because, for far too many of us, the sacrifice of a half trillion dollars and thousands of lives does not register with the depth and clarity that it should.

We are where we are because the deaths of our warriors, victims of the latest surge and surge again strategy has slipped from the front pages of our local newspapers.

Four long bloody years of conjuring yet still there is no gold, no light at the end of the tunnel, no treasure at the end of the rainbow. Four years of promises, assurances and predictions, and yet the death toll continues to rise and the vow of holy vengeance is renewed.

We have not only lost a war, we have lost our bearings, our way in the world, our hold upon the earthly realm of reason, which after all may not be as bad as accepting the truth: that we have killed and maimed our sons and daughters without just cause and that we have likely caused the death and injury of so many Iraqis that we will not be forgiven for a thousand years.

In years gone by, many an alchemist lost his fame, fortune and freedom (if not his life) for perpetuating a fraud on the unknowing and unsuspecting, but at least none were physically harmed or killed by his actions.

Today’s alchemists are much more deadly.

What makes this carefully orchestrated, plotted and planned strategy
all the more depraved is that the very same global labor exploiters who
ripped the heart out of the American working class (beware citizens of
France for you are embarked on the same path) now wish to pin the blame
for their crimes on the exploited.

Having watched these race-baiting bigots operate under the umbrella of
populism for too long, I have no doubt the strategy is deliberate. The
blame shifters tried so very hard to play the immigration card to save
them in the midterm election but they came up short because of the
ironic reluctance of the Rove-Bush machine that was hoping to parlay
the president’s affinity for Mexican politics into future Republican
dominance.

The philanthropic side of the free trade equation is a sham — a con so
thinly veiled it can only fool the foolhardy and uninformed.
Scapegoating racists have always supported blame shifting politicians
to their own demise. As former president and supreme leader of the
World Bank Paul Wolfowitz found out, the con does not work on sincere
and educated public servants dedicated to fulfilling their mandate.

The blame-shifting scheme is all the more nefarious because it pretends
to help those it most grievously injures. On the global scale, it
promises to lift up third world nations but in practice it strips those
nations of natural resources while gutting social services and
shamelessly exploiting labor with slave wages and inhuman working
conditions.

In America (as in other elite nations), it promises cheap goods and an
ever-shifting economic base that will enable us to leap ahead of our
competitors. It promises superior education and training but it cuts
funding for both and saddles public education with unachievable goals
in preparation for its role in the next blame-shifting strategy.

When the promises inevitably flounder, it is blamed not on trade
policy, not on foreign labor exploitation, not on greedy corporations
with unconscionable profit margins, but on the impoverished migrant
labor force.

The much publicized immigration policy compromise, embraced by the
mainstream of both major parties and offering a convoluted route to
legalization and citizenship with a price tag that few could ever
afford, is yet another means of evading debate on a bipartisan trade
policy that richly rewards international corporations while decimating
the workforce worldwide.

The policy allows the blame shifters to continue their assault on
immigrant labor while continuing to ignore both the short-term remedy
(strict and cost prohibitive penalties on employers) and the core
solution: Fair Trade.

For those defenders of CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who more than any other
mainstream pundit parlays race baiting, anti-immigrant venom into media
ratings, why is it that he turns every discussion of immigration
solutions into border defense and ultimately a multi-billion dollar
boondoggle wall that sponsors insist (like the Israelis) on calling a
fence?

Dobbs knows and has admitted that harsh, unforgiving and strictly
enforced penalties on employers of illegal immigrants would stem the
tide at a fraction of the cost, yet Dobbs and his Republican
blame-shifting compadres know a cash cow when they see one. They do
not want a real solution. They would rather focus on a wall that would
mock our founding principles and further a transformation of the
American dream into a façade — a guarded refuge for the privileged, a
gated nation fearful of its own neighbors, and an object of
international pity.

Ancient China built the Great Wall, Berlin had its wall of isolation,
Israel has its wall of oppression and America will join that history of
ignominy with its wall of fear.

What more could we do to impress the world with our fall from grace:
State sanctioned torture? Suspension of Habeas Corpus? Aggressive
wars on false pretense? Indifference to the plight of the poor and
dark skinned victims? Scientific regression and denial of the world’s
most pressing problem? Incarceration of the homeless, disabled,
dispossessed and destitute? The forgotten ruins of the American city
that most embodies our multicultural heritage?

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be
free…”

Let us send Lady Liberty back to France. We have forsworn her and
France needs to be reminded of her enlightened ideal.

“If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out … in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted UN speech … they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave US kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.”

– Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 2 May 2007

The truth is a twisted sister and rarely sets men free. The cold bloody truth of the war in Iraq is like a toxic cloud that poisons everything it touches.

If former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet thought they could find absolution in their post-complicit years, they are as delusional as the little man who dreamed of empire and betrayed a nation. If they believed the armor of loyalty and patriotism could shield them from the harsh blow of accountability, they have been drinking from the well of Shakespeare’s Queen Mab.

How now that trinity Medals of Honor awarded Tenet, Paul Bremer and General Tommy Franks have stained the heart of integrity and transformed the very words “presidential honor” into an oxymoron.

Everyone who has grasped the hand of our self-anointed war president now feels the sting of humility and disgrace. Powell is gone. Rumsfeld is gone. Wolfowitz is gone, spiraling down the rabbit hole, wrapped in his own arrogance and cronyism. Ashcroft is gone and Condoleezza Rice has all but vanished from the stage.

The latest diplomatic initiative came and went like a whisper in the night, a token gesture from a token neocon, a one-time renaissance woman who sacrificed the promise of greatness when she consigned her soul to a rabid brain trust bent on the path of war.

As it is for Condoleezza Rice, who might have been a concert pianist or Nobel prizewinner, so it is for the generation that nurtured her and blessed her with the promise of hope.

Shame, where is thy blush? It hides behind masks of honor, loyalty and patriotism.

Among the forgotten coalition of the coerced (our allies in the conquest of the Middle East), Asnar of Spain was first to fall, Musharraf of Pakistan is hanging by a totalitarian thread, and
Britannia’s Blair is cursed to live out his days in the shadow of the Bush wars, as his companions shake their heads and wonder what might have been.

As it is for Tony Blair, so it is for the generation of new and bold ideas.

The bell chimes and we think of Rice, Powell and a loss of innocence. The bell tolls and we think of Camelot, the Bay of Pigs and a president who at least knew when to cut his losses. The bell rings out and we remember Rudy Giuliani’s 9-11 testament: “Thank God George Bush is president.” The bell sounds and we think of patriotic boys and girls who will never become fathers and mothers.

The bells echo in the chambers of our collective soul and we wonder if we have finally learned enough to spare future generations the sorrow of an endless cycle of violence and destruction.

As we step forward and look back upon our selves, we reflect that we were the generation with the greatest promise, the greatest moral founding, the greatest hope and vision for transforming the world we inherited, yet we squandered that bountiful promise for the darkest vision an American president has ever advanced.

While we launched a campaign of aggressive war, wars of dominion and economic conquest, our allies in Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, and Russia wandered further from the paths of justice and democracy.

While we led the campaign of denial, the world marched toward global catastrophe.

While we pushed our armed forces to the brink of implosion for a fool’s campaign of horror, we allowed genocide in Darfur to roll on as if the community of nations was obliged to tolerate inhumanity in dark skinned populations.

While we squandered half a trillion in fortune on the destruction of other nations, we allowed a great American city to wallow in virtual ruin, transformed as much by indifference as by an act of nature.

When we hear the bells, we reach inside and mourn a generation lost. We hear and we contemplate the words of John Donne:

“Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind: And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

As of Saturday, May 12, some 3,391 men and women of the American armed forces had died in the Iraq War. The latest:

Army Pfc. Roy L. Jones III, 21 of Houston, Texas.

Army Sgt. Jason W. Vaughn, 29 of Luka, Mississippi.

— former DCI George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm (2007)

“In the push to war with Iraq, something extraordinary happened in the world of Intelligence. All the king’s agents…silent partners in former crimes against humanity… refused to provide false information to support the administration’s claims. Even in the last minute of the
last hour, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet flatly stated there was no documented link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.”

— Jack Random, The War Chronicles (2004)

The lies to launch war have been supplanted by the lies of war itself.
The trail of lies is as long as the trail of Iraqi blood and tears.
The lies of weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaeda connections and
Middle East democracy have given way to the lies of civilian massacres,
the lies of military heroism, the lies of Abu Ghraib, the lies of the
Samarra mosque bombing and the lies of progress in securing Baghdad.

When former DCI George Tenet accuses vice president Dick Cheney of
misleading the nation to war, he is sculpting the truth to his own
benefit. The vice president did not have the power to declare war and
he could not have succeeded without the ascent of a feckless commander
and the silent complicity of those in the White House who should have
spoken out. That evasion of responsibility continues to this day with
the newly appointed field commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

The General claims there is measurable progress in Iraq if you do not
count car bombs or sensational attacks or attacks outside of Baghdad.
Just as the White House cherry picked evidence to justify war, the
military will select facts to prove the security plan is working when
the soldiers on the ground know otherwise.

Like George Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld
before him, General Petraeus has betrayed us, along with every soldier
under his command. His mission is not to secure victory in Iraq — a
“victory” that would only further secure America’s place in the annals
of infamy. His mission is to continue the chain of lies to perpetuate
an illusion of success that will enable the worst president in history
to pass his catastrophic war along to a new president.

In a spirit of unbridled cynicism, the neocons that launched this
campaign of never-ending war are counting on a party of opposition so
inept that it will parlay almost certain victory into electoral defeat
by stammering, stumbling and falling on the word “peace.”

As witnessed by the recent group debate-a-thon, the Democrats have
become so conditioned to aggressive posturing that they cannot oppose
an unqualified disaster and wholesale waste of life without ceaseless
qualifications and pontificating on the virtues of aggression in lesser
wars (Afghanistan, the Balkans) and potentially greater calamities
(Iran).

General Petraeus, the anointed savior of the Bush war strategy,
betrayed us from the moment he ascended to his post as director of the
Baghdad theatre of blood. He is not so much a commander as an
illusionist, not so much a strategist as a front man for a magic act.

Watch the right hand while the left covers over a pile of fresh
corpses, the latest yield in an orgy of sectarian conflict, resistance
and revenge. Poof, the war is manageable! Poof, the violence has
ebbed! Poof, the Iraqi government is taking charge! Poof, the war is
winnable!

It is a dog and pony show (rated R for blood) but the players only come
out at night. It would be too easy to see through their masks and
detect their slight of hand in the light of day.

We started the wrong war for the wrong reasons, and we continue to fight
only to cover the lies and the greed that placed us in the center of a
sinking hole.

Nothing could have empowered our enemies more than a dim witted, poorly
planned and poorly executed war of attrition on foreign terrain and
nothing will continue to empower our enemies more than a march of
lemmings over the Arabian cliff.

As the surprisingly frank Senator from Alaska suggested in the
presidential debate, Osama bin Laden must greet every dawn with a
prayer of thanks to George W. Bush.

The warlords, who have never faced an enemy on the field of battle,
think it amusing to throw accusations of betrayal and treason at those
who acknowledge the reality of defeat but who was more loyal to the
troops: the officers who advised General Robert E. Lee that the war was
lost after the slaughter of Gettysburg or those who advised him to
press on?

To those obstinate holdouts that still support this cowboy commander
and his calamitous war, wake up and smell the battlefield. The air is
filled with deadly fire, toxic smoke and the scent of scorched flesh.
It is filled with foreboding and a promise of further horrors beyond
our immediate view.

Wake up because it is you that enable the horror to go on. Your blind
allegiance and false patriotism is all that stands between the lies of
victory and the beginning of reparations. Your irrational support is
all that props up a failed war president.

The Democrats, with their pandering and posturing frontrunners, will
not stop this war or the wars to come unless the people demand it with
one voice.