On Sunday, the New York Times detailed Bush biographer Robert Draper's stunning portrait of the President asleep at the switch as the disastrous May 2003 decision to dissolve the Iraqi army moved forward. Now, Tuesday's New York Times suggests that Coalition Provisional Authority viceroy L. Paul Bremer indeed told Bush that he planned to disband Saddam's military and that the President casually - and unquestioningly - went along for the ride.

For the details, see:
"Bremer Letters Show Bush OK'd Disbanding Iraqi Army."

Missed it by thatmuch

“If I’m so f**king productive, where’s my cut?”

That's what bugs me about this crap that's trotted out all the time "The American worker is the most productive in the world!!"
Productivity is measured from the businesses standpoint. Which means that if, from that perspective, American workers are the most productive, then they are really the most overworked and underpaid.

You know what would impress me? PERSONAL productivity. Productivity measured from the workers' standpoint. How productive is your work for YOU?

Kevin Drum has a provocative post up in which he concludes that the liberal blogosphere and liberal establishment were badly "outplayed" by Petraeus' PR "blitzkrieg."a> Kevin reaches this sobering conclusion: "Even though there's been no discernible political progress, minimal reconstruction progress, and apparently no genuine decrease in violence, he's managed to convince an awful lot of people that the first doesn't matter, the second is far more widespread than it really is, and the third is the opposite of reality." [buzzflash 9/4 ]

80 minutes is a pretty long bike ride.

The essay at Empire Burlesque is heartbreaking.

Bush can stack those "Iraq improvements" right next to those "WMD" and other lies.

Why We Should Thank "Right-Said" Fred

I've been reading Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque for quite awhile now (he's often at Counterpunch too). He's pretty dark about the state of things, but I can never find any holes in his arguments. I agree with his despair--it's tough to see a realistic way out of the mess we're in. Those at the top have no allegiance to any notion of a nation anymore--only to their own globe-trotting, trottered porcine cabal.

Re: Quaker Agitator:

Well said.

Jonathon Last Writes:

"“It was in the aftermath of Somme that the British mind first began to flinch at the price of empire. Within 20 years the British would be actively turning a back on the world, allowing slaughter to bubble forth from Germany again.”"

What an astonishing feat of intellectual dishonesty. To fix the blame for WWII on "losing the appetitie for empire". Of course, the profoundly unjust Versailles Treaty had nothing to do with creating perfect economic and social conditions which assured the rise of a twisted, opportunistic demagogue like Hitler. No,,,,, nothing at all.

When a policy is crafted whose intent is to self-righteously and unjustly beggar and forever punish a people, the only thing assured is that strife is going to result. There is no other possible outcome. Even a full on gluttonous, insatiable appeptite for empire cannot change that. Acting upon that appetitie can only make things worse.

That was, at one time, one of the BIG lessons learned from WWII. You know, the motive behind the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan.(?!?)

Imperial rule and empires always fail, because they are unsustainable. They are unsustainable because they are built upon injustice. The weilders of empire become exploiters and theives; those subject to imperialism become the obligatory exploited - perpetual victims. It will work to the exploiter's advantage for a little while, but the costs of sustaining empire rapidly become intolerable.

Injustice breeds ardent disunity. Ardent disunity breeds strife. One follows the other with the inescapable weight of inevitability. WWII was the direct result of such a process, a process that was itself born out of an attempt at creating new empire, wherein the losers of WWI were assigned the role of permanent victims. The victor's decision to go that post-WWI route, made the appearance of a Hitler on the scene inevitable. No amount of historical revision will change that. Nor, can limitless indulgence in neocon fantasies about creating "new realities" through the simple exercise of will power and Applied Ideology alter the operation of cause and effect. Current and future acts of foolishness will proceed with their own irresistable momentum to their inevitable consequences independent of such things as wishful thinking or determined spin.

There are some things in the human and social dynamic that proceed with imutable force to inevitable outcomes - a certain cause invariably leads to a certain end state. As certainly as nature is trapped in physical law do these dynamics appear to be inescapably trapped within some kind of their own natural law. Exposing these articles of natural law has always been one of the points to the honest study and examination of history. So, too, for the study and examination of enduring principles of ethics and morality.

Jonathon Last must have been sleeping in the back row of class when lessons covering these concepts were taught. The Philadelphia Inquirer obviously doesn't care about it's reputation if it allowed his psuedo-intellectual drivel to be published without a countering argument.

Finally, can I assume that it is safe to conclude that Mr. Last would not mind being included among the entirely reasonable number of war dead in Iraq? Or does the specific number of dead sacrificed in pursuit of empire only become reasonable and acceptable when it is those-other-than-self who must do the dying?