The Nation

Defense Budget Follies (continued)








Holding Bush to Account for Climate Lies, Neglect







That is not a prospect to be considered casually.





But the Greens are right on this one.











Libby Trial: Scooter Speaks














Think Globally, Act Globally




What's Wrong With This Picture?














A Budget for Permanent War

Need proof that George W. Bush is not planning to withdraw US troops from Iraq on his watch? Just look at his latest budget.

The Bush Administration will ask Congress for $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan this year--on top of the $70 billion already allocated--and $145 billion for 2008. Why ask for the money if you're not planning to use it?

Administration officials, according to the Washington Post, "warned that even more money will probably will be needed." The Los Angeles Times says the military wants "even larger defense budgets."

Are you kidding me?

The costs of Iraq and Afghanistan aren't even included in the $481 billion the Pentagon demands for 2008, a 10 percent raise over this year. Total these figures up and Bush is asking for roughly $745 billion in defense spending, a higher number, when adjusted for inflation, than the entire cost of the Vietnam War.

Just pause and consider the size of that number. Three-quarters of a trillion dollars and Osama bin Laden is still at large, the Taliban are regrouping in Afghanistan and the US military is stuck in a civil war in Iraq.

"We have the largest Pentagon budget since World War II, but we are losing to an opponent in Iraq that spends less over an entire year than what we spend in one day," says Winslow Wheeler, a longtime defense expert at the Center for Defense Information.

Four defense analysts at the Security Policy Working Group recently awarded the government low or failing grades on virtually every aspect of the budget--use of nation's resources (D), affordability (D), realism (D) and transparency (F). On only one criteria, advertising, did they award at A+, "for the Pentagon managing to convince Congress that the world's largest defense budget is too small."

The question now is whether this Congress will take the bait?

States to Congress: Block War Escalation

As the Senate struggles even to open debate on a non-binding – translation: meaningless – resolution expressing frustration with President Bush's plan to surge 21,500 more U.S. troops into Iraq, state legislators across the country are telling Congress to embrace its constitutionally-defined duty to check and balance an out-of-control executive.

With encouragement from the Progressive States Network and activists across the country, members of at least 22 state legislatures have introduced resolutions urging Congress to use its authority to prevent the escalation of a war that should not have been fought in the first place. The resolutions that have been introduced generally declare that: "the Congress should pass legislation prohibiting the President from spending taxpayer dollars on an escalation in Iraq unless he first seeks Congressional approval."

This is a relatively mild intervention at a time when most Americans oppose not just the president's "surge" proposal but the war itself. What the legislators are suggesting, however, is that a divided Congress must, at the very least, act to prevent the escalation of a war that has killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, that has made Americans at home and abroad less safe and that has emptied the US treasury of funds that could pay for health care, education and other needed programs in the states.

There will be those who suggest that state and local officials have no place in federal debates. But PSN leaders, citing past moves by states to add their voices to debates over trade policy, argue that the legislative resolutions on the "surge" issue can and should play a vital role on convincing Congress to act.

"States have the power and authority to speak out on issues that will impact them and their citizens," says PSN executive director Joel Barkin. "An escalation in Iraq would cripple our already over-extended guard units, threatening readiness at home."

Barkin's found plenty of agreement for that view in state capitols around the country. So far, PSN is tracking resolutions in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.

The moves by state legislators come as city officials across the country are stepping into the debate over the diversion of precious resources to an unwise and unnecessary war. Two weeks ago, the Minneapolis, Minnesota, city council passed a Bring the Troops Home Resolution, making it the 274th community to endorse an exit strategy as part of the Cities for Peace campaign organized by the Institute for Policy Studies' Cities for Progress initiative.

The Cities for Peace campaign, an outgrowth of a pre-war push to get local governments to weigh in on Iraq, began long before the president made his "surge" proposal in January.

The new effort to get state legislators to pass anti-escalation resolutions began several weeks ago. In a PSN-organized conference call with legislators and activists, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, who had just proposed legislation that would require the president to attain congressional approval for any move to send more troops to Iraq, said that states should weigh in on the "surge" issue.

Kennedy suggested that members of Congress can be prodded by the states, noting that moves by states to increase the minimum wage has played a role in forcing the US House and Senate to address the issue.

States can do the same on the war, explained Kennedy.

PSN answered the call, using its website to encourage citizens to contact state legislators and urge them to speak out against the surge. More than 10,000 did. And the numbers are expected to rise quickly, as PSN will join MoveOn, True Majority and the Women Legislators' Lobby are preparing to launch a national drive to build citizen support for the state-based anti-escalation resolutions.

The anti-war surge from below comes in conjunction with a broader Americans against Escalation in Iraq campaign, which has won backing the Service Employers International Union (SEIU), US Action, Move On, Win Without War, Vote Vets, Center for American Progress, Campaign for America's Future and United States Student Association.

Americans Against Escalation plans to launch a multi-million-dollar campaign in up to two dozen states with the stated purpose of creating "a firestorm of grass-roots mobilization (to insist that Congress stand up to the President and insist on a policy which responsibly brings our troops home."

The point, explains former Congressman Tom Andrews, the Maine Democrat who serves as Win Without War's national director, is to prevent George Bush from steering the United States deeper into the Iraq quagmire.

"From the outset, the Bush administration's Iraq policy has been rooted in denial and deception and carried out with a lethal combination of arrogance, ignorance and incompetence," says Andrews. "When you find yourself in a hole, the first principle is to stop digging."


John Nichols' latest book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure forRoyalism.

Kuwaiti Singer's Video Satirizes the Bush War

Within the highly wired world of the urban Middle East, the latest and most potent means of political communication are short videos that are disseminated either via YouTube or from cellphone to cellphone.

I'm writing this from Egypt. Everyone here agrees that the video images of the hanging of Saddam Hussein played a huge role in stirring up anti-US and also anti-Shiite feelings among many of the Sunni Muslims who make up the majority of the Arab world's people.

Now, a well-known Kuwaiti singer called Shams has come out with a new 5-minute video called Ahlan! Ezayek? ("Hi! How are you"), which is a hard-hitting anti-Bush satire. She energetically sings and performs a well-known Egyptian popular song of romantic repudiation. "Hi! How are you... You think you're so great? I never want to see you again!" while hamming it up with a dizzying array of props representing aspects of Bush's policy in the Middle East. And yes, that includes Washington's "information" policies, too, with repeated visual references to newspaper stories and to round-table type TV talk-shows...

I've remarked before on the complex relationship between pornography and war. In this video-- which was apparently shot in Cairo and used remarkably high production values-- Shams does her own mocking (and I would say, extremely feminist) riff on that relationship... She sashays provocatively up to a cardboard image of Bush at the "presidential" podium before she takes over the podium herself... She stands dancing and primping in a sand desert in front of huge letters spelling out "DEMOCRACY" before hitting into the sand various heavily armed US soldiers undertaking operations all around her... She wanders with a "lovelorn" look around a sound-studio full of (male) talking heads hung from puppets' strings around a table, and being manipulated by members of the Bush administration before, with a wicked smile, she snips the string of one of the puppets. (The string/rope left swinging there at the end is an eery visual reminder -- same lighting and all-- of the videos of the Saddam execution.)

You have to see how she blows the blond toupee off the head of an ageing Arab male journo, provocatively fans herself with the card holding her "detainee number" as she stands in a police line-up, or disports herself langorously along the top of the large letters "GUANTANAMO" laid out in front of (an image of) the White House...

In the fast-paced denouement of the video a cowboy-hatted Bush propositions her on top of a castle built in the sand in the form of an economist's graph showing, I think, oil-price rises. She swats Bush off the castle (more Saddam hanging imagery here), then throws down on top of him a stone block that turns out to be an "E" that is rapidly joined by all the other letters of the word "LIBERTY"... which is then itself immediately placed behind iron bars... Finally, from a fortune-teller Shams learns that her future is to walk happily off into the sunset with... Naji al-Ali's iconic, Kuwaiti-born child, Handala. (And if you don't know who Handala is, or what he represents, then you probably need to find out. Hint: "old-fashioned" pan-Arab nationalism... )

Anyway, if you have a fast internet connection, check out the video and see what you think.

Afghanistan in Headlines



On the fighting:

"Airstrike kills up to Seven in Afghanistan"

"12 militants killed in West Afghanistan"

"Nato offensive 'kills 30 Taleban'"


"Driving the Taleban off Nipple Hill -- again"



On calls for intensification of the military struggle:

"Britain to increase forces in Afghanistan"









So goes the repetitive, if ever deepening, tragedy of our other war- and under such headlines lie massive tragedies that seldom make the headlines anywhere like the plight of Afghanistan's "liberated" women (as recently vividly described by former humanitarian aid worker and author of Kabul in Winter, Ann Jones), who remain "by custom and practice, the property of men," capable of being "traded and sold like any commodity," despite all the hoopla about their improved status offered by the Bush administration.

In the case of Afghanistan, the question remains: What ever made the top officials of the Bush administration think that they could succeed in conquering and occupying Afghanistan, when so many others from Alexander the Great to the imperial British and the imperial Russians failed so dismally at the same task?