- Written by Mike Whitney
Powderkeg
“You’ll find a day when there are no Sunnis left in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are panicking about this, and they are hoping that the US
will in some way arm or support Sunnis militias. It’s hard for me to
imagine that Sunni nations in the region will stand by and watch Sunnis
pushed out of Baghdad, because there is this terror of the Shia threat. So you’ll see greater support from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan, perhaps from Yemen, from Egypt for Sunni militias. And the civil war will spread and become a regional one.†Nir Rosen; interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now President Bush’s latest round of “Disaster Diplomacy†has turned into a tragedy worthy of Eugene O’ Neill. In Riga, Latvia he was coolly greeted by foreign leaders in NATO who flatly rejected his request for more troops in Afghanistan or for redeploying troops to the south where the fighting is fiercest.
The next leg of Bush’s trip, a stopover in Amman, Jordan, turned out to be an even bigger flop. Bush was supposed to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, but Al-Maliki decided to follow the orders of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and pulled a “no showâ€. This left the “most powerful man in the worldâ€, the President of the United States, looking like a schoolgirl who had been dumped on Prom Night. Bush's humiliation appeared as headline news around the world.
All in all, it’s been a tough week for Bush. The trip has exposed the fault-lines in US foreign policy and the steady erosion American power. Bush seems completely oblivious to the damage he’s doing to the country by refusing to change the present strategy and by blundering-ahead blindly pushing us deeper and deeper into the quagmire:
“I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,†Bush growled to the NATO assembly.
Translation: “Stay the course, stay the course, stay the courseâ€; repeat into infinity.
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Let me be the first to wish Bill O'Reilly a very Happy Winter Solstice. The
precise moment this year will be December 21, 2006 at 7:22 p.m. EST (00:22
UTC on December 22). For those of you scoring at home, "solstice" means
"standing-still-sun" and it occurs when, due to the earth's tilt, your
hemisphere is leaning farthest away from the sun.
A
group of national newspapers have paid £170,000 [roughly $330,000] to a
man they falsely accused of involvement in the "liquid bomb" plot to
blow up planes at Heathrow airport.
disappeared, probably forever, into the shadowlands – that murky confluence of crime, violence, money and politics where so much of the real business of the world is conducted. However, an examination of some of the curiously overlooked aspects of the affair might send at least a few shafts of light into the cloud of unknowing that has enveloped Litvinenko's death. 
“The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide.â€
It all happened while America slept.
I did something worse than St. Augustine did when I was a kid. I must confess I broke into a house on the other side of town, and I did it just because it was such an ugly beat-down house that needed work so badly. Well, that and I kind of wanted to move out of my parents'. 
Perhaps the greatest triumph of modern capitalism has been its ability to sell itself and to do it by fair means and foul with the emphasis on the foul.
Jimmy Carter was the latest to use the M Word. The former president said he
believes the "occupancy of Iraq and all the consequences of it are a big
mistake." This echoes John Kerry's infamous 1971 question: "How do you ask a
man to die for a mistake?" Hmm...perhaps recalling a few details about the
Vietnam "mistake" might shine some light on the Iraq "blunder."
Well, the New York Times just got sucked in again to help the Bush
Administration make the case for starting a war with Iran and Syria. Sorry, but how obtuse can some folks be? I refer to the so-called news
reported by 
You would think that
by now we would have "supp'd full with horrors" on the New York Times
op-ed pages. What could be worse than the atrocities that have filled
those gray columns in the past few years,
the loud brays for war, the convoluted excuses for presidential
tyranny, the steady murmur of chin-stroking bullshit meant to comfort
the comfortable elite and confirm them -- at all times, at any cost --
in their well-wadded self-righteousness? Surely, you would think, we
have seen the worst.
On my way to the elevated subway station today, I caught sight of my
neighborhood's most clearcut (pun very much intended) sign that Santa season
is fully upon us: Christmas tree lots. I detect the familiar faces of the
folks‹positioned, as always, in front of Rite Aid‹hawking pines and firs
long since separated from their roots. According to the National Christmas
Tree Association, approximately 30-35 million "real" Christmas trees are
sold in the U.S. every year and roughly 100,000 people are employed in the
Christmas tree industry.
Noam
Chomsky needs no introduction. He's MIT Institute Professor Emeritus of
linguistics and a leading anti-war critic and voice for over 40 years for
social equity and justice. He's also one
of the world's most influential and widely cited intellectuals on the
Left. Gilbert Achcar is a
Lebanese-French academic, author, social activist, Middle East expert and
professor of politics and international relations at the University of
Paris. Their new book, Perilous Power,
is based on 14 hours of dialogue between them over three days in January, 2006
and updated six months later in July in a separate Epilogue at the end. It covers US foreign policy in the most
volatile and turbulent region in the world, the Middle East, and discusses the
wars in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan as well as such key issues as
terrorism, fundamentalism, oil, democracy, possible war against Iran and much
more. Chomsky and Achcar collaborated
with Stephen Shalom, Professor of Political Science at William Paterson
University acting as moderator to pose questions and keep the discussion on track. 
Think of it as a Tomdispatch.com milestone. This is now the first website to "indict" the President, the Vice President, and their colleagues for defrauding us into war in Iraq. I put that "indict" in quotes because what follows, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega makes clear in her new book United States v. George W. Bush et al., is "not an actual indictment." It can't be, of course; but consider it the second best thing. 
As long as there has been a
U.S. military, people have been
leaving it. That choice has never
been more appropriate than today. Individuals who signed up to defend the United States are engaged in a
war that was sold on the basis of lies, was entirely unnecessary, is making us
less safe, has nothing to do with defending anyone, and which involves the
horror of slaughtering men, women, and children by the hundreds of
thousands. The majority of
Americans want the war to end and just voted accordingly in the Congressional
elections. The majority of Iraqis
want the war to end. The majority
of American service men and women in Iraq want the war to end. And taking part in this war is illegal,
whether you are ordered to do so or not.