RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.
CHENEY: So?

1. Winter Soldier Testimonials

• Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) hold press conference in Washington, DC. 3.14.08 (video) http://www.therealnews.com/web/index.php?thisdataswitch=0&thisid=1122&thisview=item

• Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans Speak Out (photo essay)
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79802/

• How to Become a Concentration Camp Guard Without Even Trying (video). http://www.alternet.org/rights/79980/

2. Baghdad: City of Walls (video)

In the first of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's extraordinary series of films to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, he investigates the claims that the US military surge is bringing stability to Iraq. By travelling through the heart of Baghdad he exposes how, by enclosing the Sunni and Shia populations behind 12ft walls, the surge has left the city more divided and desperate than ever. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad 3.17.08 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/mar/17/baghdad.city.of.walls

3. Reuters: Bearing Witness:Five Years of he Iraq War (video)

http://iraq.reuters.com/

4. Iraq's lost generation (video)

In the final instalment of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's series of films to mark the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, he travels to an orphanage in Sadr city, where children speak of their hatred of America. A generation of Iraqi children have been radicalized and anti-westernised by the war. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2008/mar/19/iraqs.lost.generation

5. The Colbert Report: The Audacity of Hopelessness

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/03/the_word_6.html

6. Frontline: Bush's War

From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge -- for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.

Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War, airing Monday, March 24, from 9 to 11:30 P.M. and Tuesday, March 25, 2008, from 9 to 11 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings). Veteran producer Michael Kirk (The Torture Question, The Dark Side) draws on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism -- more than 40 FRONTLINE reports on the war on terror. Combined with fresh reporting and new interviews, Bush's War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

7. From the DAILY GRILL

"House Republicans had been seeking the closed session to delay a vote on a new Democratic FISA overhaul, unveiled Tuesday, and discuss its national security implications."-- The Hill, 3/13/08

VERSUS

"There are clear rules and procedures for how Congress handles classified information. ... This nonsense is nothing more than another stalling tactic from a bunch of liberals who don't want to give our intelligence officials all the tools they need to keep America safe." -- Spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) claiming the House Democrats were the ones that were pushing for a closed session to discuss the legal underpinnings of President Bush’s intelligence surveillance program. 2/26/08



"If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor ... and it has been well worth the effort." -- Dick Cheney 3.17.08

VERSUS

"At the fifth anniversary, the conflict’s staggering burden is a rebuke to any who hoped Mr. Hussein’s removal might be accomplished at acceptable cost. Back in 2003, only the most prescient could have guessed ... that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America’s financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years. Beyond that, there are a million or more Iraqis living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and the pitiful toll of fear and deprivation on Iraqi streets." -- NY Times correspondent JOHN F. BURNS 3.16.08



"There have been some phenomenal changes...with respect to political developments here in Iraq." -- Cheney. 3/17/08  

VERSUS

"A conference to reconcile Iraq's warring political groups began to unravel even before it got under way on Tuesday, with the main Sunni Muslim Arab bloc pulling out and protesting it had not been properly invited." -- Reuters, 3/18/08



"I have the most experience of any presidential candidate when it comes to foreign policy and advancing our national and economic security priorities around the globe." -- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 1/29/08

VERSUS

"Sen. John McCain... incorrectly asserted Tuesday that Iran is training and supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq, confusing the Sunni insurgent group with the Shiite extremists who U.S. officials believe are supported by their religious brethren in the neighboring country." -- Washington Post, 3/19/08



"There are lots of problems and after thirty years of a brutal dictatorship, we can't turn this thing around overnight. But to say we cannot win." -- Iraq war architect Richard Perle, 3/17/08

VERSUS

"And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush." -- Perle, 9/22/03

8. "Happy Birthday War," by Mitch Benn (video)

Mitch Benn's song and video celebrate the fifth birthday of the war in Iraq! http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=30528025

9. President weakens espionage oversight

Almost 32 years to the day after President Ford created an independent Intelligence Oversight Board made up of private citizens with top-level clearances to ferret out illegal spying activities, President Bush issued an executive order that stripped the board of much of its authority.

"It's quite clear that the Bush administration officials who were around in the 1970s are settling old scores now," said Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. "Here they are even preventing oversight within the executive branch. They have closed the books on the post-Watergate era." Charlie Savage
3.14.08 http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/03/14/president_weakens_espionage_oversight/

10. Robert Greenwald: FOX Attacks Obama, part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjvNSpsPu1k

11. Stephen Colbert on John Gibson, Tucker Carlson and Gov. Spitzer

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=163837&is_large=true

12. Writers Strike at DailyKos: an open letter to the progressive blogosphere...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/14/20827/4727/132/476843

13. Ellen DeGeneres Calls GOP Rep Who Said Gays Are "Bigger Threat" Than Terrorism (video)

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/mediaculture/79613/

14. Late-Night Political Jokes for Dems

"The price of gasoline, oh, my God, it's going crazy. In Hawaii, now over $4 a gallon. Again, President Bush, I don't think he understands the problem. Like today, he says, 'First off, nobody drives to Hawaii.'" --Jay Leno

"Anybody got one of these yet, the new redesigned $5 bill? It's out, new $5 bill. It has several new features. One of the new features, it's only worth $3." --Jay Leno

"The dollar has fallen fast on the world market. In fact, there has now been a request to take 'In God We Trust' off the bill. The request came from God." --Jay Leno

"But President Bush is concerned about the economy. He admitted today that the economy is a little sluggish, a little sluggish right now. The same way Elvis is a little sluggish right now, too. Elvis can't come out, he's a little sluggish." --David Letterman

"A lot of American dignitaries visiting the Middle East. Senator McCain, running for president, is in Iraq. ... Of course, he remembers Iraq when it was known as Mesopotamia." --David Letterman

"Vice President Dick Cheney also paid a surprise visit to Iraq. And Cheney is very popular in the Middle East. I mean, he flashes them that nice, warm sneer and they just go crazy. And in that part of the world he is known as Lawrence of Arrhythmia." --David Letterman

"You know the amazing thing to me about this whole situation is? Now, we didn't know anything about this woman. She'd given a fake name, 'Kristen,' and a vague general description -- 5'5", petite. That's all we knew. Yet, reporters tracked her down in a day and a half. A day in a half, they found her. Now, Osama bin Laden, the most famous terrorist in the world -- he's 6'6", he's got a beard, he wears the same robe and turban every day -- we have no idea." --Jay Leno

"Taking over for Governor Spitzer will be the lieutenant governor, David Paterson, who is legally blind. Interesting. Once again, I don't think President Bush really understands the situation. In fact, when he heard 'legally blind,' he said, 'I love that movie.'" --Jay Leno

"With all the bad news about the economy today, John McCain started distancing himself from President Bush. In fact, McCain was running so fast from President Bush, he ran into Barack Obama, who was running from his minister, and Hillary, who was running from Geraldine Ferraro. And they all just collided." --Jay Leno

"Did you see how much the dollar fell again today? ... The dollar is so low now, all of Eliot Spitzer's hookers demand euros." --Jay Leno

"A blue-ribbon panel of educators put together by President Bush -- President Bush put these guys together. He's determined that other countries' kids are better at math because we try to teach our kids too much. Oh, that's the problem? We're teaching them too much. Teach them less and they'll learn more. In fact, don't teach them at all, they could grow up to be president of the United States." --Jay Leno

"Don't kid yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, things are bad. We've got an unpopular war, we have high energy prices, slumping economy. I just hope to God the president doesn't find out." --David Letterman

"You folks excited about the presidential race? What do you think of John McCain? I like John McCain. He looks like the guy at the bakery who doesn't hear his number called. ... He looks like the guy who likes to watch the plumber work." --David Letterman

"Big news out of the Pentagon. The Pentagon just published a report, just a couple of hours ago, that officially confirms that there was never any link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Never any link. Yeah. The report is entitled, 'Oops, Our Bad.'" --Conan O'Brien

"The president was pretty blunt in his speech today, but at the end he managed to put a positive spin on things [on screen: Bush laughing after a series of negative things are said about the economy]. He has a special gift, and that is being able to see humor in everything. Thank goodness I have all my money invested in breakfast sausage." --Jimmy Kimmel

"You know how the governor got caught? Through wiretaps. You see, Democrats get caught in sex scandals through wiretapping. Republicans get caught in sex scandals through foot tapping." --Jay Leno

15. Face The Nation: Bob Schieffer Reminds America There’s Still A War In Iraq (video)

http://www.crooksandliars.com/Media/Play/27336/2/ftn-schieffer-close-iraq-031608.mov/

16. The U.S. Military's Assassination Problem

in 2004, when an American missile fired from a Predator drone killed Taliban leader Nek Mohammed, an observer told a journalist that the bombing was so exact it "didn't damage any of the buildings around the lawn where Mohammed was seated." It was an endorsement, if ever there was one, of the Bush administration's post-9/11 efforts at assassinations using what are known as decapitation attacks.

The practice, which is shrouded under a veil of intense secrecy, is generally regarded as warfare's answer to laser surgery: clean and accurate, cheaper than waging a protracted ground battle, and less risky for American troops. But in reality, these premeditated and narrowly focused air bombings often fail to kill their intended foe and hit civilians instead. "It's much more difficult to hunt people with a 2,000-pound bomb than people realize," says Marc Garlasco, who until 2003 was one of the Pentagon's leading analysts of air strikes, including assassinations. David Case March/April 2008 http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2008/03/the-us-militarys-assassination-problem.html

17. President's Budget FY 2009 and Iraq War: State Impact

The National Priorities Project takes stock of President Bush's spending priorities on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, examining the cost of the Iraq War, proposed budget cuts in domestic programs and the cost of keeping tax cuts for the wealthy.

A fact sheet for each state is at http://www.nationalpriorities.org/budgetpriorities2009

Trade-off information by congressional district and state is at http://www.nationalpriorities.org/tradeoffs

18. John McBush on the Economy: The Same Old Thing (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lvgHvm4_OI

19. McCain and Cheney Five Years Ago: ‘We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators’ (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKFL-Mz4rto&eurl

20. 'The Unforeseen'

The film deftly examines the building of a subdivision in Texas and its fallout, depicting the battle between the competing interests of developers and environmentalists, turning it into a convincing microcosm for land use issues everywhere. Kenneth Turan 3.14.08 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/cl-et-unforeseen14mar14,1,7972791.story

21. Senator Hothead: The McCain Quiz, by Paul Slansky

1. What did Richard Kimball, John McCain’s opponent in his 1986 Senate race, do during a debate that got McCain so upset that, according to his aide Jay Smith, he “wanted to kill” Kimball?

(a) He pointed out that McCain had referred to the retirement community Leisure World as “Seizure World.”

(b) He revealed that McCain was standing on a riser behind his podium.

(c) He said, “I’m not the one who left his disabled first wife so he could marry a rich young beer heiress.”

2. Who is Harry Jaffe?

(a) The writer who first called McCain “Senator Hothead.”

(b) The journalist who helped break the 1994 story of Cindy McCain’s addiction to Percocet and Vicodin, which led her to steal pills from a relief organization she’d founded.

(c) The reporter whose question prompted McCain to respond that he was “fine” with a hundred-year U.S. military presence in Iraq.

(d) The politician who said of McCain, “His volatility borders in the area of being unstable. Before I let this guy put his finger on the button, I would have to give considerable pause.”

The remaining questions and the answers to these questions are at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/polls/slansky/080307sh_shouts_slansky

22. Manacled, starved, beaten: a rendition victim's story

Khaled al-Maqtari's nightmare began when American troops arrived at the al-Ghufran market in Fallujah in January 2004. He was arrested along with other terrorist suspects and taken to Abu Ghraib jail. For the next four years he was held captive, moved from country to country and suffered, he says, appalling torture.

Mr al-Maqtari, from Yemen, was one of the many inmates in the US's secret "ghost detention" who disappeared into an international network of prisons, their whereabouts unknown to family and friends. British soldiers, he claims, were involved in investigating him although they did not play any part in the abuse.

Details of what Mr al-Maqtari, 31, says was done to him emerge after a recent admission from the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband (after previous denials) that the island of Diego Garcia, a British territory, had been used in American rendition flights.

Amnesty International, in a report into the Yemeni's case, has called for an independent inquiry into the extent of the UK's role in the US's "war on terror" and, especially, rendition flights. An investigation across the Atlantic into the subject was also necessary, says the human rights group, to bring the torturers to justice and provide compensation for the victims. Kim Sengupta 3.14.08 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/manacled-starved-beaten-a-rendition-victims-story-795741.html

23. Andy Borowitz: McCain Concludes Fact-hiding Mission to Iraq

Presumptive G.O.P. nominee John McCain wrapped up his fact-hiding mission to Iraq today, declaring the trip an unqualified success.

“My friends, I came to Iraq to hide the facts about the way the war is going, and in that I have succeeded,” Sen. McCain told reporters. “Omission accomplished.”

The Arizona senator said that his trip to Iraq was successful in part because he was able to obscure the actual facts with new facts of his own creation.

“It’s a well known fact that Iran is training al-Qaeda,” Sen. McCain said. “And if it wasn’t a well-known fact before, it is now.”

In a speech commemorating the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush echoed Sen. McCain’s fact-hiding theme.

“As far as the war is concerned, the facts speak for themselves,” Mr. Bush said. “So I won’t mention any of them.”

Mr. Bush acknowledged that the war still presented certain challenges, but concluded on an upbeat note: “Iraq today is in better shape than Bear Stearns.” www.borowitzreport.com

24. Another year, another $300 billion

One-third of the 780,000 troops discharged so far have been treated at veterans' hospitals and clinics, including 120,000 treated for mental health conditions and 68,000 diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. This year alone the Department of Veterans Affairs expects to treat 333,000 returning veterans. The majority of these veterans will be eligible to receive lifetime disability compensation - 228,000 have already filed applications. Linda Bilmes 3.16.08 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/16/another_year_another_300_billion/

25. Times poll: Dems want primary results to count

Howard Dean and Barack Obama may insist Florida’s Democratic presidential primary was meaningless, but a new poll shows Florida Democrats aren’t buying it, and one in four may not back their party's nominee in November if Florida winds up with no voice in the nomination. 3.18.08 http://blogs.tampabay.com/buzz/2008/03/by-adam-c-smith.html

26. What is the real death toll in Iraq?

So five years after Bush and Tony Blair launched the invasion of Iraq against the wishes of a majority of UN members, no one knows how many Iraqis have died. We do know that more than two million have fled abroad. Another 1.5 million have sought safety elsewhere in Iraq. We know that the combined horror of car bombs, suicide attacks, sectarian killing and disproportionate US counter-insurgency tactics and air strikes have produced the worst humanitarian catastrophe in today's world. But the exact death toll remains a mystery. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg 3.19 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraq

27. Saturday Night Surrogates

Tina Fey endorses Hillary Clinton and Tracy Morgan responds at http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20080317_saturday_night_surrogates/

4. GAIL COLLINS: George Speaks, Badly

Watching George W. Bush address the New York financial community Friday brought back many memories. Unfortunately, they were about his speech right after Hurricane Katrina, the one when he said: “America will be a stronger place for it.”

“You’ve helped make our country really in many ways the economic envy of the world,” he told the Economic Club of New York.

You could almost see the thought-bubble forming over the audience: Not this week, kiddo.

The president squinched his face and bit his lip and seemed too antsy to stand still. As he searched for the name of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (“the king, uh, the king of Saudi”) and made guy-fun of one of the questioners (“Who picked Gigot?”), you had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.

We’re really past expecting anything much, but in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control. Suddenly, I recalled a day long ago when my husband worked for a struggling paper full of worried employees and the publisher walked into the newsroom wearing a gorilla suit.

The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance. Our credit markets are foundering, and all we’ve got is a guy who looks like he’s ready to kick back and start the weekend. 3.15.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/opinion/15collins.html

5. Derrick Z. Jackson: Prisoners of sentencing politics

WITH ODIOUS sanctimony, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice released the annual State Department human rights report. She praised people around the world who work "to hold their leaders accountable and to achieve equal justice under the law."
more stories like this

Missing from the State Department report was the disastrous detour of our own nation. Our inflexible reforms have for two decades turned nonviolent criminals into prisoners of politics.

The United States is the world's leading prison state. For the first time in our history, more than one out of every 100 adults is behind bars. We have 2.3 million people in jail or prison, according to a Pew Center on the States study released last month. Our rate of imprisonment easily beats second-place Russia and is six times the rate of China, seven times the rate of Germany or France, 10 times the rate of Italy, and 12 times the rate of Japan. 3.15.08 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/15/prisoners_of_sentencing_politics/

6. David Krieger: Accountability for the Iraq War

We have been engaged in an illegal war in Iraq for five years - and there is no accountability.

It is beyond doubt that our leaders lied us into this war - and there is no accountability.

More than four thousand American and coalition soldiers are dead - and there is no accountability.

Tens of thousands of American and coalition soldiers are seriously wounded - and there is no accountability.

Our surviving soldiers are coming home traumatized from the war without proper medical and psychiatric care - and there is no accountability.

More than a million Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed in this war and countless others wounded - and there is no accountability.

More than four million Iraqis are displaced as internal or external refugees of this war - and there is no accountability. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/15/7713/

7. Through Bush-Colored Glasses

President Bush admitted on Friday that times are tough. So much for the straight talk.

Mr. Bush went on to paint a false picture of the economy. He dismissed virtually every proposal Congress is working on to alleviate the mortgage crisis, sticking to his administration’s inadequate ideas. And despite the rush of serious problems — frozen credit markets, millions of impending mortgage defaults, solvency issues at banks, a plunging dollar — he said that a major source of uncertainty today is whether his tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2010, would be extended.

This was too far afield of reality to be dismissed as simple cheerleading. It points to the pressing need for a coherent plan to steer through what some economists are now predicting could be a severe downturn. Mr. Bush’s denial of the economic truth underscores the need for Congress to push forward with solutions to the mortgage crisis — especially bankruptcy reform to help defaulting homeowners. Lawmakers also must prepare to execute, in case it is needed, a government rescue of people whose homes are now worth less than they borrowed to buy them.

Mr. Bush said he was optimistic because the economy’s “foundation is solid” as measured by employment, wages, productivity, exports and the federal deficit. He was wrong on every count. On some, he has been wrong for quite a while. 3.16.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/16sun1.html

8. MAUREEN DOWD: Soft Shoe in Hard Times

Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood.

The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”

“I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,” that gas prices are spiking, and that folks “are concerned about making their bills.”

He began by laughingly calling the latest news on the economic meltdown “a interesting moment” and ended by saying that “our energy policy has not been very wise” and that there was “no quick fix” on gasp-inducing gas prices.

“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”

Dude, you’re already in the ditch. 3.16.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/16dowd.html

9. Partick Cockburn: A gross failure that ignored history and ended with a humiliating retreat

The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing. It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish.

The British failure in the Iraq war has been even more gross because it has not ended with a costly military victory but a humiliating scuttle. The victors in Basra and southern Iraq have been the local Shia militias masquerading as government security forces.

Britain should immediately hold a full inquiry into the mistakes made before and during the war in Iraq out of pure self-interest. Gordon Brown's suggestion that holding such an inquiry now would somehow threaten the stability of Iraq is either a piece of obvious prevarication or, if taken at face value, a sign of absurd vanity. Iraqis show not the slightest interest in British policy and assume it will simply be an echo of decisions made in Washington. 3.17.08 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/partick-cockburn-a-gross
-failure-that-ignored-history-and-ended-with-a-humiliating-retreat-796775.html

10. Dick Polman: The American Debate: Jaded by lies, public suffers war fatigue

Hey, remember Iraq? Little dustup in the Middle East, launched by President Bush based on false premises, that's now costing this country $3 billion a week? A conflict now on the cusp of its fifth anniversary, which makes it the third-longest in our history, after Vietnam and the Revolutionary War?

We have reached the point where Iraq seems both omnipotent and under the radar. It has wreaked all kinds of havoc on our economy, roiled our relations with allies, and profoundly deepened the ideological divide in our politics - yet polls indicate that most Americans view Iraq as a second-tier issue in the '08 presidential campaign. This would appear to be a contradiction, but I think it is easily explainable.

There is a great temptation to simply tune out the war. That's what happens when people are jaded, exhausted and confused.

We are jaded about the mendacities and duplicities that began during the '02 sales pitch and continue to this day. Last week, for instance, the Pentagon concluded, after sifting 600,000 captured documents and quizzing former Iraqi officials, that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were not in cahoots - thereby refuting one of the Bush war team's core claims. The Pentagon at first promised to post the full report online, then reversed itself. Yet the smattering of news stories barely made a ripple.

We are exhausted by the sheer weight of this misbegotten enterprise. We are told that "the surge is working" (as Bush and John McCain frequently intone) whereas, in reality, the military has merely applied a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. Four million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes, and their fates are unclear. Meanwhile, the dead still pile up daily. In March, an average of 39 Iraqis have been killed each day; last week, at least 12 U.S. soldiers were killed. 3.16.08
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/20080316_The_American_Debate__Jaded_by_lies__public_suffers_war_fatigue.html

11. Devastation at 3,000 feet

AT HEARINGS last week on the Cape Wind project, some of the witnesses spoke in a mountain twang that had no hint of Yarmouth to it. They hailed from coal-mining country in West Virginia and had come north to plead with New Englanders to find a renewable energy alternative to mountaintop-removal coal mining - a practice that is making a moonscape out of their countryside.
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Each week, coal companies use explosives equal to the Hiroshima bomb to turn mountaintops into rubble and expose coal seams. The consequences are ghastly. Often, the blasts destroy wells or allow them to be poisoned by contaminants that decades of surface and underground mining have created. Residents say the earth-moving has also caused more flooding. And in 2004, a boulder dislodged by coal company blasting killed a 3-year-old Virginia boy in his bed.

Coal accounts for just 15 percent of New England's electricity, so even Cape Wind, which would use offshore wind turbines to supply power equal to three-quarters of Cape Cod's demand, would not stop much of the devastation of Appalachia. But activists such as Janet Keating and Chuck Nelson of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition hope that Cape Wind will usher in a whole new era of energy production that lessens the nation's dependence on coal. The country gets 50 percent of its power from coal, the biggest carbon emitter among fossil fuels.

Short of a nationwide shift away from coal and toward renewable sources, the Appalachia activists would like to see Congress pass the Clean Water Protection Act. This bill would reverse one of the Bush administration's most damaging concessions to industry on the environmental front. The Environmental Protection Agency decided in 2002 that mountaintop-removal miners' practice of dumping their waste into stream beds did not violate the Clean Water Act of 1970. The EPA decided the material was "fill," not waste. 3.16.08 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/03/16/devastation_at_3000_feet/

12. Aida Edemariam: The true cost of war

I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."
 
Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armor, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armored vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behavior was just unbelievable." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/iraq.afghanistan

13. Nicholas von Hoffman: Economic Chaos, Political Consequences

"Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" -- Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve.

Bumpy is no word for it. The news coming out of Wall Street makes what the three presidential candidates are saying beside the point. Cancel the fun. The bad news also bids fair to change the daily lives of 300 million Americans. No, kidding, folks. What's going on in the business world is as serious as it can get.

Events unfolding this week on the lower end of Manhattan will cancel out all the projects John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been talking about. McCain will have to deal with the home truth that, though he may dig up enough soldier boys for the Middle Eastern wars, there is no money to pay for them. And thanks to the ever-shrinking dollar, other countries are not going to lend us more money to carry them on. We have run out of money: it's time to cut and run. 3.17.08 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/howl

14. Joe Conason: The Folks Who Brought You Iraq

“Well, that’s history. That’s the past. That’s talking about what happened before. What we should be talking about is what we’re going to do now.”

The man who spoke those words was Senator John McCain, and the subject was the Iraq war and its origins in official falsehood, strategic error and wishful thinking. Expect to hear him repeat those same dismissive phrases again and again as the presidential campaign unfolds.

Understandably, the presumptive Republican nominee prefers to avoid examining how our finest young people and vast amounts of our national treasure came to be squandered in that desert, since he was among the war’s most excited advocates.

There were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq (as some of us were not surprised to learn), and in particular no nuclear weapons under construction, as advertised. There were no significant connections between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein (as the Pentagon reaffirmed in a recent intelligence analysis). There was no legal basis for an invasion. There was no population inviting us to occupy their country as liberators.

Yes, it’s all “history,” or at least it will be someday, and the historians will properly record Mr. McCain’s role in the fiasco with all due asperity. But on the fifth anniversary of the war, it is a little too easy to dismiss everything that led us to this point as “what happened before.” 3.18.08 http://www.observer.com/2008/folks-who-brought-you-iraq

15. E.J. Dionne: Be Careful What You Wish For

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries, and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost “confidence” in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe has any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another’s portfolios.

So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can’t have that. It’s just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are “too big to fail” because they could bring us all down with them.

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don’t expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?3.18.08 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080318_be_careful_what_you_wish_for/

16. Robert Scheer: The Idiot's Grin

That idiotic "What, me worry?" look just never leaves the man's visage. Once again there was our President, presiding over disasters in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and existing reality. Be it in his announcement that Iraq was being secured on a day when bombs ripped through that sad land or posed between his treasury secretary and the Federal Reserve chairman to applaud the government's bailout of a failed bank, George Bush was the only one inexplicably smiling.

Failure suits him. It is a stance he learned well while presiding over one failed Texas business deal after another, and it served him splendidly as he claimed the title of President of the United States after losing the popular, and maybe even the electoral, vote. It carried him through the most ignominious chapter of US foreign policy, from the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to an unprecedented presidential defense of torture.

The totally unwarranted assurance was there this week as the once proud dollar fell into the toilet and the debacle of Iraq and Bush's other failed Mideast policies pushed oil prices to record highs. The Europeans, who didn't support the US imperial intervention, are doing much better, not having to pay for guarding besieged oil pipelines, while US taxpayers are saddled with trillions in future debt, not to mention 4,000 US military deaths and 30,000 US injuries in a war the Administration had promised would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues. Even in Baghdad last week there wasn't enough oil to keep the lights on for more than a few hours. 3.19.08 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/scheer

17. Patrick Cockburn: This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lie

It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.

The outcome has been an official picture of Iraq akin to fantasy and an inability to learn from mistakes because of a refusal to admit that any occurred. Yet the war began with just such a mistake. Five years ago, on the evening of 19 March 2003, President George Bush appeared on American television to say that military action had started against Iraq.

This was a veiled reference to an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by dropping four 2,000lb bombs and firing 40 cruise missiles at a place called al-Dura farm in south Baghdad, where the Iraqi leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker. There was no bunker. The only casualties were one civilian killed and 14 wounded, including nine women and a child. 3.19.08 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-this-is-
the-war-that-started-with-lies-and-continues-with-lie-after-lie-after-lie-797788.html

18. RUPERT CORNWELL: Lone superpower is on the wane

Even now, here in the U.S., if you turn off the radio or television blaring the latest news of financial apocalypse, you can pretend that it's still business as usual.

Incredibly, those unsolicited loan and credit card offers continue to pop through the mailbox, offering the American dream on the never-never. Do you feel it's time for that oft-postponed home improvement, or that richly deserved holiday you've been putting off? Or are you simply having trouble getting credit? Just call this number and within 15 minutes a qualified officer can approve a loan of $30,000 for you, interest free for the first three months.

Of course, what sounds to be too good to be true, is. But you used to have to wade through the fine print on the back to discover that. Now you just turn the TV back on.

To say so out loud would be an offence against American optimism, but the unspoken truth is that the good old days are gone, probably for a very long while. Like its predecessors, this particular financial meltdown has brought fear verging on panic. The difference, however, is that it is destroying not only wealth. It is also destroying illusions.

The U.S. has long inhabited a world of make-believe -- of a war that demands no sacrifice, of a consumer boom that demands no payment, of a power and prosperity that seemed America's birthright, whatever events in the real world. Now those fantasies are yielding to the truism coined by Herb Stein, a top White House economic adviser in the 1970s. If something can't go on forever, it won't. 3.19.08 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/355630_poweronline20.html