As the U.S. government fired upon alleged terrorists in the rugged outback of Pakistan, Obama was back in Washington appointing Richard Holbrooke as a special U.S. representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, like the remote control bombing that claimed human life, Obama’s vision for the region, in the embodiment of Holbrooke, may not be a drastic departure from the failed Bush doctrine. Or a departure at all.

"[Holbrooke] is one of the most talented diplomats of his generation,” Obama said during a January 22 press conference at the State Department. In his speech Obama declared that both Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the "central front" in the War on Terror. “There, as in the Middle East, we must understand that we cannot deal with our problems in isolation,” he said.

In 1975, during Gerald Ford’s administration, Indonesia invaded East Timor and slaughtered 200,000 indigenous Timorese. The Indonesian invasion of East Timor set the stage for a long and bloody occupation that recently ended after an international peacekeeping force was introduced in 1999.

Transcripts of meetings among Indonesian dictator Mohamed Suharto, Gerald Ford, and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have shown conclusively that Kissinger and Ford authorized and encouraged Suhatro’s murderous actions. “We will understand and will not press you on the issue [of East Timor],” said President Ford in a meeting with Suharto and Kissinger in early December 1975, days before Suharto’s bloodbath. “We understand the problem and the intentions you have,” he added.

Henry Kissinger also stressed at the meeting that “the use of US-made arms could create problems,” but then added, “It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.” Thus, Kissinger’s concern was not about whether US arms would be used offensively, but whether the act could be interpreted as illegal. Kissinger went on: “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.”

After Gerald Ford’s loss and Jimmy Carter’s ascendance into the White House in 1976, Indonesia requested additional arms to continue its brutal occupation, even though there was a supposed ban on arms trades to Suharto’s government. It was Carter’s appointee to the Department of State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Holbrooke, who authorized additional arms shipments to Indonesia during this supposed blockade. Many scholars have noted that this was the period when the Indonesian suppression of the Timorese reached genocidal levels.

During his testimony before Congress in February 1978, Professor Benedict Anderson cited a report that proved there was never an US arms ban, and that during the period of the alleged ban the US initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesians:

“If we are curious as to why the Indonesians never felt the force of the U.S. government’s ‘anguish,’ the answer is quite simple. In flat contradiction to express statements by General Fish, Mr. Oakley and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke, at least four separate offers of military equipment were made to the Indonesian government during the January—June 1976 ‘administrative suspension.’ This equipment consisted mainly of supplies and parts for OV-10 Broncos, Vietnam War era planes designed for counterinsurgency operations against adversaries without effective anti-aircraft weapons, and wholly useless for defending Indonesia from a foreign enemy. The policy of supplying the Indonesian regime with Broncos, as well as other counterinsurgency-related equipment has continued without substantial change from the Ford through the present Carter administrations.”

If we track Holbrooke’s recent statements, the disturbing symbiosis between him and figures like berhawk Paul Wolfowitz is startling.

“In an unguarded moment just before the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington,” reported First of the Month following the terrorist attacks in 2001.

The article continued: “Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was acutely aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in the next administration. Looking perhaps to assure the world of the continuity of US foreign policy, he told his audience that Wolfowitz’s ‘recent activities illustrate something that’s very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.’ The example he chose to illustrate his point was East Timor, which was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with US weapons — a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. ‘Paul and I,’ he said, ‘have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”

In sum, Holbrooke has worked vigorously to keep his bloody campaign silent. The results of which appear to have paid off. In chilling words, Holbrooke describes the motivations behind support of Indonesia’s genocidal actions:

“The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer — which plays a moderate role within OPEC — and occupies a strategic position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans … We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia.”

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

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As President-Elect Barack Obama vacationed in Hawaii on December 26, stopping off to watch a dolphin show with his family at Sea Life Park, an Israeli air raid besieged the impoverished Gaza Strip, killing at least 285 people and injuring over 800 more.

It was the single deadliest attack on Gaza in over 20 years and Obama’s initial reaction on what could be his first real test as president was "no comment." Meanwhile, Israel has readied itself for a land invasion, amassing tanks along the border and calling up 6,500 reserve troops.

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Obama’s Senior Adviser David Axelrod explained to guest host Chip Reid how an Obama administration would handle the situation, even if it turns for the worst.

"Well, certainly, the president-elect recognizes the special relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s an important bond, an important relationship. He’s going to honor it … And obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded. But it’s something that he’s committed to."

Reiterating the rationale that Israel’s bombing of Gaza was an act of retaliation and not of aggression, Axelrod, on behalf of the Obama administration, continued to spread the same misinformation as President Bush: that Hamas was the first to break the ceasefire agreement, which ended over a week ago, and Israel was simply responding judiciously.

Aside from the fact that Israel’s response was anything but judicious, the idea that it was Hamas who broke the six-month truce is a complete fabrication.

On the night of the U.S. election, Israel fired missiles on Gaza that were aimed at closing down a tunnel operation they believed Hamas was building in order to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The carnage left in the wake of Israel’s bombing of Gaza over the past six weeks has killed dozens of Palestinians.

"The escalation towards war could, and should, have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the ‘ticking tunnel’ raid … two months ago," the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom wrote in a press release. "Since then, the army went on stoking the fires of escalation with calculated raids and killings, whenever the shooting of missiles on Israel decreased."

Over the last seven years only 17 Israeli citizens have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire, which makes it extremely difficult for Israeli politicians, which are in the midst of an election, to argue that their response has been proportionate or defensible in any way.

The asymmetry of the conflict leaves an opening for harsh criticism from the soon-to-be president Barack Obama. He has every right to oppose Israel’s belligerence. The international community and the majority of public opinion are on his side. Certainly he knows Israel’s disproportionate response has inflicted insurmountable pain on Palestinians as well as what the blockade has done by keeping vital medical and other supplies from reaching Gaza, where hundreds have died as a result of inadequate medical treatment.

While bombs fall on a suffocating Palestinian population and Israeli forces prepare for a ground invasion, Obama is monitoring the situation from afar after a talk with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials. This isn’t leadership; it’s a continuation of a policy that has left Palestinians with little recourse, let alone hope for lasting peace.

"The president-elect was in Sderot last July, in southern Israel, a town that’s taken the brunt of the Hamas attacks," David Axelrod told Chip Reid on Face the Nation. "And he said then that, when bombs are raining down on your citizens, there is an urge to respond and act and try and put an end to that. So, you know, that’s what he said then, and I think that’s what he believes."

If Axelrod is correct, and Barack Obama does indeed support the bloodshed inflicted upon innocent Palestinians by the Israeli military, there should be no celebrating during Inauguration Day 2009, only mass protest of a Middle East foreign policy that must change in order to begin a legitimate peace process in the region.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

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Afshin Rattansi has for more than a decade worked in broadcast and print media around the world. In the UK, he has worked at the Guardian, the New Statesman, for every regional and national outlet of the BBC. In 1999, he helped to launch the developing world’s first global financial news and current affairs channel. He is currently a news anchor for Press TV. Rattansi has written six novels including The Dream of the Decade — The London Novels. He recently spoke with Joshua Frank about Press TV.

Joshua Frank: Afshin, can you tell us a little about Press TV? How long has the station been on the air?

Afshin Rattansi: Certainly more than a year. It’s an initiative by the Iranian government to counter some of the more crazy assumptions that other international channels make about the Middle East. Of course, given the crippling siege of Gaza at the moment, international media can’t even get into the place so that makes Press TV uniquely able to cover something that the rest of the world’s media seems to have forgotten. The “narrative," as the fashionable post po-mo word goes, seems to be that the U.S. made a mistake by invading Iraq rather than the whole operation being an international war crime.

If Press TV can redress the balance a bit, it would be good. Also, wars in Africa are covered on other stations as if they are purely about “black people fighting each other” just as famines are somehow natural phenomena. Little is told about the corporate background to conflicts in a continent in which the positive stories seem to be about animals and “entrepreneurs” somehow battling, atomistically, against the tide.

Frank: You aren’t a native of Iran, so how did you get involved with Press TV?

Rattansi: There may be some Iranian in me! Afshin is an Iranian name and I think there is a possibility my roots are from a magician’s castle in Alamut but that’s a long story and goes back a thousand years or so,

But seriously, I had been at Bloomberg News, hired to revamp things, after my time at CNN International and Al Jazeera Arabic and, most enlightening of all, the Today programme at the BBC. The mainstream coverage in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was very poor even if Today and its source, the late David Kelly, tried its best to allow listeners another view of what the British government was spouting about WMD in Iraq. It was odd as twenty years ago I was accused of being against an ally, Saddam Hussein. I had helped make a documentary for Channel 4 in the UK about how Western companies, in particular architectural firms akin to Albert Speer acolytes, were aiding Saddam.

The British government didn’t like it at all and yet, once I was working at Today, my colleagues and I were being accused of being apologists for Saddam because we could tell that the government was lying about WMD. Blair’s people unleashed an onslaught that led to the resignations of all the most senior staff at the BBC. I left for the Jazeera Arabic program, Top Secret, which identified the 911 attackers when Osama bin Laden himself contacted the programme to name the perpetrators. They would be caught even as we ran the trailers.

Well, after that story the Qatari Al Jazeera Arabic was chastened as we prepared for the launch of the English-language channel. As for my attempt at trying to get Bloomberg to avoid bluster and actually cover what was well known — the impending financial catastrophe — it ended in failure. In between, at CNN, coverage of the financial world was laughable. I remember talking to financial editor, Todd Benjamin who was nonchalantly cheerleading multinationals without a care in the world for the house of cards.

It was in this context, that I was getting worried that the same mistakes were going to be made all over again, vis–vis Iran. For me, the deaths of more than a million people in Iraq let alone the disastrous interventions in Afghanistan were axiomatic. Reading Seymour Hersh had me worried and I still don’t know if he was being used. But Iran was the story. Thankfully, that’s died down a little. But going to Tehran seemed a responsible thing to do.

Frank: Do you think the mood has changed because of the forthcoming change in administrations here in the United States? What’s the perception among Iranians about Barack Obama?

Rattansi: I think the mood hasn’t changed at all. Certainly, Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State and the possibility of Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke hardly inspires much confidence. Nevertheless, there was a certain amount of heat generated by the electoral victory of Barrack Obama.

Frank: How can people in the US tune in to Press TV, and why do you think it’s important that they should?

Rattansi: Press TV is available in the U.S. through special servers via the internet at presstv.com. I think the audience will certainly get a very different perspective to that on other channels of world events and they may be surprised to see that many of the people interviewed on the channel — from Noam Chomsky to Gore Vidal to Amy Goodman — are all American.

Press TV is available in Europe on Sky Channel 515.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in June 2008. Check out the new Red State Rebels.

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Increasingly, antiwar voters I talk with admit they are starting to get a little disgusted with the antics of Barack Obama, that great agent of change. It wasn’t too long ago that these same folks were overly optimistic Obama would deliver on his varied promises, beckoning a new era of Washington politics, an end to the war in Iraq, and a new, peace driven foreign policy. Nonetheless, they all plan on voting for the Democrat regardless of how dismayed they have become with him and his campaign.

Of course, this isn’t the lofty hope their candidate has been talking about. After eight long years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it’s been a logical reaction, one that the Obama camp has done its best to exploit. But as Obama shows his constituents that he is far from an antiwar candidate, the less likely he is to walk away with an electoral victory come November, and the more doubtful it is that he will make any real progress in the Middle East if elected.

It’s a pretty straightforward equation: pro-war Democrats don’t have a great track record of winning national elections. Voters want straightforward, common-sense approaches to handling the problems our country faces today, not posturing and political maneuvering for the sake of manipulation.

For what it’s worth, John McCain shoots straight. He supports more war and doesn’t know much about economics. Voters know exactly what they are getting if they punch the card for the old Arizona senator.

That’s not the case with Obama, who says he wants an end to the war, but has voted for its continuation and will leave troops and private mercenaries in the country to deal with the so-called insurgents — even threatening to shift U.S. forces to Afghanistan and Iran, where he’s promised to bully our enemies into submission.

Obama says he supports our civil liberties but voted to reaffirm the Patriot Act and FISA. He says he will expand the Pentagon budget, and on Israel, he promises to do whatever it takes to protect the country from “terrorists,” paying little to no attention to the plight of Palestinians and their suffering in Gaza.

I would call all of these postures a huge betrayal. But they aren’t. Obama has never been anti-intervention. He’s another centrist Democrat who has done his best to appease all sides of the political spectrum; giving the corporate wing the hard evidence they need to trust he’ll protect their interests, and the left-wing rhetoric and political bravado to ensure they won’t flee from the stifling confines of the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, many Obama supporters know his pitfalls well, and no matter how disastrous they may seem, they’ll still vote for him. As respected columnist Norman Solomon recently claimed:

"To some, who evidently see voting as an act of moral witness rather than pragmatic choice (even in a general election), forces such as corporate power or militarism are binary — like a toggle switch — either totally on or totally off. This outlook says: either we reject entirely or we’re complicit…Such analysis tends to see Obama as just a little bit slower on the march to the same disasters that John McCain would lead us to. That analysis takes a long view — but fails to see the profound importance of the crossroads right in front of us, where either Obama or McCain will be propelled into the White House."

Solomon, who served as an Obama delegate at the convention in Denver and sits on the board of Progressive Democrats of America, has an agenda: to usher Barack Obama into the White House because he sees John McCain as leading our country closer to the sacrificial ledge.

“Save the Country (read Empire), Vote Democrat” has become a common refrain among a certain segment of the antiwar movement, one that echoes through progressive and even radical circles every four years like clockwork. Go ahead and acknowledge their faults, they sing from on high, just don’t you dare ditch the Democrats come Election Day, for the rapture will ensue.

Like others of his stature, Solomon has, in the past, dished out scare tactics in an attempt to threaten peace activists into voting against their own interests, an approach not too unlike the Republicans who consistently undermine the concerns and needs of their base.

Barack Obama will not address the bloodshed in Iraq because he knows quite well he’ll have this segment of the voting block shored up, no matter how militaristic he may turn. If one follows the Solomon line of logic, we will all just have to wait until Obama’s inauguration to pester him to end the "War on Terror." If you do it now, they assert, it will only embolden John McCain.

Such a political philosophy (bigotry) is void of historic truths. One need look no further than Clintontime to grasp the amount of abuse the Democrats are allowed to commit because they are not Republicans. It’s the political version of the battered wife syndrome. Once Democrats are elected, and things don’t change, advocates against militaristic government are still silent.

And Clinton’s legacy is a long, ugly list of betrayal indeed: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Iraq Liberation Act, increased deaths in Bosnia, support for deadly UN sanctions on Iraq, and much more.

So don’t fear standing up and voting for what you believe in, no matter how fringe or foolish you are made out to be by others who claim to know better than you. Our democracy is in peril and war rages on. Voting on the likelihood of perceived gains in the short-term is not only erroneous; it is without a true understanding of what it is going to take to bring a true halt to US imperialism.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

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Election 2008 has officially kicked off and the only real excitement thus far is the explosion of grassroots support for the Republican antiwar candidate, Ron Paul. The 10-term Congressman’s anti-government, pro-market platform has rallied a-never-before-seen online mobilization, filling his campaign’s bank account with almost $20 million in the last quarter alone. That puts him on par with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s fundraising prowess.

Many progressives, including myself, believe some of the libertarian fiscal ideas Paul espouses would be a disaster if they were ever implemented. Nevertheless, the policies of all the other leading candidates aren’t about to change the course of the economic apartheid that is already plaguing most people in this country. They’d simply continue it.

The upside of Paul’s campaign certainly outweighs the potential downsides. The critical issues now aren’t Paul’s plea to dismantle the welfare state (although cutting off all subsidies to corporate American would be fine by me), but his call to restore the Bill of Rights and drastically curb American Empire. I think most Iraqis living under US occupation would probably concur that ending the war ought to be priority number one for US voters this year. So why aren’t we listening? At this point Paul is the only candidate calling for a radical change in our Middle East foreign policy.

The Ron Paul rebellion, with the antiwar component at its core, represents a potential crisis for the Democratic Party. In the absence of a Ralph Nader—type candidate and a coexisting movement, Paul’s crusade is the only major force to align with to stop the war in Iraq and, on a longer-term level, represents a politically activated and more mainstream segment of American society worth trying to reach out to.

Many left-leaning writers and respected activists have recently latched on to John Edwards’ anti-corporate campaign, claiming, as author Norman Solomon recently did, that if Edwards were nominated he "would be the most progressive Democrat to top the national ticket in more than half a century."

It seems the litmus test for the lauded "progressive" label is pretty damn weak these days. Edwards may be touting populist rhetoric along the campaign trail, claiming he’ll clamp down on corporate crime, which garnered him Ralph Nader’s endorsement, but Edwards has utterly failed to challenge the US-Israel relationship and even President Bush’s lies regarding Iran.

During a speech broadcast at a security conference in January 2007 in Herzliya, Israel, Edwards echoed a dangerous neoconservative position. "Iran threatens the security of Israel and the entire world," he claimed, "Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons." Later in his speech Edwards went as far as to say that "all options" should be left on the table, hinting, if not admitting outright, that he believed military action may be necessary to contain America’s new arch nemesis.

Most antiwar activists have been quiet regarding Edwards’ I-won’t-promise-not-to-nuke-Iran pose, but have gone to great lengths to discredit Ron Paul, calling him a racist because of the support he’s received from the likes of David Duke and other bona fide nut jobs. Guilty-by-association politics are petty and naïve. How soon we forget the smearing of Ralph Nader in 2004 because Republicans were supporting his campaign. Some may call us hypocrites for slandering Paul in the same way.

The Left so often swallows its own head with overt sectarianism, it’s downright embarrassing. Here’s Ron Paul electrifying a new contingent of voters. Thousands of them. He’s raking in millions for his antiwar campaign, yet he’s completely written off as a whacko libertarian. Many, if not most, of his supporters are new the electoral game. Sure some may indeed be rednecks, but what the hell is so wrong with hard-working folks who oppose Empire? Disregarding or pooh-poohing Paul’s movement because he’s not a progressive and some of his followers have odd world views, makes us look like elitist snobs.

Plus it is just silly.

The Paul demographic is essentially the same group of people the Left was attempting to organize at its apex in the 1930s, before we became a mostly irrelevant group of detached naval gazers, and postmodern-bullsh***ers. If we want any kind of revolution, large or small, we better stop being diversity-mongers, claiming we embrace everyone, aside from those we disagree with. How the Left could be so out of touch with regular Americans is beyond me.

Ron Paul, unlike any other candidate in the hunt this year, including John Edwards, has tapped in to a true populist current. The people who don’t typically vote and are generally disgusted with big government. And that is exactly what the Left should try and understand, if not replicate, even if they don’t care for Paul or the majority of his positions.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008.

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The left wing of the antiwar movement has some very serious problems, mainly our inability to recognize that the antiwar sentiment in the United States is resonating far beyond the confines of the so-called “left."

We cannot step back and effectively analyze the failures of the antiwar movement without peering under the hood of John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. In essence, I think the majority of the left made a huge mistake on this issue by not opposing the Democrats; the movement supported a pro-war position by not opposing Sen. Kerry, who promised to continue the occupation of Iraq. There was no pressure on Kerry to alter his position on the war. No bird-dogging protests along the campaign trail. No outrage over his flip-flopping-let’s-send-more-troops-into-battle rhetoric. Silence during election season is complicity. So let’s be loud.

Despite his good intentions, Dennis Kucinich also failed us four years ago as well by abandoning his antiwar platform in favor of Kerry’s pro-war candidacy. There is little reason to believe ol’ Dennis won’t do the same thing again this year if Hillary is the nominee. It was party politics before issues. Kucinich, unfortunately, wasn’t an activist but a pawn in the Democrat’s game. And the antiwar movement, or at least those who supported his bid, felt the damaging tremors for months afterward. Kucinich has been running in Iowa for almost nine years and is barely pulling in 1% of the vote. So what’s the point?

The backlash to the Iraq war in this country is much larger than Kucinich’s fan club, yet there is no real visible “moving” movement on the ground to end it. In many ways this is our fault as we are not willing to reach out to antiwar folks across the lines. A movement will never move forward with archaic sectarian factions or unyielding adherence to entrenched political philosophies. We must overcome our unwillingness to collaborate and collectively organize.

Case in point being the most visible and enthusiastic antiwar candidate in the country, which we consistently ignore: Rep. Ron Paul. Whether we agree or disagree with Paul’s libertarian solution to every problem, we cannot disregard that his campaign is exploding owing to a broad coalition of people who oppose the war on terror. Paul has built a viable campaign, one that must move beyond the Republican primaries and into the general election. We can’t let Paul become Kucinich of ’04. The more independent antiwar voices we have running against the war machine the better we’ll all be. And Paul has millions in his coffers to push an antiwar agenda.

This is not about Rep. Paul as an individual per se, but about his grassroots following. He’s exciting many newcomers to the movement and that must be welcomed. We certainly don’t share the same views with all who have latched on to his campaign, but on the issue of the Iraq war we are in total agreement. One doesn’t not have to be a member of the left to oppose empire.

As a movement that allegedly grew out of WTO protests in Seattle, which was an unimaginable coalition of interests (labor, environmental, protectionist), one would think the left would be at the forefront in calling for such an alliance again today.

Whether we’re beer-drinking rednecks from Tennessee or pot smokin’ hippies from Oregon, we need to come together. And working to keep the movement away from supporting a pro-war candidate like Hillary Clinton is an important endeavor. One we shouldn’t shy away from over the course of the next 11 months.

Rep. Paul’s call to end the war needs to be supported. We need to monkeywrench the war issue so the media and the big party candidates cannot ignore it. There is a lot of work that must be done and we cannot be locked in the logic of old if we are to succeed.

Ending the war in Iraq will take substantial pressure from all sides of the political spectrum. From conservative veterans to radical peaceniks. Let’s embrace this new reality. The antiwar movement is larger than the left, in fact so much so that we may be at the whim of a real grassroots resistance instead of at its forefront. And if that means bringing this ugly war to a screeching halt, I’m all for it.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008.

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Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California silently resigned from her post on the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) late last week as her ethical limbo with war contracts began to surface in the media, including an excellent investigative report written by Peter Byrne for Metro in January. MILCON has supervised the appropriations of billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts since the Bush wars began.

Feinstein, who served as chairperson and ranking member for the committee from 2001-2005, came under fire early last year in these pages for profiting by way of her husband Richard Blum who, until 2005, held large stakes in two defense contracting companies. Both businesses, URS and Perini, have scored lucrative contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last four years, and Blum has personally pocketed tens of millions of dollars off the deals his wife, along with her colleagues, so graciously approved.

Here’s a brief rundown of the Feinstein family’s blatant war profiteering. In April 2003, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq’s Central Command. A month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for “electrical power distribution and transmission” in southern Iraq.

But it is not just Perini that has made Feinstein and Blum wealthy. Blum also held over 111,000 shares of stock in URS Corporation, which is now one of the top defense contractors in the United States. Blum was an acting director of URS, which bought EG&G, a leading provider of technical services and management to the U.S. military, from the neocon packed Carlyle Group back in 2002.

“As part of EG&G’s sale price,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carlyle acquired a 21.74 percent stake in URS — second only to the 23.7 percent of shares controlled by Blum Capital.”

URS and Blum have since banked on the war in Iraq, attaining a $600 million contract through EG&G, which Sen. Feinstein permitted. As a result, URS has seen its stock price more than triple since the war began in March of 2003. Blum has cashed in over $2 million on this venture alone and another $100 million for his investment firm.

And it is not just the Feinstein family that has benefited from the war — so too has the Democratic Party. Since 2000, the Democrats’ Daddy Warbucks has donated over $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Committee including leading Democrats including John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, and even Barbara Boxer.

Feinstein’s resignation from MILCON was the least the senator could do to atone for profiting off the spoils of war. But Feinstein wasn’t trying to atone, she seems to have been trying to cover her tracks instead by distancing herself from her post. If the Democratic Party had any foresight whatsoever it would return all the Blood Money donated by Blum. From there the Senate ought to hold hearings and examine Feinstein’s tenure as the chair and ranking member of MILCON and analyze every single contract she approved which benefited her husband’s respective companies.

There is absolutely no question — Sen. Dianne Feinstein has a plethora of ethics violations she needs to account for at once.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

There were other times the White House attempted to paint the chaos in Iraq in a positive light. Remember when US armed forces annihilated Saddam’s wretched sons Oday and Qusay? Or how about when they captured Saddam and promised things were starting to look up? At best these token events only served as minor diversions for most of the US media, not unlike the alleged thwarting of a terrorist attack on the Holland Tunnel in New York did late last week.

Over the weekend, Sunni and Shi’ite militias were said to be responsible for the deaths of more than 60 Iraqi civilians while injuring dozens more. Just another tranquil weekend in the streets of Baghdad. Rarely do we hear reports of what’s going on outside the Green Zone, where the ethnically driven civil war is believed even worse.

On June 6, shortly before Zarqawi’s death, the infamous blogger behind "Baghdad Burning" reported; "There’s an ethnic cleansing in progress and it’s impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card … We hear about Shia being killed in the u2018Sunni triangle’ and corpses of Sunnis named u2018Omar’ (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia."

Unfortunately, political opposition to the war is weak here in the United States. Washington supports an ongoing occupation, if it can even be called such a thing these days. Dissent is all but dead in DC, where candidates so-often flex their foreign policy muscle in fear that they’ll be looked at as soft on terror.

But how could anyone reasonably argue that things were worse with Saddam at the helm? Iraq under US control is far more violent and malicious. Not that the US has any sort of legitimate control over the large country. In fact, the US is now just one of many armed militias in Iraq, truly unable to contain the exponentially increasing sectarian warfare. Every reservation critics of the war put on the table before the invasion is now coming true. Iraq is unwinnable, and the bloodshed is only being exacerbated by the presence of US military.

No matter how many troops the US and its allies shovel at the ever-growing sectarian flames, the fighting is sure to spread. The US military is only fueling the fire. And if there were ever a reason why the troops should be brought home immediately, this would be it.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Hillary, in a letter to constituents last November, expressed her belief that the war in Iraq shouldn’t be “open-ended” but was clear that she would never “pull out of Iraq immediately.” She wrote that she wouldn’t accept any timetable for withdrawal and won’t even embrace a “redeployment” of U.S. troops along the lines of Rep. John Murtha.

“I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war,” Clinton wrote in her lengthy letter that amounted to nothing short of denial for her own culpability in the mess.

Sen. Clinton soon after reiterated her position to a group of Democrats in Kentucky.

“The time has come for the administration to stop serving up platitudes and present a plan for finishing this war with success and honor,” she said. “I reject a rigid timetable that the terrorists can exploit, and I reject an open timetable that has no ending attached to it.”

Translation: Clinton is all for an extended American stay in Iraq. She “takes responsibility” for her vote on the war, but won’t admit that it was wrong. And of course, Clinton is still for “winning” this war. Whatever that means.

In the same letter, Clinton hoped contingents of U.S. soldiers would remain in the region with “quick-strike capabilities. … This will help us stabilize that new Iraqi government,” she attested. “It will send a message to Iran that they do not have a free hand in Iraq despite their considerable influence and personal and religious connections there.”

Messages, I guess, carry more weight when they are delivered at gunpoint. “Watch out Tehran,” Hillary seems to be declaring, “I’ll strike quick.” Such neoconish attitudes have upset antiwar activists, and now many are rallying ’round any alternative they can find to challenge Hillary in her bid for reelection this year.

Jonathan Tasini, who is running against Clinton in the New York Democratic primary, is gaining the most visible support. His position on the Iraq war is solid, as he wants all U.S. troops home now. Tasini also believes that democracy in Iraq is a long way from developing and argues that there will be no such thing in Iraq’s future as long as the U.S. stays the course. “[The] invasion of Iraq has created a theocracy,” says Tasini. “The people of Iraq have the right to decide what law they choose to follow.”

The Green Party is also tossing its antiwar weight into the ring with veteran antiwar Green Howie Hawkins winning his party’s nomination. Hawkins still has to gather enough signatures to get his party’s line on the ballot. The Libertarian Party of New York recently nominated Jeff Russell, who says he’d bring soldiers home as soon as possible, and the Socialist Equity Party is running Bill Van Auken, who wants to bring U.S. troops home now.

None of the antiwar third-party candidates at this point in the campaign season have any real name recognition or financial backing. Even so, Tasini the Democrat does. Antiwar flyers plaster campuses throughout New York City touting his challenge to Hillary, and his campaign is being discussed on numerous antiwar blogs and e-mail discussion lists. Tasini’s drive may soon spark some real tension among antiwar activists in New York, however, as many believe supporting Tasini will fail the movement against the war and set up Clinton for a 2008 run for president.

For starters, they contend that Tasini is still a Democrat, which means that if he doesn’t beat Hillary in September’s primary election, he will most likely endorse her campaign and hand over his antiwar funds to the pro-war Democratic Party, something he denies. Another problem is Tasini may not even appear on the Democrat’s ballot in September, he still has to turn in 15,000 Democratic signatures before that happens. And Hillary, despite her primary challenge, has already accepted her party’s nomination in typical establishment style: ignore any challenges and stay on message, no matter how misguided it may be.

The Working Families Party, the alleged labor party here in New York, endorsed Hillary on June 3 over Tasini, even though the WFP was one of the first third parties to oppose the Iraq invasion four years ago. No wonder the Democrats take us for granted.

If the antiwar movement is to truly take on Hillary this election season, we need to challenge her all the way up to November and Tasini won’t cut it. The majority of New Yorkers who oppose the Iraq war aren’t even Democrats and can’t vote for Tasini in New York’s closed primary elections.

Supporting another antiwar candidate or voting “none of the above” may be the only way to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for her depraved Iraq war stance on Election Day 2006.

Fortunately, antiwar activists can all agree on one thing: Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve our votes. And there are plenty of reasons why, including her atrocious position on Israel and Palestine.

Sen. Clinton, along with her husband Bill, paid a visit to Israel last fall. The former President was a featured speaker at a mass rally that marked the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was Hillary’s second visit to Israel since she was elected to office in 2000.

The senator did manage to take time out of her voyage to meet with the then semi-conscious Ariel Sharon to discuss “security matters.” Hillary also made her way to the great apartheid wall, which separates Palestine from Israel. As of now, the barrier is nearing completion, and when all is said and done the monstrosity will stretch to well over 400 miles in length.

Palestinians rightly criticize the obtrusive wall on the grounds that it cuts them off from occupied land in the West Bank. Thousands have also been cut off from their jobs, schools, and essential farmland.

Hillary and her Israeli allies don’t get it. When you put powerless Palestinians behind a jail-like wall where life in any real economic sense is unattainable, you wreak pain and anguish, which in turn leads to more anger and resentment toward Israel’s brutal policies. Indeed, the wall will not prove to be a deterrent to resistance, but an incitement to defiance.

“This is not against the Palestinian people,” Clinton said as she gazed over the massive wall. “This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism.”

The senator’s comments seem as if they were taken word-for-word from an AIPAC position paper. They may well have been. Last May, 2005, Sen. Clinton spoke at an AIPAC conference where she praised the bonds between Israel and the United States:

“[O]ur future here in this country is intertwined with the future of Israel and the Middle East. Now there is a lot that we could talk about, and obviously much has been discussed. But in the short period that I have been given the honor of addressing you, I want to start by focusing on our deep and lasting bonds between the United States and Israel.”

Clinton went on to wail about the importance of disarming Iran and Syria as well as keeping troops in Iraq for as long as "it" takes. It was textbook warmongering and surprise, surprise, Hillary got a standing ovation for her repertoire.

It is no matter that Iraq will never see true democracy. The U.S. won’t allow that. The imperial powers would never let an Iraq government form that embodied even the slightest hatred toward Israel or the U.S. Democracy in Iraq, like democracy in Israel, has clear limitations.

Sen. Clinton’s trip down to Israel was just one of many more to come. Like her husband and the current Republican president, Hillary will never alter the U.S.’ Middle East policy that so blatantly favors Israeli interests.

Sadly, Clinton, if elected president in 2008, will praise and embolden the occupations — both in Iraq and Palestine. She won’t pull out U.S. troops and she won’t cut U.S. funding to Israel.

Like I said, Hillary Clinton may well be presidential material after all.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

In a radio address on June 10, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, praised Zarqawi’s death.

“This week, America received good news from a place we don’t often hear about, Iraq. First came reports that our military tracked down and destroyed al-Qaeda terrorist Zarqawi,” Reid said. “He was a cold-blooded murderer who got what he deserved. With his death, America continues to serve notice to those who would do us harm: you can run, you can hide, but you’ll meet a just fate.”

In November 2001, Bush emphasized similar rhetoric about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. “We’re smoking them out,” Bush remarked. “They’re running. And now we’re going to bring them to justice … we’ll use whatever means necessary to achieve that objective — and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton praised the killing of Zarqawi as well. “I hope that this will be a blow to the insurgency in Iraq and affords an opportunity for the new Iraqi government to build on this success and provide greater security and stability for the Iraqi people.”

Both the Republicans and Democrats would have us believe that Zarqawi was a brilliant terrorist mastermind, whose death comes as a giant setback to the resistance movement in Iraq. But if Nir Rosen, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and others are correct, Zarqawi’s death will make little, if any, difference in the long run — for all-out ethnic civil war is fast engulfing the battered land. The United States is being defeated and its occupational grip is weakening. Zarqawi’s departure from the scene won’t change that.

The fact that U.S. presence in the country is becoming less and less significant still doesn’t mean our troops will be coming home any time soon. The Republicans won’t bring them back, nor will their alleged opposition. Both parties will stay the course and keep the U.S. military there for the foreseeable future.

A few popular Democrats are calling for the exit of troops from Iraq, including past presidential disappointments John Kerry and Al Gore. Sen. Kerry wants to pull troops out of Iraq by year’s end, which of course he’s qualified by writing that only “troops essential to finishing the job” would remain. Such a bogus position won’t end the war. Gore, however, will not even back Kerry’s tepid plea.

“I would pursue the twin objectives of trying to withdraw our forces as quickly as we possibly can, while at the same time minimizing the risk that we’ll make the mess over there even worse and raise even higher the danger of civil war,” Gore recently told ABC News. “It’s possible that setting a deadline could set in motion forces that would make it even worse. I think that we should analyze that very carefully. My guess is that a deadline is probably not the right approach.”

As if the approach we are currently taking is making the situation any better. Iraq is becoming more bloody and chaotic by the day. The “war on terror” will carry on in its misguided and illegitimate direction as long as Democrats and Republicans continue to call the shots in Washington. The soft murmurs of dissent we are now hearing from a handful of Democrats amount to little more than a coordinated bluff. It’s an election year, remember?

That is the reality the antiwar movement better grapple with if it wants to end this crazy war.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Perhaps the worst of the Democrats still embracing the illegal war is Senator Hillary Clinton. And despite her unwillingness to engage the antiwar community, she still receives substantial support from those who say they don’t support the occupation.

On June 3 Clinton won the coveted ballot line of the Working Families Party in New York, even though the WFP was one of the first to oppose the war on Iraq four years ago. It was a sign of what’s to come as Hillary sets herself up for a presidential run down the road, where alleged antiwar groups like MoveOn.org will likely rush to defend Hillary against a Republican challenger, despite her deadly foreign policy positions. But let’s hope Hillary never makes it that far.

Capitulation, like the WFP’s last week, only serves to make Hillary worse than she already is. Not that the Democrats will ever come out in opposition to the Iraq war, but they surely aren’t going to do so as long as the antiwar movement supports them simply because they aren’t Republicans. And the WFP even had a legitimate alternative in Jonathan Tasini, Clinton’s antiwar primary challenger.

Tasini has come head-to-head with the Democratic elite in his efforts to hold Clinton accountable for her depraved war stance. Late last month at the New York Democrat’s state convention, Tasini failed to introduce an antiwar resolution that would have called for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

His party wouldn’t hear it. Democratic officials said Tasini hadn’t followed the rules by introducing the resolution fifteen days in advance. Tasini contends he was misinformed and insists that Clinton’s camp was behind the sabotage.

“There is absolutely no question Hillary Clinton doesn’t want a debate on the war,” says Tasini.

At the same convention Clinton snobbishly accepted her party’s nomination, and ignored Tasini’s potential challenge — "potential," because Tasini is not guaranteed a spot on the Democrat’s primary ballot in September. His campaign still needs to turn in 15,000 signatures from registered New York Democrats before his name will appear on the ballot. If he fails to do so, his campaign will be over.

That’s the futility of running antiwar campaigns in Democratic primaries against party elites like Hillary Clinton. Besides, only Democrats in New York can vote in the primaries, which in this case would ignore the fact that the antiwar movement is more diverse than just grassroots Democrats.

But that’s how the Democrats stifle debate. Instead of addressing the issue they’ll silence those who aren’t in line with their positions. And that raises the question: why even run antiwar campaigns inside the Democratic Party like Tasini is trying to do?

If the antiwar movement were politically savvy they’d be thinking ahead to Hillary Clinton’s expected run for president in 2008. They’d be putting pressure on the Senator now from outside the party instead of waiting until more bodies in Iraq pile up and more tax dollars spent on slaughtering innocent civilians. The antiwar movement shouldn’t be supporting Democrats, period. The primaries, as Tasini’s campaign has experienced (as well as Dennis Kucinich in 2004), are rigged in favor of the pro-war establishment.

The truth is, Democrats and Republicans aren’t going to end this war. We will, by refusing to play by their rules.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Chris Toensing, writing for In These Times this month, insists, "The Shiite religious parties, in particular, prefer that the U.S. military stay until they consolidate their grip on the security apparatus. But even independent Iraqis, like Isam al-Khafaji, fear the intensified sectarian violence and the multi-sided mle of militias that might follow a U.S. pullout."

One of the more astute observers of the situation in Iraq, Nir Rosen, author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, doesn’t seem to agree with Toensing’s interpretation that Iraqis want US forces to remain in Iraq. Writing for The Atlantic in December of 2005, Rosen explained:

"At some point — whether sooner or later — U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner … Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars — Iraq’s most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency — called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It’s not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites’ Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003."

Marc Cooper, contributing editor to The Nation, along with a few other "lefties" have long plucked through the neocon playbook to justify a prolonged occupation of Iraq, and even recently signed the erroneous Euston Manifesto, which, among other things, calls for a continued occupation of Iraq. As the Manifesto reads:

"We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.”

So, like President Bush, the signers of this document believe the Left and others should pressure Iraqis to succumb to the US version of democracy. Sounds pretty imperialistic. Other Euston Manifesto supporters include Dissent magazine editors Michael Walzer and Mitchell Cohen, Dissent editorial board member Paul Berman, and Kanan Makiya a Dissent contributor.

In The Washington Post last week Nir Rosen continued by writing, "Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq u2018the republic of fear’ and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere … Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost" in the mayhem.

Working to end the occupation of Iraq from within the belly of the beast will not be an easy thing to do, especially with folks like Marc Cooper attempting to hold us up. If the U.S. were to leave tomorrow, violence in the country would not end abruptly. No antiwar activist I have spoken to has ever stated anything to the contrary. But if Nir Rosen is correct, and occupation forces are just one more militia in a country of many, wouldn’t removing that militia at once be a step in the right direction?

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Nixon thought the antiwar movement at the time was largely made of up radical environmentalists, so he figured why not divide the movement by appeasing a few of the enviros’ wishes. Fortunately for those who wanted U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam, Nixon’s ploy didn’t work. Today, the Save Darfur campaign is the cause du jour for the liberal wing of the antiwar movement. And unlike Nixon and the EPA in the ’70s, if Bush gets involved in Darfur he may well derail the mounting opposition to the war in Iraq.

George Clooney and a handful of other Hollywood big shots, along with over 164 humanitarian and religious groups, are now calling on the United States to hustle troops over to stop the ethnic conflict. Bin Laden, in his latest radio hit (if it was really him), claimed the Darfur region of the Sudan, which is largely Muslim, would be the next stop for the U.S. imperial armies. Let’s hope he’s wrong, even if Clooney and Amnesty International desire it. The United States, if troops were deployed, would most likely only escalate the deaths, not end them. There is absolutely no reason to believe that shipping young Americans off to the Horn of Africa to die would result in anything tangible or worthwhile. Sadly, the bloody conflict would likely continue regardless.

Some little-known facts about the Darfur situation: Both sides in the conflict are black, and both sides are Muslim. So, despite what the major news media may say, this isn’t an Arab-on-black or Muslim-on-Christian nightmare. And perhaps worst of all, there isn’t a good side to be on. Both have committed horrible atrocities, and both want to slaughter the other. Not to mention that entering the region militarily would only feed right into bin Laden’s rhetoric — much like we did when we shocked and awed Baghdad. So I think it’s safe to say that hatred of the U.S. would only increase among closet jihadists in the Middle East and elsewhere if we invaded Darfur. That doesn’t make us, or them, any safer.

You may recall that President Clinton did his part to end the violence in the Sudan when he fired a few missiles at a pharmaceutical plant in 1998. It didn’t do much good; it led to countless deaths and probably prompted al-Qaeda to attack the United States quicker. There is no reason to believe that an intervention by Bush would result in anything different. And never mind that the United States is all that great at "humanitarian interventions."

1992 saw the invasion of Somali, which by most accounts was an utter failure. Thousands of innocent Somalians died while others were brutally raped by UN peacekeeping forces. And for all those who claim that the late 90s Kosovo war a just conflict, don’t forget that thousands of ordinary people were killed because of our intervention. Oh yeah, NATO is still occupying the place.

There are other reasons we ought not act on all of our humanitarian impulses, however well intentioned they may seem. Unlike Darfur, we’ve got wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan that actually involve us. In fact, we are responsible for them. Want to help bring peace to the Middle East? Why not pressure the U.S. government to halt all funding to Israel? That’d be a heck of a start.

There are atrocities for which the U.S. government is culpable, but Darfur isn’t one of them. So don’t jump on the Save Darfur bandwagon — it may only lead to more devastation.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Hillary, in a letter to constituents last November, expressed her belief that the war in Iraq shouldn’t be “open-ended” but was clear that she would never “pull out of Iraq immediately.” Translation: Hillary Clinton supports a continued occupation of Iraq. Her stance on Iran isn’t much better; in fact, it may be worse. In the same letter, Clinton hoped contingents of U.S. soldiers would remain in the region with “quick-strike capabilities. … This will help us stabilize that new Iraqi government,” she attested. “It will send a message to Iran that they do not have a free hand in Iraq despite their considerable influence and personal and religious connections there.”

Messages, I guess, carry more weight when they are delivered at gunpoint. “Watch out Tehran,” Hillary seems to be declaring, “I’ll strike quick.” Such neoconish attitudes have upset antiwar activists, and now many are rallying ’round any alternative they can find to challenge Hillary in her bid for reelection this year.

Jonathan Tasini, who is running against Clinton in the New York Democratic primary, is gaining the most visible support. His position on the Iraq war is solid, as he wants all U.S. troops home now. Tasini also believes that democracy in Iraq is a long way from developing and argues that there will be no such thing in Iraq’s future as long as the U.S. stays the course. “[The] invasion of Iraq has created a theocracy,” says Tasini. “The people of Iraq have the right to decide what law they choose to follow.”

The Green Party is also tossing its antiwar weight into the ring. Sander Hicks, the founder of Soft Skull Press and operator of indie publishing house Vox Pop, is challenging Steve Greenfield for their party’s nomination. Both Hicks and Greenfield support bringing U.S. troops home immediately and oppose any US involvement in Iran. The Libertarian Party of New York recently nominated Jeff Russell, who says he’d bring soldiers home as soon as possible, and the Socialist Equity Party is running Bill Van Auken, who wants to bring U.S. troops home now.

None of the antiwar third-party candidates at this point in the campaign season have any real name recognition or financial backing. Even so, Tasini the Democrat does. Antiwar flyers plaster campuses throughout New York City touting Tasini, and his campaign is being discussed on numerous antiwar blogs and e-mail lists. Tasini’s drive may soon spark some real tension among antiwar activists in New York, however, as many believe supporting Tasini will fail the movement against the war.

For starters, they contend that Tasini is still a Democrat, which means that if he doesn’t beat Hillary in September’s primary election, he will most likely endorse her campaign and hand over his antiwar funds to the pro-war Democratic Party, much like Dennis Kucinich did during his presidential race in 2004 when he endorsed John Kerry.

When I contacted Tasini’s campaign manager, Adam Koch, he challenged these criticisms.

“Tasini won’t be endorsing Senator Clinton after the primaries if he doesn’t win,” says Koch. “Nor will he be giving any of his money to the Democratic Party.” Koch also noted that Tasini is currently seeking the Working Families Party line, but if that falls through he will not be appearing on the ballot.

The Working Families Party will be endorsing a New York senatorial candidate on June 3, and Hillary and Tasini have been the only two candidates to seek the party’s line thus far. Hillary scored the endorsement in 2000, so it’s not guaranteed to go to Tasini.

If the antiwar movement is to truly take on Hillary this election season, we need to challenge her all the way up to November. The majority of New Yorkers who oppose the Iraq war aren’t even Democrats and can’t vote for Tasini in New York’s closed primary elections. The validity of Tasini’s campaign is now greatly dependent on whether or not he receives the Working Families’ endorsement.

Supporting another antiwar candidate or voting “none of the above” may be the only way to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for her depraved Iraq war stance on Election Day 2006. Until then, let’s track Hillary across the country and let her know we don’t agree with what she’s offering.

Fortunately, antiwar activists can all agree on one thing: Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve our votes.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Joshua Frank: Jeff, it’s been three long years since the US invaded Iraq and there has been a mountain of speculation as to the real motives for the war and occupation: Was it for oil, Israel? No WMDs have turned up, and there weren’t any connections between Saddam and Bin Laden. After reading Grand Theft Pentagon, however, it’s hard not to think that perhaps a larger reason the US invaded was to benefit economically. Can you talk about this a bit? Why the heck are we in Iraq anyway?

Jeffrey St. Clair: Josh, stop cribbing questions from Helen Thomas! The invasion of Iraq had a MIRV warhead full of motives, none of which had to do with eliminating Saddam’s arsenal of WMDs. They knew all he had at most were a few aging mustard gas bombs and the like that had been rusting away since the first Iran/Iraq war. (I believe we may be in the opening acts of the second Iran/Iraq war.) That’s precisely why he felt so comfortable in launching the invasion with such a relatively small force. A lesson Iran and North Korea have taken to heart. Second, they knew Saddam the Atheist and Osama the Fundy loathed each other. But most Americans had no clue about this long-standing antagonism, so they were easily, and to some extent, willingly duped by this fictional alliance.

The neo-con claque in the White House and in the salons of Washington had their own motives, some of which they publicized, such as imposing another US client state in the heart of the Middle East; some of which they kept relatively submerged, that is, annihilating a threat to Israel. But the neo-cons are zealots and even many inside the Bush White House recognize them as such. Useful zealots, just like Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson. But it’s vital to understand that the key players in the Bush inner sanctum — Rove, Card, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and Armitage — are not neo-cons. So they had other motives, some political, some strategic and, yes, some economic. Bush needed a scalp after 9/11. Toppling the pitiful Taliban wasn’t going to be enough to mask the troubling questions about his administration’s incompetence leading up to 9/11. Saddam was sitting out there as the perfect object of sacrifice. They could inflate this marginal regime into a threat the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, knock them down swiftly with minimal US casualties and then have access to a huge trove of oil, as a kind of tribute of war, which they could use to pipe money into the portfolio of private contractors who acted as a kind of second invasionary force.

After 12 years of nearly daily bombings and a vicious sanctions regime, the Bushies knew that the basic infrastructure of Iraq, from power plants to sewage plants, was broken. And what had survived the sanctions was slated for being destroyed in the invasion. Post-invasion Iraq was going to be the biggest reconstruction project in history. The contracts would largely go to companies hand-picked and vetted for loyalty to Bush by Douglas Feith, the former Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Bremer. And the funding was supposed to come from Iraq’s oil revenues, once Halliburton and Parson’s got the spigots opened, to the tune of $100s of billions. It was all meant to be a big feast and your ticket to the feeding frenzy was a big political contribution to the RNC. Guess who came to dinner?

JF: So, who is behind some of these monstrous reconstruction contracts?

JSC: The more difficult question is which unlucky corporation didn’t win a seat at the table. Companies were being created on the fly to get a piece of the Iraq pie, from security firms formed by former Pentagon and CIA staffers to telecom companies who did little more than act as brokers and middlemen, where the heavy lifting was really just stuffing money into their accounts as fast as possible. Of course, the big ticket contracts, worth 100s of millions of dollars, went to an honor roll of contractors whose names are familiar to us all: Halliburton and its subsidiary Brown and Root, Bechtel, which has never seen a war it didn’t profit from, Parsons Company (Halliburton’s great rival), the Carlyle Group, naturally. Republican big wigs used to join elite country clubs to do their business, but now that they’ve begun admitting blacks they flock to the Carlyle Group instead. But there are 100s of other corporations, from Blackwater Security to MZM, the CIA-connected company that took Duke Cunningham down, that have largely executed loot-and-run operations in Iraq with little attention from the press.

And you certainly don’t have to slap a Bush/Cheney sticker on the back of your black Mercedes SUV to cash in. You’ve done excellent reporting, Josh, on the freshets of funds flowing into the accounts of Richard Blum, husband of Democrat icon Dianne Feinstein, through his company URS. That’s not to say that the Bushies haven’t made out like bandits. Neil Bush, who is nearly as incompetent in business as his bro, appears to have paid for his divorce and his new Houston mansion through “terror war” related contracts in the Middle East, including most curiously, Dubai. From there, Neil went on to loot New Orleans in the name of reconstruction. And President Bush’s Uncle Bucky, an investment banker in St. Louis, sits on the board of what was once a struggling defense contractor called ESSI, Inc. With Bucky Bush on the board, W. in the White House, ESSI’s fortunes took a fortuitous swing for the better, with Uncle Bucky chuckling all the way to the bank. If you didn’t score during this orgy of contracts, you’re likely to become a case study in business school classes across the country. The whole scandal reminds me of Mexico during the Salinas years when people close to the government became billionaires through their proximity to the country’s corrupt leaders. The Mexican prosecutors had a great name for it: inexplicable enrichment. The corruption of the Bush years makes that look like minor league ball by comparison.

JF: One the most interesting, if not frightening, chapters of Grand Theft Pentagon for me was a piece on John McCain, who will likely run for president in 2008. You make the claim that McCain may be the Senator most likely to start a nuclear war. Why is that?

JSC: McCain is a seriously unbalanced individual. He is a kind of political transvestite, all-dressed up as a maverick, when in fact he is in many ways a more hardboiled conservative than Bush and political wraiths who swirl around him in the White House. Recall, that McCain, now hailed as a reformer, was the Duke Cunningham of his time. As a member of the Keating Five, he was caught taking bribes from S&L looter Charles Keating. Because it was another bi-partisan scandal, McCain got away with merely a soft slap on the wrist.

Even more disturbing is McCain’s volcanic temper. He explodes into rages at staffers, constituents, reporters and fellow senators (witness his recent bizarre buzzbombing of Barak Obama), transforms petty grievances into political death matches, and is paranoid.

I’m sure a lot of the warps in his psyche stem from his relationship with his dictatorial father, Admiral John McCain, the Curtis LeMay of the Navy, who wanted to nuke North Korea and North Vietnam. Part of it may stem from his time as a prisoner of war. Interestingly, a Cuban shrink interviewed McCain while he was a POW and produced a frightening psychological profile of the young flyer, which concluded he was borderline paranoid schizophrenic. Today we’d call him a bipolar, juice him up with Eli Lilly’s finest and send him out in the world. The description of McCain as the most likely senator to start a nuclear war comes from Dr. Robert Witzeman, a Phoenix-area physician who has known McCain for decades.

Witzeman is an environmentalist and human rights advocate who has spent many years defending Mt. Graham, one of the Apache’s most sacred mountains, from the demented scheme by the University of Arizona and the Vatican to implant deep space telescopes on the peak. McCain nearly assaulted Witzeman and his friend Robin Silver, another physician, during a meeting in the senator’s office. His tendency to throw violent tantrums and to engage in political witch hunts is well known to senate staffers.

The senator played a malign role in getting one of the most gifted and honest defense committee staffers on the Hill, Winslow Wheeler, fired, after Wheeler, writing under the pseudonym Spartacus, exposed McCain’s hypocrisy on defense pork barrel spending. Look today at how McCain is cozying up to Bush and ask yourself what kind of man would have any kind of relationship with Bush and his inner circle of thugs after these same characters had slimed your wife as a pill-popper and accused you of siring an inter-racial child out of wedlock. McCain is a more frightening figure than any other politician on the landscape, including Hillary Clinton and Tom Tancredo.

JF: I have a good friend stationed down in Antarctica doing science work who met McCain last fall. Apparently the Senator was there on a tour of sorts. My buddy, who had the misfortune of sharing a sink with the guy after taking a leak, told me McCain looks as if he’s about the keel over. I guess he’s a walking corpse. So maybe we have that going for us. Anyway, can you talk a little about the excess weapons programs that you outline in the book? Most cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, yet have no real use other than fattening the pockets of the military industrial giants.

JSC: McCain probably spends a lot of time at the sink scrubbing his hands to the bone like Lady Macbeth. But as furiously as he scrubs, he can’t wipe the tell-tale stains away. You can see his true inner nature seeping out across every pore in his face, like some strange beast out of a Borges story, which becomes more and more grotesque. McCain makes Nixon look like Carey Grant.

As you know, I subscribe to the historian Gabriel Kolko’s view that the morons running the Bush administration are destroying the US empire from the inside out. But even the seasoned Dr. Kolko must be agape at how quickly the rot has set in. Not only has the Bush administration provoked civil war inside Iraq, they’ve also ignited one inside the Pentagon. That’s because by and large the Generals who run the show aren’t all that anxious to start extended wars so much as to engage in threat inflation to justify their real operational mission which is to funnel billions into the coffers of the big defense firms: Lockheed, Boeing, TRW, Raytheon and the like. Recall that the Iraq war was supposed to be a quick cakewalk, with Saddam’s regime smashed to bits during the Shock and Awe air assault, and the ground forces entering Baghdad in a kind of parody of a Roman triumph. And it was all supposed to pay for itself through the looting of Iraq’s oil wealth. Surprise! The Pentagon now finds itself in an intractable quagmire with no foreseeable exit. Worse from the Generals’ point of view is the escalating costs, now approaching a trillion dollars with no end in sight and not the slightest indication from Bush Central that any new revenue streams, i.e., tax hikes, are in the offing. The public debt is soaring and that means that real business of the Pentagon is being put at risk: procurement of big-ticket items. At the top of the list, of course, is Star Wars, the $100 billion fantasy, which has never worked and never will.

The biggest reason Kim Jung Il has nothing to fear from the Bush crowd is that they need his slingshot missile program in order to justify continuing to dump money into Star Wars on the ludicrous grounds that the North Koreans might be able to hit one of the outer Aleutian Islands with a wind-aided missile strike. And there are dozens of other baroque projects dreamed up during the height of the Cold War, from the F-22 Fighter to the Stealth bomber to the Joint Strike Fighter, which no longer have any strategic or tactical utility other than to keep Boeing and Lockheed’s assembly lines rolling with the costliest weapons systems ever conceived to be deployed against an enemy that doesn’t exist. Now, personally, I think if we’re going to spend billions on weapons we might be better off spending them on weapons that don’t work and almost certainly will never be used. But the Pentagon and the big contractors are having night sweats. For the first time in 60 years there may not be enough money to go around. That’s why you’ve begun to hear grumblings from inside the Pentagon and inside the executive offices of companies such as Lockheed and Boeing that it might be time to cut and run in Iraq. Rumsfeld is fighting two insurgencies: one is Iraq and one inside the Pentagon. It’s probably our best hope for an early end of the war.

JF: You close Grand Theft with a quote from Jefferson, “If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” So, how are we to end all of this looting? How are we to hold all the criminals accountable and end these scandalous wars?

JSC: Unfortunately, I don’t think “we” appear to be capable of ending this war. The peace movement at the organizational level is moribund. It’s trapped in tired old formulas. The occasional demonstrations appear more like the parades of a dead movement marching. There is no opposition party to the war. There’s not a single national political leader of any standing who is an outspoken advocate of a complete withdrawal. All we have is Murtha’s redeployment plan and Feingold’s tiresome legalisms. This is all the more scandalous given the fact that the overwhelming majority of the American populace has turned against the war. The only way the peace movement could stop this war given the lack of any political power is to cut off the supply of fresh blood. By that, I mean the movement should concentrate almost all of its energy on anti-recruitment work. The Rumsfeld army is at the breaking point. The military can’t afford a steep drop in new recruits. But such protests are unglamorous, grueling and necessitate a degree of commitment that seems beyond the capacity of most antiwar organizers these days.

Ultimately, I believe that Professor Kolko is right. The American Empire will be undone by its own arrogance and extravagance. As in Vietnam, the US will be chased from Iraq not by the American antiwar movement, but by Iraqis. We have entered a very grim phase of the war, when, to quote Shakespeare, sin will pluck on sin. In fact, the US occupation of Iraq, which is degenerating daily, may succeed in uniting Kurds, Shias and Sunnis, especially after the massacres of the last few weeks by US troops.

The sooner the Iraqis evict US forces from Iraq, the better off we’ll both be. Perhaps then America’s imperial ambitions will be chastened. Perhaps the federal budget will be so busted that future forays will be curtailed and provocative and destabilizing weapon systems will be mothballed. And, perhaps, a third party will emerge to reclaim the banner of Jeffersonian idealism. I said, perhaps, didn’t I?

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

It is clear that McInerney, a Fox News (sic) commentator, and the FrontPage conspiracy nuts are desperate to find evidence that WMD existed in Iraq prior to the invasion three years ago. They are also hoping to uncover ties between bin Laden and Saddam. Many of the documents they hope will uncover these claims contain forgeries, rumors, and disinformation. In short, they aren’t the most reliable sources.

Nonetheless, here’s an example of the hearsay propped up by McInerney:

“Yes, [Saddam shipped off WMD] to three locations in Syria and one in Lebanon [Bekaa Valley] in the September—December 2002 time frame. This information was provided by Jack Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security. He charged that Saddam’s stockpiles of WMD were moved by a Russian Spetznatz team headed by Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, who came to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise the final cleanup.”

I suppose if Jack Shaw says it’s true, it must be. Right. Here’s a guy who in December 2002 released a report of Saddam’s alleged crimes, but as Noam Chomsky noted at the time,

“It was drawn almost entirely from the period of firm U.S.-UK support, a fact overlooked with the usual display of moral integrity. The timing and quality of the dossier raised many questions, but those aside, Straw failed to provide an explanation for his very recent conversion to skepticism about Saddam Hussein’s good character and behavior.”

On the flip side of the translation game, Saddam noted over and again that Iraq had no WMD in 2002. In several of the documents now available on the Web in English, Saddam Hussein is quoted as saying to his deputies:

“[The UN inspectors] destroyed everything and said, ‘Iraq completed 95 percent of their commitment. We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could take them 10 years to [verify]. Don’t think for a minute that we still have WMD. We have nothing.”

McInerney and other war supporters have attempted to interpret the Arabic material that has yet to be released in English. Letting the amateurs slug it out is not likely to produce anything of quality or truth. Yet, many conservative bloggers have tried to nail down Saddam’s ties to bin Laden by highlighting documents that seem to refer to a 1995 meeting between bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Sudan. However, many intelligence officials claim such documents must be taken with a grain of salt. Conversations were recorded over the radio; others were only passed along by secondhand sources — but none have produced any direct link between Saddam and a-Qaeda. Even so, a meeting in the mid-1990s doesn’t mean Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, or that the two were in cahoots against the U.S.

Besides, if a smoking gun did exist, wouldn’t the Bushies be the first to point it out? Why would they need an ex-fighter pilot on David Horowitz’s neocon site and a few right-wing bloggers to uncover the truth? As with most of Bush’s PR, the release of these documents is only meant to boost his dismal poll numbers.

Searching out justifications for the Iraq invasion are all the war’s backers seem to have left. I guess they all failed to read David Kay’s report on the matter of WMD. Even Charles Duelfer, another war supporter like Kay who sought Saddam’s nonexistent arsenal and wrote a report about it, is convinced Saddam didn’t have squat even before the first bombs dropped in 2003.

Now, I think it is pretty simple (but obviously hard for the war supporters to grasp): if Saddam didn’t have WMD before the war began, then he didn’t have any WMD to ship off to Syria and hide. That means there was nothing to destroy, either.

Nada. Zilch.

It’s just more fabrications from the seekers of the nonexistent smoking gun. The only thing smoking right now, however, is the war crowds’ continued lies and smoldering reputations.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Yeah, they think we are out to get them and that we’ll destroy their comfortable way of life. And what seems to be driving their delusional tendencies is the teaming up of traditional conservatives, libertarians and lefties — all of whom oppose the neocon wars.

Take FrontPageMag.com, which recently went after the conservative, yet rational, Paul Craig Roberts, former contributing editor to the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. As FrontPageMag editor Ben Johnson wrote in disgust of Roberts’ common sense which ran in LewRockwell.com:

"Roberts has declared the war in Iraq lost, not to mention criminal. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are u2018torture centers,’ and Bush would be u2018prosecuted’ … His pessimism about winning the War on Terror dates literally to its inception. Two days after 9/11, Roberts wrote, u2018a guilt-ridden people are no match for fanatical opponents who believe in their cause’ … His writings also seemingly justify terrorist attacks against innocent Americans, because, like Ward Churchill, he believes there are no innocent Americans. u2018Americans are complicit in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children as u2018collateral damage,’ he writes. So what is difference between a military target and a u2018complicit’ family of four in Des Moines?"

As if being anti-neocon somehow implies that Roberts is also anti-American. Johnson also distorted a recent column written by Roberts in which he relayed several conspiracy theories passed along to him by readers which explained how Bush might start a war with Iran.

"One of the more extraordinary suggestions," wrote Roberts, "is that a low yield, perhaps tactical, nuclear weapon will be exploded some distance out from a US port. Death and destruction will be minimized, but fear and hysteria will be maximized. Americans will be told that the ship bearing the weapon was discovered and intercepted just in time, thanks to Bush’s illegal spying program, and that Iran is to blame. A more powerful wave of fear and outrage will again bind the American people to Bush, and the US media will not report the rest of the world’s doubts of the explanation."

Now, Roberts did not intimate that he too believed such a scenario was likely, only that the whacko neocons are capable of just about anything. But Ben Johnson responded:

"Even on the far-Left, such theories would be unwelcome. Although Kurt Nimmo (a critic of DiscoverTheNetworks.org) and others have claimed for years that Bush secretly plans to pre-emptively decimate Iran, none have publicly claimed he would kill Americans as a pretext. The only detail Roberts omitted was whether Bush was doing the bidding of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the British royal family, or the Vatican."

Clearly such theories like the neocons’ fear that Iran is out to nuke us, as only relayed by Roberts, not endorsed — also border on delusional. There is no doubt that the left has its fair share of nutcases, as anyone who has been to a Green Party outing will likely attest. But in this case, as it so often is with these folks, they’d rather mince Roberts’ words than deal with the facts. Roberts never actually said he’d condone the killing of Americans as in the case of 9/11 (either did Ward Churchill), nor did he claim he believed the Bush administration was likely to detonate a nuke off the US coast in order to spark a war with Iran. The neocons are delusional.

But now that Paul Craig Roberts has turned against the neoconservative agenda, folks like Johnson can’t stomach the fact that they are at last a pitiable minority. The majority of the world hates Bush and now the majority of Americans do too. They know their liar-in-chief fibbed his way into Iraq and they don’t believe he’s telling the truth about Iran. And they shouldn’t.

Libertarians like Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, and conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts have joined forces with radicals like Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair for a reason. They all oppose the Bush wars in the Middle East and his slaughtering of civil liberties at home. They aren’t all in agreement about market capitalism or environmental concerns, but they do see eye-to-eye on the destructive nature of the warfare state.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discount through Josh’s blog.

Richard Blum’s history as an entrepreneur began at the ripe age of 23 when he began to work for the San Francisco brokerage firm Sutro & Company. Blum quickly climbed the ranks and became a partner by the age of 30. According the SFGate.com, "Blum proved that he had an eye for fixer-upper properties when he led a partnership that acquired the struggling Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for $8 million — then sold it to Mattel Inc. four years later for $40 million."

In 1975, Blum went out on his own and formed a brokerage agency. Today Blum’s lofty firm, Blum Capital, holds positions is more than 20 companies, including real estate giants, credit bureaus, and yes, even military contractors.

Blum sees himself as an altruistic capitalist, claims one of his ex-employees, "He likes to go after companies that are down and out, and bring their stock back to life. He thinks he’s doing good." Blum shares a large stake in Perini, a civil construction company that is happily employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not all of Blum’s war-profits come from Perini. In 1975 his venture capital firm went after fledging construction and design company, URS, when the business was about to be bought out by another corporation.

Since then Blum has increased his stock in URS, capitalizing on its recent military contracts. Unlike Blum’s dabbling with Barnum & Bailey, his current profits aren’t so safe for child consumption.

Here are the basics to date: Blum currently holds over 111,000 shares of stock in URS Corporation, which is now one of the top defense contractors in the United States. Blum is an acting Director of URS, which bought EG&G, a leading provider of technical services and management to the U.S. military from The Carlyle Group in 2002. Carlyle’s trusty advisors include President George Bush Sr., James Baker and ex-SEC Commissioner Arthur Levitt, among other prominent neo-conservatives and Washington powerbrokers.

URS and Blum have since banked on the Iraq war, scoring a fat $600 million contract through EG&G. As a result URS has seen its stock price more than triple. Blum has cashed in over $2 million on this venture alone and another $100 million for his investment firm.

"As part of EG&G’s sale price," reports the San Francisco Chronicle, "Carlyle acquired a 21.74 percent stake in URS — second only to the 23.7 percent of shares controlled by Blum Capital."

The Carlyle Group has long been accused of exploiting its political connections to turn a profit. And if Carlyle can come under the microscope for its government ties and war profiteering, as it did in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11, than surely Blum’s URS ought to be subject to the same scrutiny.

Owen Blicksilver, Blum’s spokesman, claims his boss and Senator Feinstein have never talked shop at home in their gated mansion. "Mr. Blum and Sen. Feinstein have never had any discussions about outsourcing, government contracts or URS,” Blicksilver said.

If this were a Republican senator’s spouse scoring bundles off the spoils of war and passing it along to fellow Republicans, the liberals would be up in arms. But since Senator Dianne Feinstein is a leading Democrat — mums the word.

Partisanship trumps ethics.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

Well, not really. It’s too cold in upstate New York right now to do anything other than fume over the liberal villains in Washington. "Why do I write about the putrid Democratic Party?" I responded, "I’ll tell you, there’s a reason this Republican administration is so damn bullet proof — nobody from the opposition party is taking aim and pulling the trigger."

And that’s why the Dems are just as culpable in all that has transpired since Bush took office in 2000. They aren’t just a part of the problem — the Democrats are the problem.

I mean, who is really all that surprised Bush and his boys wanted to conquer the Middle East? Not me. That’s just what unreasonable neo-cons do: they stomp out the little guy, kill off the weak and suffocate the voiceless. They only care about the girth of their wallets and the number of scalps they can tack above their mantles.

The Democrats aren’t just letting the Republicans get away with murder, however — some of them are also reaping the benefits of the Bush wars. We constantly hear about Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and how his ex-company is making bundles off US contracts in Iraq. But what we don’t hear about is how Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband are also making tons of money off the "war on terror."

The wishy-washy senator now claims Bush misled her leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I don’t think she’s being honest with us though; there may have been other reasons she helped sell Bush’s lies. According to The Center for Public Integrity, Senator Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum has racked in millions of dollars from Perini, a civil infrastructure construction company, of which the billionaire investor wheels 75 percent of Perini’s voting share.

In April 2003 the US Army Corps of Engineers dived out $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq’s central command. A month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for “electrical power distribution and transmission” in the southern Iraq.

Senator Feinstein, who sits on the Appropriations Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, is reaping the benefits of her husband’s investments. The Democratic royal family recently purchased a 16.5 million dollar mansion in the flush Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. It’s a disgusting display of war profiteering and the leading Democrat, just like Cheney, should be called out for her offense.

And that’s exactly why the Bush administration is so darn bullet-proof. The Democratic leadership in Washington is just as crooked and just as callous.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

Sheehan’s decision, which was announced on February 9, came after substantial pressure from elite Democrats who thought her bid could damage Sen. Feinstein. Certainly that was the point of Sheehan’s threat to take on the senator — and the elites of the pro-war Democratic Party, including Sen. Barbara Boxer, knew it. Since her decision was made public Sheehan has been taking heat from antiwar activists who believe she has given into the Democrat’s coercion. They believe she has succumbed to lesser-evil politics. But I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to such a conclusion.

Sheehan obviously believes the best way to challenge the Democrat’s ineptitude is to continue her activism from outside the party. So don’t go counting on her to endorse Feinstein this summer. If anybody still honestly believes that the Democrats are open to radical changes at the national level, they need look no further than Paul Hackett’s recent demise or the centrist Howard Dean’s campaign during the 2004 elections. If the grassroots of the Democratic Party are engaged and empowered — watch out — their challenges to way business is done in Washington, whether genuine (Hackett’s) or spurious (Dean’s), end up becoming just another casualty of Democratic corruption.

Surely Sheehan knows this and isn’t about to exert energy reforming a broken Democratic Party. She wants the troops home now — that’s her mission. Why get hung up tooling around with DC Dems and their misguided ways? It would be a waste of time.

That doesn’t mean Sheehan is going to disregard electoral politics altogether. As she answered questions during her press conference, she implored California voters to look into another antiwar candidacy: “Todd Chretien is a personal friend of mine," she said. "He is a man of integrity and peace. I encourage all Californians to take a hard look at his campaign.”

Chretien is running on the Green Party line against Feinstein and hopes to rally the antiwar movement to his side. Sheehan’s statement wasn’t a formal endorsement of Chretien’s campaign, but it certainly gives us a glimpse into the philosophy of Sheehan — for she isn’t going to support any pro-war candidate of any party. Period.

And that’s a lesson that the antiwar movement should take home and think on. Activists shouldn’t get bogged down in the Democrat’s web of power and deceit. They should instead stick to their cause and fight for what they believe in. Lesser-evil politics can only damage social movements and pro-war politicians like Sen. Feinstein will only respond to the antiwar movement when it starts to turn its back on the Democratic Party and their unwillingness to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Until then the Democrats will simply take antiwar voters for granted as they did during John Kerry’s sour presidential bid in 2004.

Cindy Sheehan is a leading voice of sanity in this age of war and disparity and her message to the Democratic Party is a poignant one — until you oppose this war we will continue to oppose you.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

“I believe we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations,” Clinton told an audience at Princeton University on January 18. “I don’t believe you face threats like Iran or North Korea by outsourcing it to others and standing on the sidelines … We cannot and should not — must not — permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons,” Clinton added. “In order to prevent that from occurring … we must move as quickly as feasible for sanctions in the United Nations.”

Sen. Clinton has attempted to out-hawk Dubya on other foreign policy matters, as well. From Iraq to Palestine, the Democratic Party’s leading lady argues that the current administration has not done enough to combat the threat of terrorism. And like so many other neoconservatives (yes, admit it, Hillary is a bloody neocon), Clinton will never admit that the United States has fallen right into the grasp of Al Qaeda by attempting to fight stateless terror by walloping sovereign Arab countries.

And with the landslide Hamas victory in the recent Palestinian elections, the US policy for the region isn’t exactly producing the kind of results Bush and his co-conspirators desired.

You’d have to pull out a microscope to differentiate between George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. Both want a continued occupation of Iraq. Both want sanctions on Iran. And they both claim to want democracy in the Middle East. Yet neither will accept a democratic outcome if it doesn’t favor US interests.

“Until and unless Hamas renounces violence and terror, and renounces its position calling for the destruction of Israel, I don’t believe the United States should recognize them, nor any nation in the world,” Hillary Clinton said recently.

"[Y]ou’re getting a sense of how I’m going to deal with Hamas … And the answer is: not until you renounce your desire to destroy Israel will we deal with you," Bush told the Wall Street Journal in an interview during the elections in Palestine.

Even though both express a desire to democratize the region, and in particular Iraq — it is hard to imagine either allowing an Iraqi government to form that expressed even the slightest disagreement for the US occupation. And a democratic Iraq (where the candidates aren’t chosen by US officials) would likely embody the same views as Iran concerning Israel.

Love for America in the Arab lands hasn’t exactly prospered these past years, and it will not likely be changing anytime soon given the unified position of the Republican and Democratic leadership in Washington.

So, there you have it. Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, both leaders of the respective parties, see eye to eye on the most pressing concerns facing the US and the Middle East today. And neither is offering up anything that will get us out of the mess we helped to make.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

I’m not even all that sure MoveOn opposes the Iraq war. Sure, they rallied opposition during the lead-up to the invasion a few years back, but since then they’ve done little if anything that should garner the respect of the antiwar movement. Despite Kerry’s grotesque position on the Iraq war in 2004, MoveOn implored their members to donate cash to his campaign, but said nary a word about his pro-war posturing. You can’t support a candidate without putting demands on their candidacy, and MoveOn’s breakdown has made them all but irrelevant as an antiwar club.

Case in point. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York has continued to support Bush’s war in Iraq as well as his greater war on terror, yet MoveOn refuses to voice frustration. Instead, they support the war-hungry senator and admit they won’t stand up to her during an election year.

"The case I would make is that 2006 needs to be a year of reckoning for Republicans on Iraq," Tom Matzzie, the Washington director for MoveOn recently told the New York Times. "If the antiwar candidate is creamed by Hillary Clinton, it’s a distraction."

A distraction from what? If I remember correctly, it wasn’t just the Republican Party that got us into this dreadful mess. The Democrats voted for it, helped sell the damn thing, and even bombed the hell out of Iraq during the 1990s, all the while supporting deadly UN sanctions. And as Americans begin to turn on this war, including prominent elected officials from both parties, Hillary still won’t retract her defense of the war, let alone meet with genuine antiwar activists here in New York.

All of this, and the feckless MoveOn.org still won’t call Hillary out for her warmongering.

MoveOn is nothing more than a cover for the Democratic Party. Issues are no matter. Partisan politics are. We’ve got a war going on, and advocacy groups who allegedly oppose it should stand up to it, not pander to those who do. The best way to force the New York senator to change her position on the war is to run an antiwar campaign against her during 2006 from outside of the Democratic Party.

Running a campaign against Hillary within the Democratic Party, as a couple antiwar activists are doing (one a former Green, Steve Greenfield), is hopeless — for their challenges will end after the primaries. If the antiwar movement really wants to take on Hillary in the electoral arena, she has to be confronted from outside the Democratic Party right up to Election Day and beyond. That is exactly what MoveOn should advocate, but never will.

No, MoveOn.org is nothing more than a roadblock for an antiwar movement that is finally gaining speed after a bout of silence. If we want to end this war, we’ve got to oppose all who support it — the bigger the name, the better.

That puts Hillary Clinton at the top of the list.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

Take John Kerry partisan drone and stand-up comedian Margaret Cho, who at a MoveOn.org benefit, railed: "I mean, I’m afraid of terrorism, but I’m more afraid of the Patriot Act," even though her candidate of choice not only voted for the legislation but authored many of its components.

Or how about Albert Gore, who in 2003 exclaimed: “They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, Big Brother-style government — toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book ’1984′ — than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America."

With such a sour musk in the air, it is unsurprising that hysteria reigned supreme over how much George W. Bush’s administration was to blame for the police conduct at the Republican National Convention last summer, where more than a thousand protestors were detained for up to 50 hours prior to being released. This infringement was indeed awful — but hardly unique to the Bush years alone.

In early 2002, more than 20 FBI agents raided the home of Southern California African-American anarchist Sherman Austin’s mother and seized her son’s computers, which he used to run a political website. Austin was later charged and sentenced to a year in prison for “distribution” of information about making or using explosives with the “intent” that the information “be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence.”

Austin did not author the information, which was housed on a section of the site he allocated to a teenager who then proceeded to upload the instructions. The obscure federal statute used against Austin, and which carried many implications for free speech, hit the books long before Bush in the late 1990s with the legislative shepherding of Dianne Feinstein, Democrat. Liberal sedatives like the American Prospect and The Nation wrote absolutely nothing about Austin’s case.

During the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, for example, police arrested Ruckus Society founder John Sellers for walking down the street. At the 2000 Democratic National Convention in LA, police brutality easily exceeded anything seen at the New York City Republican National Convention, where an outdoor Rage Against the Machine concert came to an abrupt end when riot police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors and many non-participating bystanders.

Going back a bit further to 1999, during the WTO protests in Seattle, riot police beat up marchers and sprayed tear gas and shot rubber bullets indiscriminately. Several downtown areas were locked out to protesters, as well as public parks, where individuals could not even wear anti-WTO paraphernalia.

As Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in Five Days That Shook the World: "Tear gas canisters were unloaded and then five or six of them were fired into the crowd. One of the protesters nearest the cops was a young, petite woman. She rose up, obviously disoriented from the gas, and a Seattle policeman, crouched less than 10 feet away, shot her in the knee with a rubber bullet. She fell to the pavement, grabbing her leg and screaming in pain. Then, moments later, one of her comrades, maddened by the unprovoked attack, charged the police line, Kamikaze-style. Two cops beat him to the ground with their batons, hitting him at least 20 times."

At the regional level, a May Day 2001 march in Long Beach, California ended similarly, with many activists having to enter the emergency room because of wounds inflicted by police officers, some of which left rubber bullets lodged under skins. May Day protesters amassing in Portland, Oregon in 2000 experienced similar acts when police violently corralled activists, forcing them to retreat for fear of being stampeded by mounted police horses.

Then there’s the racist and institutionalized police state that existed throughout the 1980s but really took new hold during the 1990s with the Clinton-era spike in so-called "War on Drugs" activity, which has led to record incarceration of African-Americans, Latinos, and women. Fraternities have long existed in major metropolitan police departments, wherein members ascend the ranks for beatings, flouting guidelines, and planting evidence. When one individual instance of this was exposed, as happened when police officers in LA’s Ramparts district were found to have planted drug evidence, commentators preferred to describe it as a slight blight on an otherwise functioning system, whereas it actually represented an extremity of the norm.

Racist profiling, harassment of black and Latino youth under the guise of "anti-gang" activity, and no-knock SWAT raids on the homes of non-whites supposedly in possession of drugs or illegal weapons, increased dramatically under Bill Clinton. And how about the latest admission from President Bush that his government has been eavesdropping on US citizens? Under Clinton the National Security Agency tapped millions of private phone calls placed by Americans under the super-secret program Echelon.

In fact, what we are seeing today is a logical continuation of a foundation laid during the Clinton era. The anti-Bushites forget that the Patriot Act amended a series of existing laws, most notably the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which increased the number of capital crimes and severely curtailed right of appeal such that death penalty defendants only have six months to a year for preparing an appeal. Because of lax enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act and comparable state statutes, many defendants do not even receive necessary documents in time and are consequentially in danger of execution without a fair and thorough appeal.

Although Michael Moore, hero of the liberal establishment and uninformed "activists" who view Bush bashing as social glue, claims to have read the Patriot Act in his film Fahrenheit 9/11. However, the two cases he cites in the film’s segment on the Patriot Act have absolutely nothing to do with the legislation. Local law enforcement’s infiltration of activist groups (Moore’s first case) and law enforcement’s questioning of the politically outspoken (case two) occurred during the 1990s, particularly after the WTO protests.

For foreigners and immigrants on American soil as well as the Guantnamo prisoners, both egregiously skipped over in Moore’s movie, post-9/11 legal changes have resulted in sweeping rights to detain, torture and harass. But this is not something that entirely rests with Bush Jr.

In actuality the Democrats ushered in the legislation that made this possible, with Russ Feingold the only Senator to oppose the Patriot Act (but just happened to cross over and confirm John Ashcroft as Attorney General).

The Democrats hardly have made it an issue since, and instead have gone ahead and condoned the appointment of Bush’s “torture memos” guru Alberto Gonzales to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Democrat Patrick Leahy gushed: “I like him.” Were the Democrats actually to wage a fight beyond the current rhetorical ruses holding up Gonzales’s confirmation for an extra week, they might have actually forced the Republicans to propose someone other than this brute.

In short, ascribing all the civil liberties problems of this country to one date, September 11, 2001, and one administration, George W. Bush’s, the liberal establishment has avoided any unpleasant analysis of our systemic civil liberties problems that might point back in its members’ direction. Sure it is wonderful the Patriot Act reauthorization is meeting some opposition in the Senate, but let’s not forget who supported the egregious bit of legislation in the first place.

If we only blame Bush, we’re only getting it half right.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

Joshua Frank Archives

Senator Clinton released a letter last week which clarified her (non) position on Iraq. She said she wouldn’t accept any timetable for withdrawal and won’t even embrace a “redeployment" of US troops along the lines of Rep. Murtha.

“I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war,” Clinton wrote in her lengthy letter that amounted to nothing short of denial for her own culpability in the mess.

Last Friday Sen. Clinton spoke at an event in Kentucky where she reiterated her position stating, “The time has come for the administration to stop serving up platitudes and present a plan for finishing this war with success and honor,” she said. “I reject a rigid timetable that the terrorists can exploit, and I reject an open timetable that has no ending attached to it."

Translation: Sen. Clinton is all for an extended American stay in Iraq. She "takes responsibility" for her vote on the war, but won’t admit that it was wrong. And of course, Clinton is still for “winning” this war. Whatever that means.

Antiwar activists across the country have not been overly pleased with Sen. Clinton’s continued warmongering these past few weeks. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, who supported John Kerry’s pro-war campaign last year, has changed her tune on the Democrats and says she will be hot on Clinton’s trail across the country. "We’re calling it Bird-Dog Hillary,” Benjamin raves.

It’s about time.

Cindy Sheehan also said she’ll be tracking down Hillary, maintaining that her and other activists may even take Camp Casey to the streets of NYC. Activists here in New York assured me last month that they plan on organizing a lot of events and sit-ins in front of Clinton’s offices in the months ahead. I think this is proof the antiwar movement is finally getting somewhere.

Over on the other side of the country in San Francisco, antiwar activists plan to hold a huge rally on December 20, where Clinton will be attending a bar association benefit with an interview session with Jane Pauley.

Focusing all of the antiwar movement’s energy on the Republicans is shortsighted, and perhaps worst of all, completely naïve. The Democrats not only authorized this war, they still by and large defend the ongoing occupation.

Taking on the leaders of both parties is paramount if we are ever to end this bloody conflict.

How nice it would have been for the antiwar movement had they held Kerry’s feet to fire during last year’s presidential election. But one has to be glad that prominent leaders like Medea Benjamin and publications like The Nation, which is also stating that they won’t be supporting any pro-war candidate in the future — are finally coming around. The liberal myopia that infected so many may at last be wearing off.

Lesser-evil politics often gets in the way of successful social movements; so let’s hope anti-warriors keep up their pressure on the Hillary Clinton. It can only lead to good things.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

Many who oppose this war have latched onto Rep. Murtha’s call to change the course in Iraq. It sounds nice to be sure. Changing the course is absolutely desired by the antiwar movement. Bush and the rest of the hawks in Washington have done nothing but chant a nauseous "stay the course" mantra, so not surprisingly Murtha’s sudden entrance into the debate has been greeted with open arms and wet smooches.

Rep. Murtha may be calling for something a bit different than the neo-con’s Iraq plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that.

Murtha, a respected war veteran who championed the Iraq invasion from its inception, is calling for an exit of troops from Iraq. But don’t be fooled, he won’t be bringing them home any time soon. Rather, what Rep. Murtha is really calling for is a "redeployment" of US armed forces.

Murtha’s stance is not withdrawal as it should be. What he is calling for is not immediate, either. To put it bluntly: Murtha’s proposal is not in the least bit worthy of the “antiwar" movements’ hearty embrace.

If you’ve had the misfortune of tuning into Murtha’s latest press conferences or TV showcases these past few weeks, you would not have heard him utter the word "withdrawal" — not a once did the word turn off his seasoned political tongue. Instead what you would have heard was "redeployment" over and again.

As the antiwar movement calls for the troops to come home now, Murtha has quite a different suggestion of what to do with them, and redeployment is just a cover word for a greater war agenda.

According to a policy report titled “Strategic Redeployment: A Progressive Plan for Iraq and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists,” put out by the Center for American Progress, which Rep. Murtha supports, redeployment isn’t all that better than staying the course:

"As redeployments begin, the remaining forces in Iraq would focus on our core missions: completing the training of Iraqi forces; improving border security; providing logistical and air support to Iraqi security forces engaged in battles against terrorists and insurgents; serving as advisors to Iraqi units; and tracking down terrorists and insurgent leaders with smaller, more nimble Special Forces units operating jointly with Iraqi units…

"By the end of 2007, the only US military forces in Iraq would be a small Marine contingent to protect the US embassy, a small group of military advisors to the Iraqi Government, and counterterrorist units that works closely with Iraqi security forces. This presence, along with the forces in Kuwait and at sea in the Persian Gulf area will be sufficient to conduct strikes coordinated with Iraqi forces against any terrorist camps and enclaves that may emerge and deal with any major external threats to Iraq … 14,000 troops would be positioned nearby in Kuwait and as part of a Marine expeditionary force located offshore in the Persian Gulf to strike at any terrorist camps and enclaves and guard against any major acts that risk further destabilizing the region."

It is just more of the same and the antiwar movement should in no way get excited about Murtha’s offering. He still wants US bases in Iraq and still believes the US — or rather Halliburton — should lead the way of reconstruction efforts in the battered land. And nope, the troops won’t come home; they’ll just be transferred from one imperialist venture to the next.

Rep. Murtha may be a war veteran, but that doesn’t mean he ought to be the antiwar movement’s knight in shining armor.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. You can order a copy at a discounted through Josh’s blog.

The most fascinating aspect of this whole controversy is the number of people it potentially involves. From elected officials in Congress to top conservative activists, the Abramoff lobbyist sham could ravage the neocons far worse than the CIA-leak affair. It could also take a top Democrat or two down as well.

The Abramoff saga is more than one sordid tale of an insider gone wild; it’s a vivid narrative of how business is done in Washington. From legal maneuvering to backroom bribes and pay-offs, Abramoff is just one in a long line of power hungry lobbyists.

At the heart of the Abramoff inquiry is the work he did for six Indian tribes during the 1990s up until 2004. At question is whether or not Abramoff along with his partner Michael Scanlon bilked at least $80 million from his clients, evaded taxes and violated lobbyist disclosure laws.

There are a handful of politicians currently under scrutiny. Rep. Tom DeLay is the most notable, but now in the hot seat is Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, Rep. John Doolittle of California and Rep. Robert Ney of Ohio, all Republicans, are reported to be the most central to the ongoing investigation. But on the periphery, and I’m told a potential addition to the aforementioned list in the near future, could be Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Last week the Associated Press reported that almost three dozen congress people moved to halt the construction of a Louisiana Indian casino while they simultaneously collected large donations from Jack Abramoff and his tribal clients. Senator Harry Reid was one of those elected officials.

Reid sent a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton on March 5, 2002, which was also signed by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. "The next day, the Coushattas issued a $5,000 check to Reid’s tax-exempt political group, the Searchlight Leadership Fund. A second Abramoff tribe sent another $5,000 to Reid’s group. Reid ultimately received more than $66,000 in Abramoff-related donations between 2001 and 2004," the AP reported.

It was a political tit-for-tat. Reid opposed the construction of the casino and was paid handsomely for his choice. Another Democrat caught up in the legal chaos is former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who, according to tribal records, wrote Norton on March 1, 2002 about the same matter. Coushattas wrote a $1,000 check to his Senate campaign five days later and handed over $10,000 to his library fund.

We’ve all heard how Tom DeLay was allegedly flown all over the country on Abramoff’s clients’ tab. But what we don’t hear much about is that two Democratic congressmen, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and now the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, along with Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, now the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, were flown to the Northern Mariana Islands in the mid-1990s, paid in part by Jack Abramoff. And the list of Democratic culpability in the Abramoff affair goes on.

Chances are high that the black cloud engulfing Washington will eventually rain down on both the Republicans and the Democrats.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. To learn more visit www.BrickBurner.org.

Only three Democrats voted in support of the Republicans’ Iraq withdraw proposal: Representatives Wexler, Serrano and McKinney. And their point was well made. They want the troops home now and they don’t care who wrote up the legislation or the reasons why they did it. It was the right move to make. If US troops were pulled out tomorrow, Iraq would be a safer place for all of us.

A handful of House Democrats did take the podium to express their seething disgust over the Republicans’ political feat. Talk is cheap, however. Votes are what count. If there ever was a subject that should gash the thin-skinned Democratic Party, it’d be the Iraq war. But as the House vote verified, the Democrats don’t want US troops home now, let alone in six months as Rep. John Murtha proposed last Thursday.

Murtha, a veteran war hawk who championed the Iraq invasion from its inception, announced at a teary eyed press conference that he wished to withdraw the nearly 160,000 US troops in Iraq “at the earliest predictable date.” Recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans agree with Murtha’s call to pull out US forces, which wasn’t even close to an "out-now" proposition. Regardless, the Democrats took cover as Rep. Murtha began making headlines with his remarks.

“I don’t support immediate withdrawal,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid released in a statement following Murtha’s call to exit troops.

“Mr. Murtha speaks for himself," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gasped as reporters asked for her take on the matter.

The Democratic leadership in Washington was making it crystal clear that they won’t be cut and running from Iraq but from Murtha and the movement that prompted his change of heart.

The Democrats, however, are proving to be the Avian Flu of the antiwar movement. They are willing to divvy out just enough fodder in hopes of luring in the antiwar crowd, and then they strike.

First it was the Senate lock out, which ended up being nothing more than a charade masked as opposition. After all, debating pre-war intel is a non-issue — what we need to be worried about is how to bring our troops home now. But as we well know, the Democrats have neither a plan nor the desire to bring them home anytime soon.

Senator John Kerry and even Donald Rumsfeld are calling for a reduction of US troops after December. But the troops they both want to bring home are the ones they sent over to monitor Iraq elections in the first place. Pulling them out afterward was the plan all along. The Democrats, like the Republicans, still believe there is a mission to be accomplished here. What this mission is, nobody knows.

US presence in Iraq is only enflaming more anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and worldwide. It’s only increasing potential threats against the United States. Surely it can’t be democracy the Democrats and Republicans want. If that were the case they’d have yanked out troops months ago as Iraqis have overwhelmingly declared that’s what they desire. No, this ongoing mission is only about one thing: smug American pride. President Bush and his Democratic enablers can’t admit that this war was waged for no reason whatsoever. They can’t admit that all the lives lost have been for nothing.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. To learn more visit www.BrickBurner.org.

"[T]he president’s defenders have fallen back on what has always been their argument of last resort — cherry-picked quotes from Clinton administration officials arranged to give the misleading impression that the Clintonites said and thought the same thing about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the Bushies did."

Yeah, you’re not the only one, it makes my head spin too. I’m not exactly sure how one can cherry-pick President Clinton’s 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which gave the US government the green light to whack Saddam for the slightest annoyance, whether fabricated or not. In fact, it was the former Iraq dictator’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction that were part of the Act’s foundation.

As the Act provided:

"Since March 1996, Iraq has systematically sought to deny weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) access to key facilities and documents, has on several occasions endangered the safe operation of UNSCOM helicopters transporting UNSCOM personnel in Iraq, and has persisted in a pattern of deception and concealment regarding the history of its weapons of mass destruction programs."

President Clinton was attempting to justify an attack on Iraq on the grounds that Saddam had a lethal arsenal of WMD. I am not sure how that is all that different from Bush’s rhetoric. But logic is meaningless when party loyalty is involved. Just ask Josh Marshall, who continues:

"But even arguing on this ground understates the full measure of administration mendacity in the lead up to the war since it ignores half the story. WMD was only half the administration equation for war. The other half was a Iraq’s alleged tie to Islamist terrorist groups like al Qaida and including al Qaida. On top of that, of course, was the big enchilada, the Cheney favorite, those frequent and intentionally ambiguous suggestions that Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks."

On my, what a stretch. I’d put WMD at about 75% of Bush’s justification for invading. And remind me again how the Democrats opposed Cheney’s favorite Iraq lie? Oh yeah, they didn’t. That aside, Marshall doesn’t acknowledge the bigger picture, as I describe in Left Out!;

"In 1993, Clinton himself bombed Iraqi intelligence centers for what he said was retaliation for the attempted assassination of George Bush Sr. “He said publicly that the U.S. strike on Iraqi intelligence headquarters was retaliation for Saddam’s attempt to kill [ex-president] George Bush,” Laurie Mylroie, who worked as Clinton’s Iraq specialist during his 1992 campaign, told WABC Radio’s Steve Malzberg. “[But] he also meant it for the Trade Center bombing … Clinton believed that the attack on Iraqi intelligence headquarters would deter Saddam from all future strikes against the United States,” she claimed. “It was hopelessly naïve.”

Clinton didn’t try to tie Saddam Hussein to the crime, he just went ahead and bombed on his own accord. No matter that the CIA was pointing to bin Laden and not Saddam. So much for Dick Cheney being the only one pointing fingers in Saddam’s direction when it was undeserving.

How soon Marshall forgets that in 1996 the Clintonites bombed several civilian targets and military facilities — without the approval of the UN or any international alliance, for that matter. The Iraqi government and even the Pentagon reported dozens of deaths and millions of dollars worth of damages. The war on Iraq, despite popular belief, didn’t start with Bush Jr.

How can we forget President Clinton’s callousness toward Iraqi civilians? The United Nations estimated in 1995 that as many as 576,000 Iraqi youth died as a result of the sanctions that the US had imposed and supported since 1991. But we’re talking bombs here, not sanctions.

Soon after the Iraq Liberation Act was signed into law, Clinton, in what many criticized as an effort to deflect attention from his impeachment trial, tried his luck with Saddam one more time on December 16, 1998. Unlike previous attacks on Iraq, which paled in comparison, this attack was waged with primitive anger. As President Clinton asserted in a national televised address on the day of the first U.S. offensive.

“Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors … Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.”

“Six weeks ago,” he continued, “Saddam Hussein announced that he would no longer cooperate with the United Nations weapons inspectors called UNSCOM. They are highly professional experts from dozens of countries. Their job is to oversee the elimination of Iraq’s capability to retain, create, and use weapons of mass destruction, and to verify that Iraq does not attempt to rebuild that capability … The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.”

I’m not mincing words and I’m not sure how in the heck President Clinton’s word-for-word rationale for bombing Saddam could be considered "cherry-picked" as Josh Marshall puts it.

I just don’t think there is any question that Joshua Micah Marshall’s beloved Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion. He most certainly did. As my granddad used to tell me, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating."

Chew on that for a while, Mr. Marshall.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. To learn more visit www.BrickBurner.org.

It sounds noble enough and predictably their act, which was led by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, has been praised by a flurry of antiwar pundits and bloggers who claim the Democratic Party must finally be warming up to their side of the war question.

But just because something sounds noble, doesn’t mean it is.

Writing for The Nation online, John Nichols opined, "Remarkable as it may sound, there is reason to believe that Congressional Democrats may finally be waking from their long slumber and stirring into a functional opposition party … [Reid] merits the high praise of being referred to not as a Democrat or a Republican but as the leader of the opposition that this country has so sorely needed."

Opposition to what? Calling for an investigation into how the Bush administration manipulated the public (forget that the Democratic leadership throughout the1990s up until, well, November 1, were propagating the same lies about Saddam’s threat) isn’t called "leadership," let alone the makings of "functional opposition party," as Nichols believes. It was all just a silly ruse. The Democrats certainly know how the Republicans misrepresented and inflated intelligence about Saddam’s WMD.

But there is a much bigger charade going on here that most have missed: despite their newly found tenacity, the Democrats still have not taken a sound position on the war in Iraq.

The grassroots of the Party — if their trendy blog DailyKos is an accurate sample — have missed the boat on this fact entirely. As a popular DK blogger by the name of Hunter, exclaimed jovially, "In a move worthy of a Wild West gunfight, Minority Leader Harry Reid changed the political landscape on a dime, and cleaved the Republican talking point brigades into shards and splinters. This move was political brilliance on more fronts than I can count."

What a crock. Even though the Democrats have allegedly changed their tune on pre-war intelligence, it doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot, even if Hunter et al. say so. And if an investigation is ever honestly waged (not likely) you can forget about it meaning anything more than just another blow to Bush’s already plunging popularity. But Bush’s poll figures, up or down, good or bad, isn’t going to bring the troops home. Nope, even if the Dems somehow expose the bipartisan lies that led to the Iraq invasion, the current occupation will still rage on. And even if the Dems take back the House and Senate in 2006, thanks in part to their latest political stunt, there won’t be an exit strategy in place. The Democrats are so pitifully predictable that they’ll simply say that since our troops are there now, we can’t just "cut and run." How is this any different than the Democrat’s weak position before their Senate close out?

It’s not.

What Senator Harry Reid and the other Senate Dems pulled wasn’t an act of gallant proportions as so many liberals and antiwarriors contend. It was just a political trick intended to persuade their base and the antiwar movement into believing they actually are an "oppositional party."

So don’t go getting your hopes up. The Democrats have a long way to go before anyone can consider them an opposition to the Republican agenda. For that to happen they’d have to call for an end to this illegal war. And that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. To learn more visit www.BrickBurner.org.

On Halloween, seven more US soldiers were killed bringing the monthly total to 92. At this rate we should reach 3,000 US deaths by August, if not sooner. The bombs and attacks that are killing occupation forces are becoming more accurate and sophisticated say Pentagon officials — so we are only likely to see an increase in deaths as the war continues. Journalists haven’t fared much better than soldiers and Iraqi civilians; the total death count of journalists in Iraq already outnumbers the total killed during the entire Vietnam era.

Iraq is beset with death thanks to the US government.

November’s outlook is also grim. The Democrats are likely to spend the majority of their time attempting to oppose Samuel Alito’s quest for the high court. So you can bet the war isn’t going to take center stage anytime soon. Sure the liberal Dems will pay lip service to the Libby indictments, but they will never go after the heart of the matter: the lengths to which the government is willing to go in order to sell its imperial crusades.

Why won’t the Democrats address this? Well, the liberal establishment served up the same contaminated cocktails during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion as the Republicans did. The Democrats will always play victim, though. They’d just as soon declare they were misled than admit that they too lied about Saddam’s alleged WMD stash. Despite what DC Democrats may say, this is a bipartisan war that was set into motion during Clinton’s reign.

Before we go much further, I think a small clarification is in order. This whole CIA leak and Scooter’s latest tribulations are not a product of some personal tit-for-tat aimed at Joseph Wilson, but part of a larger White House effort orchestrated in order to counter increasing CIA rumblings about the short sightedness of the government’s Iraq endeavor during the lead up to war. Never mind that outing an undercover CIA officer shouldn’t be illegal, but championed. Regardless, the Libby episode isn’t about outing a CIA creep, anyway, it’s about lying to a grand jury.

So back to the bloody war. As chaos, violence and car bombs enflame Iraq, the US government is going about its business as usual. Reconstruction contractors are posting record profits. Weapons producers are fattening their bottom lines. War in Syria and Iran may soon become reality. Campaign coffers are busting at the seams thanks to the same industries profiting in the Middle East. The neocon agenda is persevering despite the bumps in the road and it looks as though they will still be steering the helm after the 2006 elections.

If we are ever going to stop this war we can’t get sidetracked by alleged victories and poll figures. We’ve got to keep the pressure on the warmongers as long as US soldiers and corporations occupy Iraq.

Joshua Frank [send him mail] is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, just published by Common Courage Press. To learn more visit www.BrickBurner.org.