Who's Helping the Terrorists?

By Robert Parry

January 26, 2007

Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz was given prime space on the Washington Post’s Op-Ed page to question the wisdom and the patriotism of Americans who disagree with George W. Bush’s long war against Muslim militants.

To Liz Cheney, who surely qualified on merit for her former job as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, there’s only one option – to stay the course in Iraq and to remain firmly in line behind President Bush.

“We are at war,” she wrote in bold type. “America faces an existential threat. … Quitting [Iraq] helps the terrorists. … Retreat from Iraq hurts us in the broader war. … Our soldiers will win if we let them.” [Washington Post, Jan. 23, 2007]

In normal type, Liz Cheney also reprised one of Bush’s favorite refrains about how the American people must listen to what al-Qaeda says and do the opposite. Since al-Qaeda’s leaders supposedly want a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, so they can build a giant caliphate “from Spain to Indonesia,” as Bush says, the United States must stay in Iraq and fight.

“Let’s be clear,” Liz Cheney wrote. “If we restrict the ability of our troops to fight and win this war, we help the terrorists. Don’t take my word for it. Read the plans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman Zawahiri to drive America from Iraq, establish a base for al-Qaeda and spread jihad across the Middle East.”

But U.S. intelligence knows that al-Qaeda’s public statements must be taken with a grain of salt.

By contrast, analysts give more weight to intercepted al-Qaeda communiqués describing the leaders' private views. Those messages reveal that – even as al-Qaeda baits the United States about leaving Iraq – the group actually worries that a sudden U.S. withdrawal could collapse its position.

Intelligence analysts estimate that al-Qaeda's forces account for only five percent or less of the armed opposition fighting U.S. and allied forces – and many of those young jihadists are not considered committed fighters.

As Zawahiri said in one captured letter, a rapid American military withdrawal could cause al-Qaeda’s new foreign jihadists, who have gone to Iraq to battle the Americans, to simply give up the fight and go home.

“The mujahaddin must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal,” Zawahiri wrote, according to a text of a July 9, 2005, letter released by the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

Bogged Down

According to the internal communications, al-Qaeda’s real wish is for the United States to stay bogged down in Iraq, so the terrorist group can continue recruiting and training young jihadists while buying time to overcome the hostility of Iraqis toward outsiders.

In another captured letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, “Atiyah,” a top aide to Osama bin Laden, described the work that must be done to overcome the many obstacles facing al-Qaeda in Iraq. Atiyah then added, “Prolonging the war is in our interest.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]

So, if the Bush administration truly based its decisions on doing the opposite of what al-Qaeda wanted, it would immediately withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq and let al-Qaeda in Iraq either disintegrate or get decimated by angry Iraqis who would no longer find al-Qaeda’s anti-American brutality particularly useful.

But Bush and fellow hard-liners, like Liz Cheney, are selective in deciding when Americans should heed the words of al-Qaeda and do the opposite, i.e. only when that matches what the administration wants to do in the first place.

That selectivity was demonstrated again after Bush announced his decision to escalate U.S. troop levels by more than 20,000 soldiers. Zawahiri issued a public statement offering mocking praise for Bush’s decision and urging him to expand the U.S. commitment even more.

“I ask him, why send 20,000 only – why not send 50,000 or 100,000?” Zawahiri said. “Send your entire army to be annihilated at the hands of the holy warriors to free the world from your evil.” [AP, Jan. 22, 2007]

Following the Bush/Liz Cheney logic, one would have to conclude that the advocates of Bush’s “surge” or the neoconservatives who want an even bigger escalation are doing exactly what Zawahiri wants. Conversely, those who call for a phased withdrawal are actually the ones thwarting al-Qaeda’s desires.

Of course, the “logic” behind Bush’s insistence that Americans must do the opposite of what al-Qaeda wants was never meant to be logical.

It was a rhetorical device to intimidate Americans into falling in line behind Bush – or they would face the intimidating question, as expressed in Liz Cheney's words: Why are you trying to “help the terrorists”?

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

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Castro's Legacy

Wayne S. Smith
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/02/02/castros_legacy.php

February 02, 2007

Wayne S. Smith is now a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. and an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1979 to 1982.

Raúl Castro has been acting president of Cuba since July 31, 2006. His brother, Fidel, passed the office to him then because of a serious illness. At this point, it is not clear whether Fidel Castro will recover and resume the presidency. It seems unlikely. But regardless of whether he does or not, he is now 80 and in poor health. One way or the other, his almost half-century rule in Cuba is nearing an end. What will be his legacy? Has the Cuba he leaves behind registered gains over Cuba as it was when he took power in 1959? Will it have a brighter future? And is it supported by the Cuban people?

The answers to those questions are mixed. Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He despises any system in which one class or group of people lives much better than another. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all—enough to eat, health care, adequate housing and education. The authoritarian nature of the Cuban Revolution stems largely from his commitment to that goal. Castro was convinced that he was right, and that his system was for the good of the people. Thus, anyone who stood against the revolution stood also against the Cuban people and that, in Castro’s eyes, was simply unacceptable. There is, then, very little in the way of individual freedoms –especially freedom of expression and assembly. And there are political prisoners—those who have expressed positions against the revolution—though today only some 300, down markedly from the number at the outset of the revolution.

And did the system provide that promised better way of life? It can be said that during the years of the Cuban-Soviet alliance, when Cuba enjoyed most favorable terms of trade with the Soviet Union, resulting in what amounted to a subsidy of five to six billion dollars a year, the Cuban people were indeed well off. They had free (and excellent) health care, education up through the post-graduate level, adequate housing, enough to eat, and various other benefits. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cuba’s subsidy. Cuba went through some very difficult years—years of serious shortages of almost everything—of 18-hour-a-day blackouts and other difficulties.

It is a tribute to the durability of the Cuban people, and to a number of reforms to the economy carried out by the government, that they survived. But survive they did, and survive also did the revolution. At this point, the Cuban economy is making a strong comeback, thanks in part to new economic relationships with Venezuela and China, to a possible new oil field off the north coast, with other nations already bidding for drilling rights, to the fact that the price of nickel, Cuba’s largest export, is at an all-time high and that tourism continues to flourish and bring in much-needed hard currency despite U.S. travel controls blocking American tourists. The economy grew by at least eight percent in 2005 and closer to 12 percent in 2006.

For the average Cuban, life is still difficult. There are still shortages of almost all the basic necessities. Few go hungry, but the diet tends to be monotonous. Even so, the blackouts are now a thing of the past and there is renewed hope for the future. And they still have their free health care and education—something they do not want to give up!

Expectations in Miami and Washington had been that once Fidel Castro disappeared from the scene, the Revolution would crumble. But that, of course, has not been the case. Six months after Fidel passed the baton to Raúl, there has been no sign whatever of unrest. The Cuban people have accepted the transition with calm maturity—indicating a higher level of support for the Revolution than the exiles in Miami or the Bush administration had thought possible. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll conducted in Cuba indicated that 49 percent of the Cuban people supported Fidel Castro. Cuban officials strongly contest that finding, insisting that the percentage of supporters is much, much higher. But even as it stands, the poll indicates that a higher percentage of Cubans support Fidel than the percentage of Americans who support President Bush!

And what about Cuba’s place, its prestige, on the world stage? Here the gains are unquestionable. Before 1959, Cuba was considered as something of a banana republic. It played virtually no role in the international arena. But under Castro, it has played a prominent role, indeed at times a role that often resembled that of a world power.

It played a crucial part, for example, in bringing about revolutionary change in South Africa—and, indeed, throughout Africa. At the all-out battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1987, Cuban forces defeated South Africa. The Cubans showed that the “white giants” could be beaten. All else followed from that. The South Africans decided to negotiate. Angola and Namibia became independent and vast internal changes began in South Africa itself. By 1994, Nelson Mandela was president. As Mandela put it in a speech on September 4, 1998, change was made possible “… because of Cuba’s selfless support for the struggle to free all of South Africa’s people and the countries of our region from the inhumane and destructive system of apartheid. For that we thank the Cuban people from the bottom of our heart.”

Cuba no longer exerts influence abroad by military means. The world situation has changed. But its influence is still felt around the world, nonetheless, now increasingly through a vast plan of medical assistance it began in 1998. Cuba now has some 25,000 medical personnel abroad, providing assistance in over 68 countries, with 14,000 in Venezuela alone. Indeed, it has more medical personnel deployed around the world than has the World Health Organization, and is training doctors and nurses for a broad range of countries at the huge Latin American Medical School in Havana. It has received kudos from a diverse range of leaders such as President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

And, finally, Cuba’s standing in Latin America has perhaps never been higher. Wherever Castro has gone in the hemisphere over the past few years, he has been received with warm applause. Why? Because he stood up to the United States, has defied Washington and gone his own way. That is something virtually all Latin Americans respect and admire.

Campaign for America's Future Truth-Squads the SOTU

Fooled Again...?

The following comes from a NYT article concerning the theory that an off-shoot of the Mahdi army was behind the attack in Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers. This is the entire sourcing:

"Investigators say...according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable...The officials said...Officials cautioned... A senior Iraqi official said... An Iraqi knowledgeable about the investigation said... the Iraqi said... the senior Iraqi official said, citing information directly from the prime minister's office... Another senior Iraqi official said... the official said ...the American military has said... the military said... An American military official said... the military official said... officials say... Two American officials in Washington confirmed... One of those officials said... The second official said...."

While we're watching, listening to and reading this all-too-familiar line of propaganda, it would serve us well to do our own investigative reporting. While we wish for our media to do that as well, we are becoming more used to the idea that the mainstream media is the mouthpiece of the powerful and falls into the role of propaganda dissemination when the powerful have an agenda that it desires public support for - such as extending the disastrous Iraq war to Iran. You would think that they would want to consult experts who could shed light on anonymous administration official's claims that don't make any sense in the context of what is known about Iran's influence in Iraq.

For instance, the Congressional Research Service reported (9/29/06) that Iran was encouraging Shiite participation in electoral politics ("To that extent, Iran's goal in Iraq differs little from the main emphasis of U.S. policy in Iraq"), and that Iran's closest links in Iraq are to two large Shiite factions firmly connected to the U.S.-backed government: the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Da'wa Party, of which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is part. And the Iranian government has engaged in wide-ranging negotiations with the Maliki government regarding trade, diplomacy and military training. This information is important to consider alongside U.S. allegations that Iran is engaged in fomenting violence in Iraq.

And University of Michigan professor Juan Cole wrote recently in Salon.com (1/30/07) that there many reasons to be skeptical of U.S. claims:

"To begin with, some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops.

"Meanwhile, the most virulent terror network in Iraq, which styles itself 'Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,' has openly announced that its policy is to kill as many Shiites as possible. That the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran are passing sophisticated weapons to these, their sworn enemies, is not plausible.

"If Iran is providing materiel to anyone, it is to U.S. allies. Tehran may be helping the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary, but the U.S. is not fighting that group (their leaders were, in fact, granted an audience at the White House recently). By sale or barter, some weaponry originally given to the Badr Corps might be finding its way to other groups, such as the Mahdi Army of nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, that do sometimes come into conflict with the U.S. That problem, however, must be a relatively small one, and cannot explain Bush's hyperbolic rhetoric about Iran."

That said, let's watch for more deception in the form of repeated claims from anonymous officials, and take the station, newspaper, and radio editorial departments to task for their lazy stenography, shall we?

Holding Bush Back from Attacking Iran

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet
Posted on February 2, 2007, Printed on February 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47519/

As Congress and the American people protest the travesty Bush created in Iraq, our President is gunning for a confrontation with Iran. Bush is rattling the sabers and opting for gunboat diplomacy by pledging to "seek out and destroy" Iranian networks "providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies" in Iraq. But he has produced no hard evidence that Iran is supplying forces in Iraq with such weapons or manufacturing their own nuclear weapons.

When I say "gunboat diplomacy," I mean that literally. Bush recently sent US warships and Patriot missile batteries to the Persian Gulf and moved US attack aircraft to Turkey and other countries on Iran's borders. US forces stormed the Iranian consulate in northern Iraq and captured six Iranian nationals, and Bush announced he will go after any Iranians he considers a threat. There are also indications the Bush administration would support military action by Israel against Iran.

On Tuesday, the administration stepped up its inflammatory rhetoric. US officials said Iranians may have trained attackers who killed five Americans in Karbala on January 20. They also implicated the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by Moktada al-Sadr. It's very interesting that the New York Times characterized the focus on Iran and the Mahdi Army as "convenient from the point of view of the Bush administration."

Investigators were stumped at how the attackers, who wore American-style uniforms, secured forged US identity cards and American-style M-4 rifles, and used stun grenades like those used only by US forces. They are also confounded at the way the attackers' convoy of S.U.V.'s gave the impression that it was American and slipped through Iraqi checkpoints. Wednesday's article in the Times cites a theory that "a Western mercenary group" may have been involved. In the past the US government used the CIA to covertly overthrow governments, such as Iran's in 1953 and Chile's in 1973. Could mercenaries now be doing the Bush administration's dirty work?

The plan to attack Iran has been in the works since Bush inaugurated that country into his "axis of evil" in January 2002. Bush's 2006 National Military Strategy says, "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran." In April 2006, Seymour Hersh revealed the US military was making preparations for an invasion of Iran. "Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups," Hersh learned from current and former American military intelligence officials.

One of the military proposals calls for the use of bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapons against underground nuclear sites in Iran. That would mean "mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," a former senior intelligence official told Hersh. A Pentagon adviser said the Air Force would strike many hundreds of targets in Iran, 99 percent of which have nothing to do with nuclear proliferation.

A former defense official who still advises the Bush administration informed Hersh the military planning was grounded in the belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." That's the same faulty logic the US government has used to justify its cruel embargo and blockade of Cuba since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

Congress has the responsibility to prevent Bush from attacking Iran. In view of congressional opposition to his war in Iraq, Bush will not likely ask permission to make war on Iran. We can expect Bush to provoke -- or even fabricate a la Tonkin Gulf -- an incident with Iran and then claim he's responding to Iranian aggression. Senior Pentagon officials reported in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times that Air Force and Navy fighter planes along the Iran-Iraq border may be used more aggressively. Bush will then try to bootstrap the September 2001 and October 2002 congressional authorizations for force in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively into consent to attack Iran.

Offensive military action against Iran would be illegal under the United Nations Charter, which requires that members settle international disputes by peaceful means. The UN Charter is a treaty ratified by the US and thus part of American law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. Under the Charter, a country can attack another only in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council. Moreover, the use of nuclear weapons would violate our obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Congress should immediately pass a binding resolution reaffirming the United States' legal obligations and informing the Bush administration that it will not concur in any invasion or military action against Iran, would refuse to approve any funding for it, and would consider actions taken in contravention of the resolution as impeachable offenses.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of thCowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in June.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/47519/

A Field Guide To Devolution, Part 2

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH & SUBSIDIARITY

WIKIPEDIA - The principle of subsidiarity holds that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently. The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person. Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like the family, the church, and voluntary associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity," which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the subsidiarity principle.

The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle course between the perceived excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the various forms of totalitarianism, which subordinate the individual to the state, on the other. The principle was further developed in Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, and Economic Justice for All by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

A Field Guide To Devolution

INTRODUCTION

ALTHOUGH CRITICISM abounds concerning the rapid concentration of governmental power, world trade, domestic commerce and police authority - just to name a few - there is a stunning lack of alternatives proposed or even mentioned by media, politicians or intellectuals. Even among those who despise these trends there seems an almost tacit acceptance of their inevitability. A few examples:

- One of the greatest assaults on the Tenth Amendment's protection of state powers - No Child Left Behind - is broadly supported by both Republicans and Democrats. The Tenth Amendment, in fact, has almost become the Forgotten Law.

- America's right to determine the values and politics of the rest of the world, even to the point of invasion, has wide acceptance among Democrats and Republicans, limited only by the caveat that it may not be as big a disaster as is Iraq.

- The gross conglomeration of the American media - the broadcast media in particular - has raised few objections saved from those hardy groups that still believe in a free press.

- Many corporations use America mainly as a mailing address as they seek to do to the world what Starbucks has done to many urban neighborhoods.

- The cultural values of Americans is increasingly based on the idea that bigger is better. We have been taught to worship grandiosity and ridicule the modest.

Obviously, these are not universally held values although one might easily think so. In fact, underneath the surface of mainstream megalomania are numerous examples of groups and people still acting in, or striving for, human scale. They are, in fact, about some of the most important business of a human: reversing the gigantism that has not only hurt our lives but is threatening the whole planet.

Collectively these alternatives can be called examples of devolution or subsidiarity, the dispersal of authority to the lowest practical level, an increasing proximity of people to power, the return of commerce, politics and policing to human scale.

Nothing could be more important and no idea is more in need of a movement.

You didn't have to explain this in the 1960s and 70s when community power and control were well up on the left's agenda only to be wiped from memory by a generation of accumulators, self-aggrandizers and monopolizers preaching the human heresies of Thatcher, Friedman and Reagan like so many hustling evangelicals.

This journal has joined innumerable fights on this matter over the years. It argued for urban neighborhood government, it published a series of articles on devolution in other countries (including a prediction of the break-up of the Soviet Union) by Thomas Martin, and we have raised the flag for more urban states.

The best way to think about devolution is to remember that it refers to what Martin has called "the ideology of scale." This ideology functions in a three-dimensional fashion with traditional ideologies. For example, one can be a progressive decentralist or a conservative who believes in centralized authority. Thus conservatives and progressives may agree that much power needs to be returned to a local level, but might disagree violently on how it should be handled once it gets there.

What works so well in the manufacture of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of scale and mass production -- fails to work in social policy because, unlike a Taurus, humans think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize, worry or don't give a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such traits don't exist or don't matter. We have come to accept the notion that the enormous institutions of government, media, industry and academia are natural to the human condition and then wonder why they don't work better than they do. In fact, as ecological planner Ernest Callenbach pointed out, "we are medium-sized animals who naturally live in small groups -- perhaps 20 or so -- as opposed to bees or antelopes who live in very large groups. When managers or generals or architects force us into large groups, we speedily try to break them down into sub-units of comfortable size."

Today, if you want to tell it to the boss, you may have to travel a couple of thousand miles just to get to the receptionist. All of our systems appear to be on steroids. And like the drugged athlete, nature eventually pulls the plug. The institutions that have imposed a tyranny of size upon us not only fail to accomplish what they set out to do but are themselves disintegrating. The troubles of such huge institutions is a primary characteristic of our times. Consider the Soviet Union, Sears, General Motors and, yes, the United States itself.

We see it and yet we don't. Our loyalty to our assumptions and ideologies as well as our natural difficulty in accepting mortality even in non-human systems lead us to underrate such changes, to keep trying to do things the old way one more time.

Over the coming weeks, the Review will be presenting examples of devolution that works and some that doesn't. We invite further examples and will post a field guide to these matters on this page.

Molly Ivins is Dead. Long Live Molly Ivins!

The nation's mostly widely syndicated progressive columnist and a great friend of The Nation, Molly Ivins died today at age 62 after a long battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer." John Nichols' tribute to the warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen is the first in a series of appreciations we plan to publish. As he writes, "If anyone picked a fight with the powerful, she was there, writing with passion, humor and unbridled joy." She'll be dearly missed.

Sincerely,
Peter Rothberg, The Nation

Paul Krassner Reviews Himself...

Had the human potential movement of the sixties not been co-opted by the corporate media and fed back to somnambulistic consumers as commodity, the world as we know it would now be quite a different place. Viva La Revolucion!--Pete


PAUL KRASSNER, LA TIMES - In 1967, Abbie Hoffman, his wife Anita and I took a work-vacation in Florida, renting a little house on stilts in Ramrod Key. We had planned to see "The Professionals." "That's my favorite movie," Abbie said. "Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin develop this tight bond while they're both fighting in the Mexican revolution, then they drift apart." But it was playing too far away, and a hurricane was brewing, so instead we saw the Dino Di Laurentiis version of "The Bible."

Driving home in the rain and wind, we debated the implications of Abraham being prepared to slay his son because God told him to. I dismissed this as blind obedience. Abbie praised it as revolutionary trust. This was the week before Christmas. We had bought a small tree and spray-painted it with canned snow. Now, we were tripping on LSD as the hurricane reached full force. "Hey," Abbie yelled over the roar, "this is powerful [bleepin'] acid!"

We watched Lyndon Johnson on a black-and-white TV set, although LBJ was purple-and-orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. "I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war," he was saying, and the heads of the other presidents were all snickering to themselves and covering their mouths with their hands so they wouldn't laugh out loud.

This was the precise moment we acknowledged that we'd be going to the Democratic convention in August to protest the Vietnam war. I called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting. On the afternoon of December 31, several activist friends gathered at the Hoffmans' Lower East Side apartment, smoking Colombian marijuana and planning for Chicago.

Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft. We sought to utilize the media as an organizing tool, but we needed a name so that journalists could have a "who" for their "who-what-when-where-and-why" lead paragraph. . .

I came up with Yippie as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet. It was the ultimate extension of dehumanization. And so we held a press conference.

A reporter asked me, "What happens to the Yippies when the Vietnam war ends?" I replied, "We'll do what the March of Dimes did when a cure for polio was discovered; we'll just switch to birth defects." But our nefarious scheme worked. The headline in the Chicago Sun-Times read, "Yipes! The Yippies Are Coming!" What would later happen at the convention led to the infamous trial for crossing state lines to foment riot. . .

I got a call from director Brett Morgen, who was working on a documentary about the 1960s antiwar movement. It would have no narrator and no talking heads, only archival footage and animated re-enactments based on actual events and transcriptions of trial testimony. However, Allen Ginsberg levitating during meditation can be construed as cartoonic license. Brett invited me to write four specific animated scenes. . .

Although Brett "loved, loved, loved" the scenes I wrote, the backers objected to the use of LSD, fearful of diverting attention from the main focus of the film. I was disappointed, if only for the sake of countercultural history. The CIA originally envisioned employing LSD as a means of control; instead, for millions of young people, LSD served as a vehicle to explore their own inner space, deprogramming themselves from mainstream culture and living their alternative. The CIA's scenario had backfired. Anyway, my suggestion--instead of referring to it as acid, Abbie could yell, "Hey, this is powerful [bleepin'] aspirin"--was rejected. Thus, the hurricane, which was originally going to open the film, has been omitted, but of course it'll be on the DVD. . . .

Brett's goal isn't that ambitious, but when he called to tell me that "Chicago 10" had been selected to open the Sundance Film Festival, he said, "Wouldn't it be great if Abbie's legacy turns out to be that he helped to end the war in Iraq?" I hadn't seen any of the rough cuts and didn't know what to expect at the festival screening. Well, I loved, loved, loved it. Brett got a standing ovation. Although he was born two months after the protests in Chicago, he has managed--with the determination of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, aided by 180 hours of film, 50 hours of video, 500 hours of audio and 23,000 pages of trial transcripts--to reveal in this unique neo-doc, the horror and the humor, the rhetoric and the reality, of those events and their aftermath, in a style and rhythm calculated to resonate with--and inspire--contemporary youth. . .

Sundance may be a long way from Ramrod Key, the spirit of Yippie lingers on.

Iran May Have Trained Attackers That Killed 5 American Soldiers, U.S. and Iraqis Say

By JAMES GLANZ and MARK MAZZETTI
NYT Article Here...

Remember Chuck Hagel's admonition that BushCo would soon stage event propaganda for the express purpose of empirical expansion when you read the next piece, from the NYT. The wingnuts would have you believe that the Times is the voice of the "liberal elite" - whatever that is - the elite being the ones with the capital, i.e., the Reeps. The Times falls right into their appointed role as the mouthpiece of the administration, lest their Washington "reporters" lose their cherished "inside sources."--Pete

BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 — Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

A senior Iraqi official said the attackers had carried forged American identity cards and American-style M-4 rifles and had thrown stun grenades of a kind used only by American forces here.

Tying Iran to the deadly attack could be helpful to the Bush administration, which has been engaged in an escalating war of words with Iran.

One American soldier was killed during the initial attack and four more were abducted and killed shortly afterward as the police pursued the sport utility vehicles used in the attack.

The attack was focused on a meeting at a joint security station, where American and Iraqi forces mesh their efforts in the new security plan.

An Iraqi knowledgeable about the investigation said four suspects had been detained and questioned. Based on those interviews, investigators have concluded that as they fled Karbala with the abducted Americans, the attackers used advanced devices to monitor police communications and avoid the roads where the police were searching.

The suspects have also told investigators that “a religious group in Najaf” was involved in the operation, the Iraqi said, in a clear reference to the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by the breakaway Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. If that information holds up, it would dovetail with assertions by several Iraqi officials that Iran is financing and training a small number of splinter groups from the Mahdi Army to carry out special operations and assassinations.

“I hear that there are a number of commando and assassination squads that are disconnected and controlled directly by Iran,” the senior Iraqi official said, citing information directly from the prime minister’s office. “They have supplied JAM and others with significant weaponry and training,” he said using shorthand for the group, from its name in Arabic, Jaish al Mahdi.

Confirmation of a Mahdi Army connection to the deadly incident would also support the argument by Bush administration officials that the group has a direct role in attacks on American troops.

Another senior Iraqi official said that military actions by the United States against JAM essentially pushed it toward Iran.

“During the conflicts between the Mahdi Army and the United States, Iran was the only side that supported JAM,” the official said. “And they told them, ‘Hey, we are here to help you and we are here to support you, and we will not let you down.’ ”

The Karbala operation involved 9 to 12 armed militants and at least five sport utility vehicles, the American military has said. The initial attack on the compound killed one American soldier and damaged three Humvees, the military said.

But what has caught the attention of investigators is the way the convoy of S.U.V.’s was able to give the impression that it was American and slip through Iraqi checkpoints unchallenged. An American military official said all possibilities were being explored, with the focus on whom the United States can trust, even among senior Iraqi officials, in the Karbala area.

“We’ve got to be very careful as to who we define as our allies, and who we trust and who we don’t,” the military official said. “Was the governor involved? Were the Iraqi police that were on guard complicit or just incompetent?”

The unusual nature of the attack has made it a major topic of discussion in the upper echelons of the Iraqi government. It has spawned bizarre theories including the idea that a Western mercenary group was somehow involved.

But the existence of what American commanders sometimes call “rogue JAM” — separate from the central, controlled militia — has put the Mahdi Army at the center of the investigation, officials say.

Two American officials in Washington confirmed that American military investigators were looking into the possibility of Iranian involvement in the Karbala attack. One of those officials said the working assumption by the investigators was that the operation had been carried out by a splinter group of the Mahdi Army.

The second official said the operation could be seen as retribution for three recent American raids in which Iranians suspected of carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi forces were detained. On Sunday, the Iranian ambassador to Iraq conceded that two Iranians detained in Baghdad last month were security officials, but said that they were making legitimate contacts with Iraqi government officials.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

The Iraqi Resistance is not an “insurgency”

The Iraqi Resistance is not an “insurgency”. Insurgency is an organized rebellion aimed at overthrowing a legitimate and constituted government by force, such as the Contras, a U.S. proxy terrorist gang used against the legitimate government of Nicaragua in the late 1980s. There is nothing legitimate about the U.S. Occupation and its puppet government in Iraq. The Iraqi Resistance has the support of most Iraqi. One only needs to watch the jubilation of Iraqis at a destroyed U.S. tank or a Humvee to have a sense of Iraqi feelings. This distortion of the truth is part of U.S. psychological warfare not only against the Iraqi people but also against the rest of the world. It denies indigenous Iraqis their right for legitimate national resistance, and it deliberately demonizes the armed struggle against the invaders. The presence of “insurgency” implies that the U.S. Occupation is (nonexistent) peaceful and legal, and that the puppet government is legitimate government; it is not imported to Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks and imposed and legitimized by undemocratic and fraudulent elections at gunpoint.

Courtesy of Countercurrents and Ghali Hassan

Feingold Justifies Cutting off Bush's War

By Evan Derkacz
Posted on January 31, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/47445/

The good folks at PoliticsTV videotaped this Senate Judiciary Hearing on Congress's Constitutional Right to cut off funding for the war on Iraq.

There is no mealy-mouthed, namby-pamby speak here. In the Framers' brilliant design, Feingold says, Congress got the power of the purse, and the president got the power of the sword. They had the foresight to separate the two.

Of Cheney's recent pronouncement that Congress could not stop him and Bush from the War on Iraq, Feingold responded: "In the United States of America the People are sovereign, NOT the president..."

The video is over 7 minutes...

And don't miss Glenn Greenwald's post on our Senators' shifting opinions of Congress' ability to end a president's war. As you'd expect, many who demanded that Clinton set a timetable for withdrawal are suddenly singing a different tune...

He writes: "And Sen. McCain in particular made arguments in favor of Congressionally-mandated withdraw that are patently applicable to Iraq today. And he specifically argued with regard to forcible troop withdrawal that "responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States." The Constitution hasn't changed since 1993, so I wonder what has prompted such a fundamental shift in Republican views on the proper role of Congressional war powers."

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/47445/

The Shape Of Unions To Come

Anya Kamenetz

January 30, 2007

Anya Kamenetz is a freelance writer, the author of Generation Debt and a journalistic fellow of the Freelancers Union. She can be reached at her website, anyakamenetz.blogspot.com.

Do you have your dream job? If the answer is "yes," you are probably in a union. That's the finding of a nationwide marketing survey of over 37,000 workers released on January 25. The respondents most likely to report that they were in their dream jobs were police and firefighters (35 percent) followed by teachers (32 percent.)

By coincidence, on that same date, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing yet another severe drop in U.S. union membership—from a steady 12.5 percent in 2004 and 2005 to 12 percent in 2006. The remaining stronghold of unionism, with a 41.9 percent membership rate, is local government workers. As the BLS points out, "This group includes several heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers and firefighters."

The biggest surprise disappointment in this new report is the drop within the traditional base of manufacturing—for the first time in many decades, a factory worker is actually less likely to be unionized than a worker at large.

There is a longstanding progressive debate over whether the decline in unionization is due mostly to sustained business and political enmity towards organizing, or is simply a product of broader global economic forces. A recent Center for Economic and Policy Research report supports the former theory. The researchers found a sharp increase in illegal firings of pro-union workers in the 2000s, estimating the likelihood that a union organizer will be axed during a campaign at 1 in 5.

On the other hand, recent statements at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland give evidence for the latter view. The head of Infosys Technologies, India's second-largest software exporter, said he expects the continued growth of outsourcing and offshoring around the world in 2007.

Did the traditional union die of natural causes, or was it murdered? It may be up to historians to settle the debate. Meanwhile, pragmatism demands alternative models to protect the interests of workers. Increasingly, these are found in "social movement unionism": an approach that is flexible and broad in its definition of workers' issues, often enlisting the cooperation of business and government, rather than being tied to a specific job or employer. Here are three diverse recent examples.

● The Service Employees International Union, the nation's largest health care workers union, is endorsing ten principles of universal health care reform in concert with business owners, seniors and other stakeholders. They are pursuing legislation in six states and reaching out to big business. SEIU President Andrew Stern testified before Congress in January on the need for "fundamental change," declaring "The employer-based health system is dead."

● The Freelancers Union, based in New York, offers group rate health insurance to 14,000 of its approximately 40,000 self-employed members. The organization lowers the cost of insurance by treating its members as though they belonged to one large employer, an idea hailed by Harvard Business School as a "disruptive innovation for social change." While the group does not bargain with employers, they do offer a range of services on an a la carte basis, much like a guild or mutual aid society. These include networking and education events and advocacy for tax benefits, unemployment insurance and other components of a social safety net. They are planning on expanding to 10 more states by the end of 2007, to serve more of the nation's 20 million independent workers. "Our ultimate goal is to update the New Deal," Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union, told The New York Times last week. "It is to create a new safety net that's connected to the individual as they move from job to job."

● Jennifer Gordon, a Fordham University law professor, in a paper forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review, proposes a scheme of "transnational labor citizenship." The idea is to bring migrant workers under the wing of transnational grassroots organizing groups that uphold a "floor" of working conditions. The proposal moves beyond decades of bitter standoff: Labor unions often try to stem immigration or exclude undocumented workers, while employers take advantage of their unprotected status to offer lower wages and worse conditions for the so-called "jobs Americans won't do." While offering a sweeping vision that she says is "unfeasible" today, Gordon's paper opens with a description of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, organizing prospective migrant workers in Monterrey, Mexico in 2005. The FLOC also has an "associate members" program, which offers unorganized, undocumented workers the chance to protect their human and working rights.

A job that includes membership in a traditional union is nice work if you can get it. The rest of us need new solutions. Renegotiating a real social safety net for all is going to take time and hard work, but the way there is forward, not back.

10 Reasons To Debate User-Generated Content

10. It can be a cover for "attack PR" agencies.

9. Does it appeal inevitably to "lowest common denominator" media?

8. Does the above question really matter?

7. The readers who "strike back" may be spambots.

6. It all ends up being sampled by a U2 film clip, anyway.

5. Become too successful and Elevation Partners will stage a VC buyout.

4. Dave Sifry has projections of blogger uptake . . . but how do we judge quality?

3. It triggers lawsuits such as 20th Century Fox's against YouTube.

2. Our MySpace.com page is more fun.

1. 23 Skidoo vs. TheRealMcCain.com VJ remix.

Can't You See What Love Has Done?

U2's new song, "Window In The Skies", is a thing of beauty from a band that has been producing such for over 27 years. The video for the song, directed by Gary Koepke, is phenomenal, and stands as testament to the fact that pop culture and art can co-exist.

Watch and be moved...

Spray-On Solar-Power Cells Are True Breakthrough

Mon, 29 Jan 2007
Summary:

Recently in President Bush’s State of the Union speech, our faithful leader claimed that we are on the verge of techonological breakthrough which will lead us to live less dependant on foriegn oil, become better environmental stewards and live more sustainably.
Nanotechnology is delivering this crutch to the Hummer driving, overconsuming citizens of the world.

[Posted By Merlin]

By Stefan Lovgren
Republished from National Geographic News

Scientists have invented a plastic solar cell that can turn the sun's power into electrical energy, even on a cloudy day.

The plastic material uses nanotechnology and contains the first solar cells able to harness the sun’s invisible, infrared rays. The breakthrough has led theorists to predict that plastic solar cells could one day become five times more efficient than current solar cell technology.

Like paint, the composite can be sprayed onto other materials and used as portable electricity. A sweater coated in the material could power a cell phone or other wireless devices. A hydrogenpowered car painted with the film could potentially convert enough energy into electricity to continually
recharge the car’s battery.

The researchers envision that one day “solar farms” consisting of the plastic material could be rolledacross deserts to generate enough clean energy to supply the entire planet’s power needs.

Is a story about a protester spitting at a wounded Iraq vet a right-wing lie?

By Joshua Holland
Posted on January 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/47361/

Uh-oh. The New York Times caught this bit of lefty incivility at Saturday's protest against the occupation of Iraq …

There were a few tense moments, however, including an encounter involving Joshua Sparling, 25, who was on crutches and who said he was a corporal with the 82nd Airborne Division and lost his right leg below the knee in Ramadi, Iraq …

... as antiwar protesters passed where he and his group were standing, words were exchanged and one of the antiwar protestors spit at the ground near Mr. Sparling; he spit back. Capitol police made the antiwar protestors walk farther away from the counterprotesters. "These are not Americans as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Sparling said.

The Washington Post characterized Sparling's participation like this:

At least one veteran from the Iraq war tried to bridge the divide between the groups. Cpl. Joshua Sparling, 25, from Port Huron, Mich., who lost his right leg below the knee in an 2005 explosion in Ramadi, spoke to both groups.

What could be more damning than the image of dirty hippie protesters spitting at a vet, especially a wounded vet who was just trying to bridge "the divide" between the anti-war protesters and what turns out to have been a small group of "freepers"?

Well, it turns out that Joshua Sparling has conveniently been the victim of many outrageous acts of leftist brutality over the years. So much so, in fact, that he's become a bit of a celebrity among the wing-nuts.

Digby has the details.

Sparling was featured in rah-rah military PR efforts as far back as 2005.

Then, in December of 2005, while recovering from his wounds at Walter Reed Medical Center, he was victimized by a Christmas card -- given to him by the Red Cross -- that was wrapped in patriotic fluff on the outside, but inside bore the message: "Have a great time in the war and have a great time dieing in the wor [sic]." It was signed, suspiciously, "Miguel." Fox, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the wingnuttisphere jumped all over the story. Sparling became an instant darling of the right; he even got a personal visit from war criminal Oliver North! What's more, the incident got the Sparlings an invitation to the State of the Union address.

A white supremacist named Michael Crook later took credit for sending the card.

Then, earlier this year, another ugly incident befell our "hero," this time at an airport as Joshua and his father tried to get home for a convalescent leave from Walter Reed …

We told them we would need a wheelchair and assistance with security because he was a wounded paratrooper confined to a wheel chair. They told us that would not be a problem…

We arrived at the airport at 4:30 pm for a 5:10 flight. When we arrived there was no wheel chair, no one at the SPIRIT counter and no security. I looked for a SPIRIT employee for ten minutes. Joshua said, "Dad I'm going to miss my flight, just get me to the gate and they can help us there." Northwest gave us a wheel chair, but we still had no security. Security would not let us through because we had no boarding pass. We informed them that SPIRIT had our boarding pass and asked that he please let us go to the gate with him and he could verify it, or get someone from SPIRIT and they could give it to him. The security guard said, "You are no different than any other passenger with no boarding pass - no go."

My son started to cry uncontrollably and told the guard to go to hell. Another lady spoke up and said, "That's what you get for fighting in a war we have no business in." Madder and very emotional I asked, "Can't you remember 9-11?" She responded that was just our excuse to be in Iraq when we should not be there and we deserved whatever we got. That is when my son really lost it. Three WWII vets were coming off flights into DC, gave my son a hug, and stood up to the lady and security guard. They stayed with my son until he flew out. […]

Meanwhile, Joshua was still at security. I told him "SPIRIT would not help us, but hang tight, I'll get you out tonight, I promise." Joshua said, "never mind Dad, it's not worth it. I'm going to end it tonight. I said don't you dare do anything stupid. There are too many people who care about you and too many people have got you where you are today.

Can't you hear the violins?

Of course, it falls within the realm of possibility that this guy just happens to always be at the exact spot where some unhinged war opponent sinks to blaming the troops, therefore validating one of the right's most cherished myths. But I don't buy the story at the airport -- even if someone was thinking 'you deserved what you got,' nobody would ever say it to a wounded vet in a wheel-chair. And we know that not a single incident of hippies spitting on vets returning from Vietnam was ever reported in the 1960s and 1970s -- that urban legend apparently popped up out of the blue in the 1980s, as the right was working overtime to rehabilitate American militarism.

As Digby writes:

Some might find it odd that such terrible treatment would befall the same man --- first he gets a terrible Christmas card (Christmas!) that tells him to "go die." Then, he was spat upon by protestors --- a myth of the 1960's come to life right before our very eyes. What are the odds?

Luckily the New York Times, which obviously reported his spitting incident without even the most cursory google search on his name, is helping to perpetuate this story for a new generation. From now on, any search of "spitting on Iraq veterans" will turn up this incident to back up the inevitable future claims by wingnuts that they were mistreated by the dirty hippies of 2007. Good job NY Times. That's why they call it the paper of record.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/47361/

Half a Million Patriots Gather In D.C. To Demonstrate For Peace In the Face of Imperial Tyranny

Oh, how these souls must love their nation, to show their en masse disapproval of the illegitimate executive's imperial reign!

Video: Iraqi troops beat captives as U.S. trainers cheer

Two British TV journalists embedded with the US Army’s First Cavalry division in Baghdad witnessed Iraqi army soldiers viciously batter helpless Sunni men while Americans cheered them on. After learning they had filmed the extensive affair, the Americans threatened the journalists, held them under armed guard and attempted to seize their footage. Their video was saved, and it includes shocking images of abuse carried out by Shia Iraqi troops under the encouragement of the US soldiers assigned to train them in the field.
Main Source: Channel 4

Dems help sink real opposition to Bush's Iraq

By David Sirota
Posted on January 25, 2007, Printed on January 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/sirota/47213/

Circus contortionists never cease to amaze, because the moment you think they can't twist their bodies any further, they somehow do something even more absurd, like tying a full slip-knot with one leg. The same can be said of Washington politicians these days when it comes to Iraq: the moment you think they can't obscure their positions any further, they go right ahead and wow the crowd with ever more hideous poses.

Nowhere is this more apparent than among top congressional Democrats. As we saw earlier this week, just months after the public delivered a strong anti-war mandate to Washington, top House Democrats are demanding that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) take a "go slow" approach to Iraq - Washingtonese for a "do nothing" approach. Now yesterday, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-MBNA) led a group of Democrats on his committee in voting down a bill that would have forced President Bush to get congressional authorization for an Iraq escalation. Ignoring basic historical precedent as laid out by Rick Perlstein in Salon, Biden instead championed a toothless, non-binding resolution.

But it gets worse - much worse.

At the very same time this is happening, Senate Democrats are somehow trying to pretend they have absolutely no power to do anything and, in one high-profile case, they are basically claiming they aren't even part of the government.

As I noted before, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is actually asking the public to sign a petition demanding President Bush back off his escalation plan. The petition, of course, says nothing about the fact that Democrats, now in the majority, could themselves stop the escalation by using any number of Congress's constitutional powers. Put another way, the petition is asking the public to demand President Bush do something that the petition sponsors themselves could do.

Then, today, there is Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), the senator who - despite every effort to make us forget - voted for the war and continues to this day to oppose efforts to end the war and bring our troops home. The New York Times reports that she said offered up the classic pass-the-buck self-fulfilling prophecy that "we’re not likely to stop this escalation." Still, she said, congressional lawmakers like her "are going to do everything we can to send a message to our government and the Iraqi government that they had better change."

Let's repeat that to comprehend it's true absurdity: U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, who serves as a senior member of the majority party that controls both Houses of our government's Congress, said that all she can do is "send a message to our government" that "they had better change."

This is triangulation on a bad acid trip. Whereas old-style Bill Clinton triangulation meant sucking face with Republicans and Big Money interests in order to isolate Democrats, the new strung out, acid trip-style triangulation by Hillary Clinton means Senators actually pretending that they, as majority party lawmakers, aren't really part of "our government." Seriously - is she planning on having her staff "send a message to our government" in a self-addressed stamped envelope? I mean, I understand that she's very, very busy now running for president, and can't be bothered with details like, oh, massive U.S. troop casualties in a war she pushed. But did this woman and her professional political entourage forget that about 3 months ago, she asked New York voters to re-elect her to serve as a U.S. Senator in "our government" rather than as some innocent bystander sending "messages" to something she's supposedly not a part of?

All of this is happening as the vast majority of Americans and, courageous lawmakers like Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) and state legislators from all over the country are saying it's time for Congress to use something more than polite senatorial "non-binding" requests to stop a war that is killing more and more people, further destabilizing and already unstable region, and severely damaging U.S. national security.

It begs questions I asked a few days ago: in the face of such inaction, distortion and dishonesty, isn't it time we finally face up to the fact that there is a powerful faction of Democrats on Capitol Hill who support the Iraq War, support the escalation and support President Bush? And further, because Democrats now have real power in the majority, isn't it time that the progressive movement spend some real resources not just chasing cheap media-grabbing headlines by going after our partisan foes like John McCain (R-AZ), but also doing the less glamorous, more serious, might-get-you-kicked-off-the-D.C.-Christmas-party-list work of taking on those in the Democratic Party who clearly are helping President Bush continue this war?

Is this too much to ask? My pessimistic side says it might be - there remains serious resistance within quarters of the progressive movement to actually going after Democrats, no matter how many troops die, no matter how much those specific Democrats may undermine their own party, no matter how much these specific Democrats lay waste to the progressive agenda. That resistance seems to have as much to do with cocktail party chumminess as it does with the cold, hard cash that comes with political consulting fees, campaign jobs, and insider careeerism.

Then again, we are in historically uncharted waters. The convergence of an unpopular war and new political technologies that are giving citizens back more of their voice really provides a chance to break into some truly new politics (and I'm not referring to the hackneyed "post-partisanism" that the media now reflexively ascribes to any new politician that hasn't been in D.C. for the last quarter century and yet who, upon being elected to federal office, instantly knows to utter only nebulous, substance-free platitudes). There is a huge amount of organizing going on right now, whether through the Progressive States Network's 50-State Anti-Escalation Campaign, this Saturday's march on Washington or through scores of other efforts. We can make a difference, I am sure of it - but only if we are willing to take on our opponents - ALL of them.

David Sirota is a veteran political strategist and author of Hostile Takeover, a New York Times bestseller about the corruption of both political parties.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/sirota/47213/