Iraqi Prez Talabani taken ill in Baghdad and flown to Jordan for tests …
An exhausted Iraqi President Jalal Talabani fell ill on Sunday at the end of another day of mayhem in strife-torn Baghdad that saw at least 40 people die in a suicide attack. The 74-year-old president flew to Jordan from the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah for medical tests after he was overcome by the unrelenting pressure of recent work, his office said.
We interrupt this chronicle of the country’s destruction …
Sam Marshall.
Okay, it seems we need more updates on why Dick Cheney is too dangerously incompetent to have in any position of authority, let alone the vice presidency. You’ll see for instance that this morning Cheney showed up in Islamabad warning President Musharraf that al Qaeda is “regrouping” along the Pakistani border. Musharraf must be a little confused since, didn’t we sign off on the armistice his government signed with the jihadists and their protectors just a few months ago?
More to the point, last week Cheney claimed that Nancy Pelosi’s position on Iraq would validate al Qaeda since al Qaeda’s goal in Iraq is to show that our will can be broken. Reed Hundt chimed in and pointed out that it’s far more likely that al Qaeda’s goal is to bait us into ridiculous and unwinnable wars that will sap our military strength and financial power.
Now, as it happens, in response to Reed’s post, commenter Tom Hilton flagged this passage from the article James Fallows wrote last year in which he wrote …
Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.
Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing Americaâs ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East.
In other words, the actual intelligence we have about what al Qaeda wants — not the usual stuff Dick Cheney makes up or gets from Ahmed Chalabi or his butler or whoever — suggests we’re playing right into their hands.
How many American deaths is this goof responsible for? And who in this country has done more to advance the al Qaeda agenda and make the US more vulnerable to attack?
Today’s Must Read: Cheney plays Good Cop, Bad Cop with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The bad cop? The Democratic Congress.
New site debuting: OpenCongress. All the info behind each bill in Congress.
CNN: One of the Libby trial jurors has been exposed to case information outside of the trial. Judge summons parties to the court.
CNN: Iraqi Prez Talabani placed in intensive care in Amman.
Rothenberg to Dems: There’s no need to fear casting Dem opposition to Iraq War as partisan.
“The reason our mission in Iraq has proven to be so disastrous and corrupt is very simple — the advocates and architects of that war are completely corrupt, inept, and deceitful.” The words are Glenn Greenwald’s. And though many others have said the same thing in slightly different words, it bears repeating again and again. The corruption and ineptitude aren’t unfortunate add-ons to the effort. They’re at the heart of it. It’s a stain like original sin. And the same goes for the democratizing element of the mission. Even among critics of the war, it’s often accepted as granted that a key aim of this effort was democratization — only that it was botched, like so much else, or that the aim of democracy, in a crunch, plays second fiddle to other priorities. Not true. The key architects of the policy don’t believe in democracy or the rule of law. The whole invasion was based on contrary principles. And the aim can’t be achieved because those anti-democratic principles are written into the DNA of the occupation, even as secondary figures have and continue to labor to build democracy in the country.