(updated below - Update II)

It is now conclusively clear that President Bush lied last week, several days before the election, when he vowed definitively to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would remain as Defense Secretary for the next two years. At the time he made that statement, he was deep into the process of replacing Rumsfeld, if not already finished, and the President knew that the statement he made about Rumsfeld was false at the time he made it. That is the definition of "lying."

There can be no reasonable dispute about this, since the President at his Press Conference not only admitted lying when he told the reporters that Rumsfeld would stay, but he even went on to explain his reasons for lying ("the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer"). The decision was clearly a fait accompli before the election, as the President himself said: "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."

The President's admission of lying was so glaring that even Byron York immediately described it as such (as did other conservatives such as James Joyner). So what are the consequences, the implications, the fallout? So far, virtually nothing, and the behavior of The Washington Post shows why that is the case:

As I noted in the post I wrote two days ago about the President's Rumsfeld lie, The Washington Post article which reported on the Press Conference, written by Michael Fletcher and Peter Baker, detailed the Rumsfeld lie and even described what the President did with unusual candor, i.e., that the President "appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters." It's so unusual to see a major newspaper accurately report on the President's dishonesty that I noticed and praised the Post's candor ("It's encouraging (although it should be commonplace) that the Washington Post is calling this what it is"). At the time, as I quoted in my post, this is what the Post article reported about the President's Rumsfeld explanation:

At his news conference, Bush called the election results a "thumping" but vowed to maintain his policy of refusing to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq "before the job is done." Bush indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections, but he said he had not held a "final conversation" with the defense chief or talked to Gates at the time he told reporters in response to a question last week that Rumsfeld would be staying on.

Asked about that comment, Bush said he made it because "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign," Bush said. He appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters, saying, "And so the only way to answer that question and to get you onto another question was to give you that answer."

He added later, "Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.

But at some point, the Post fundamentally changed this article (without leaving any indication that it did so). Now, in that same Post article, the passage I quoted about the President's having acknowledged that he "misled reporters" is gone entirely -- just disappeared, deleted with no trace -- and instead one finds only this:

He said that he had begun to contemplate Rumsfeld's exit before the election -- even while he was publicly vowing that he would keep the defense secretary through the end of his term and insisting that polls forecasting Republican defeat were wrong. "I thought we were going to do fine yesterday," Bush insisted. "Shows what I know." But "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."

At some point, the Post changed what was the accurate reporting -- that Bush expressly acknowledged that he "misled" reporters because he had "indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections" -- by claiming in the new version that he merely "contemplated" Rumsfeld's exit before the election. Worse, the Post deleted entirely the accurate statement that the President "appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters." (If one does a search of the Post for the deleted paragraphs, the article will still come up in the Post's search engine, but the entire passage is nowhere to be found in the article).

Ironically, the explanation for why this happened may be found in today's Howard Kurtz column, the whole point of which is to explore the unbelievably stupid question of whether Bush's lie about Rumsfeld was "on par with [meaning: as bad as] President Bill Clinton's hair-splitting defense in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that 'it all depends on what the definition of is is'"? In other words, was Bush's pre-election "untruth" about management of the Iraq war as bad as Clinton's lie about sex with Monica? In the course of pondering that idiocy (even quoting "experts" comparing the two lies), Kurtz says this:

Did the president of the United States make a rare admission on national television that he had told an untruth?

Or had he merely engaged in a dodge of the sort that is common in politics?

Journalists by nature shy from pinning the "liar" label on any political leader, but President Bush's acknowledgments that he had not been forthcoming about his plans to dump Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have kicked up a fuss at the White House and sparked a debate about the limits of presidential evasion.

As Kurtz's own column illustrates, journalists most certainly do not "shy away from pinning the 'liar' label on any political leader." All of the wise and brave pundits and other Beltway luminaries -- one after the next -- fell all over themselves calling Bill Clinton a "liar" continuously because he claimed not to have had sex with Monica Lewinksy. In that instance, they were more than happy to use the word "liar" as clearly and freely as can be imagined.

Journalists "shy away" from pinning the "liar label" not -- as Kurtz claims -- "on any political leader," but on the specific political leaders who currently occupy the White House. And for proof of that, Kurtz need look no further than his own newspaper, which appears to have engaged in some sort of Stalinist-like purging of history by zapping out of existence the Post's accurate detailing of the President's Press Conference admission of lying.

So the President got caught lying to the American people, several days before an election, about a matter of unquestionable importance -- namely, who will manage our war in Iraq and, more broadly, will the President change how the war is being managed? And not even the President claims there was some national security "justification" for lying. It was a pure political calculus: "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign."

(And incidentally, this is not the first time Bush lied this way; last May, he assured reporters that Treasury Secretary John Snow was not leaving and specifically stated that Snow "has not talked to me about resignation," even though Snow had already told the President he was leaving and the decision to replace Snow had already been made and finalized). All Howie Kurtz can do is wonder whether this was as "on par with" the Greatest Evil Ever -- Bill Clinton's lie about Monica Lewinsky.

Why did The Washington Post delete the passage in its own article detailing how the President misled reporters when he answered their questions about Rumsfeld? Presidents simply do not have the right to lie to Americans about important matters of public concern, particularly before a major election. If we don't embrace and enforce that standard, what standard exists? And if newspapers like the Post are too afraid to detail dishonest statements that come from our highest political officials -- to the point where they publish such revelations only to then surreptitiously delete them -- what possible purpose do journalists serve?

UPDATE: It seems that some people (including certain bloggers) are missing the point of this post completely. The crux of the post is not about Bush's lie regarding Rumsfeld, but instead, is about how The Washington Post reported this lie, and then un-reported it. Some of the confusion may be my fault (although the post title, by itself, seems to make that sufficiently clear), but this comment from sysprog is highly clarifying and, in its own right, worth reading.

UPDATE II: Even Newt Gingrich recognizes that the President essentially acknowledged at his Press Conference that he lied about Rumsfeld, and Gingrich objects:

"We need candor, we need directness," said Gingrich, a potential 2008 presidential candidate."We need to understand the threats we faced with are so frightening and so real, the danger that we'll lose two to three American cities so great, that we cannot play games with each other, cannot manipulate each other, we have to have an open and honest dialogue, and I found yesterday's staments at the press conference frankly very disturbing."

He condemned Bush's admission that in making last week's statement about Rumsfeld, he had known he was being misleading.

"It's inappropriate to cleverly come out the day after an election to do something we were told before the election would not be done," Gingrich said. "I think the timing was exactly backwards and I hope the President will rethink how he engages the American people and how he communicates with candor."

Gingrich has all kinds of politically self-interested motives for trying to distance himself this way from this increasingly and unprecedentedly despised President, but he is right about what the President did. If Byron York, James Joyner and Newt Gingrich can all recognize and say that the President admitted to lying at his Press Conference, why did The Washington Post delete that passage and deprive its readers of that knowledge?

At 4:10 p.m. EDT today (December 13, 2006) Neil Cavuto interrupted his "business news" show with this:

Alright. I just want to bring in this alert that's come into our newsroom right now. U.S. Senator Tim Johnson, he's a Democrat of South Dakota, has, we're getting reports that he had a stroke at his office today and is being hospitalized. That's all we know at this point. Nor do we know the 59 year old's condition. This happened just today.

Keep in mind that the new senate takes over on January 4 and it's right now 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 2 Independents, but ostensibly it will be a Democratic body.

We don't know how the fallout from all of this or, again, the severity of Senator Johnson's condition. We'll keep you posted.

At 4:14 p.m. EDT Fox aired the FOX NEWS ALERT graphic and Cavuto said:

Alright. We are getting some updates now that South Dakota Senator Jim Johnson, a Democrat, has checked out at a hospital -- was in a hospital -- after suffering a possible stroke. That's all we know at this point.

This always takes on some added urgency with the new senate taking over in ah, January 4. That will be a senate as close to evenly divided as you can get, 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, 2 Independents, who will essentially vote as Democrats, thereby the Democratic body. But keep in mind that if this situation with the senator were to worsen, the governor of South Dakota is a Republican, Michael Rounds and could, in an extreme case, appoint someone of his choosing within his party so this could even be a succession issue in the senate.

But, for now, let's not ponder that, more the senator's own health which we hope is good. He has suffered an apparent stroke. He is being checked out as we speak.

Fox aired another FOX NEWS ALERT at 4:23 p.m. EDT and Cavuto continued:

Alright. Just before the new senate is to take hold one of its key members has apparently had a stroke. That's the indications [sic] we're getting from the Associated Press that Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat of South Dakota, was taken to a George Washington University Hospital suffering from a possible stroke. That is all we know.

You know that as close as the senate, the new senate is, with 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 2 Independents who ostensibly will be voting along the Democratic side, that this is close as a tick to anything, anything that hints that that could possibly be changed, [inaudible] the health condition of any one of 100 members gets overly scrutinized, perhaps here as well.

Um, again, keep in mind as well that the Governor of South Dakota is a Republican, Michael Round. Should the senator's condition worsen, ah it will be up to the Governor to find a replacement. We're not nearly at that stage. I only raise the issue because this senate is that close and these things are that important. Reaction now from former congressman Tom DeLay. Congressman, what do you make of this?

(Cavuto's emphasis.)

DeLay was on to do a segment about how Hillary Clinton will definitely run for president in 2008, but even he wasn't prepared to go as far as Cavuto:

Well, Neil, let's, let's make sure that Senator Johnson is in trouble. I mean, this is a pretty mean town and you're right; I am not saying you're being mean. Ah, let's just keep him in our prayers and hope that he's going to be alright.

At 4:44 p.m. EDT, Cavuto asked guest Jon Kyl (R-AZ) (on to bash Ben Nelson (R-FL) for meeting with Syria's President, Bashar Al-Assad) whether he could "add anything or any insights," and, like DeLay, Kyl wasn't ready to declare Johnson incapacitated or dead quite yet:

I certainly can't add anything except my prayers for Tim. Tim and I served together in the House. We've been together in the Senate now for a decade and I certainly hope he's alright and I'll be saying a prayer for him.

"There is no question that the ethics process in the last couple of years has lost the confidence of the American people," Pelosi told a news conference. "I'm hopeful that it's possible that we can have an outside entity that will restore that confidence."

Congress has been hit by a series of ethical black eyes, including the page scandal, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, and the bribery scandal that sent former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham to prison.

The House ethics committee has been largely inactive throughout. It concluded last week that Republican lawmakers and aides failed for a decade to protect male pages from sexual come-ons by former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., but that no rules were broken and no one should be punished.

Establishment of a permanent outside enforcement entity has been a priority of ethics reformers, but such proposals have failed to become law in the past. In March, the Senate voted 67-30 to reject creation of an Office of Public Integrity to oversee ethics violations by lawmakers.

Among the no votes were incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who will head the Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over ethics and lobbying.

Feinstein is concerned that an outside panel could be abused by people aiming to publicize grudges, spokesman Howard Gantman said. She will not include the proposal in ethics legislation she is introducing next month but is considering holding a hearing on such ideas.

Members of the Senate ethics committee have objected to an outside panel, saying they could investigate wrongdoing themselves. Some lawmakers also believe the Constitution gives members of Congress the responsibility to police themselves, not give the job to outsiders.

Some senators plan to revive the public integrity office idea next year, including Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrats Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

Democrats have complained about a "Republican culture of corruption," a theme of November's elections in which they wrested control of Congress from the GOP. They promised to vigorously pursue an ethics overhaul; Pelosi pledged to enact lobbying changes as part of her agenda for Congress' first 100 legislative hours.

Proposals include banning lobbyist-paid meals and gifts and privately funded travel, forcing lobbyists to disclose more of their activities and requiring lawmakers and senior staff to wait two years instead of one to lobby their former colleagues after leaving Capitol Hill.

Democrats also want to make lawmakers disclose authorship of "earmarks," the home state spending projects often slipped into bills with little disclosure. Lawmakers would have to disclose any post-employment job negotiations.

Bills that would put in place some of these changes passed the House and Senate this year, but negotiators could not reach agreement on final legislation. The efforts were criticized as too weak by watchdog groups.

Fred Wertheimer, president of the ethics watchdog group Democracy 21, welcomed Pelosi's proposal. "Unless we replace the current failed enforcement process with a new one, we face the same problem of ethics rules being ignored that we've seen in the past," he said.

For at least one of Pelosi's House Democrats, her plan did not go far enough.

"I would conclude that the study process is unnecessary," said Rep. Mike Castle, D-Del., contending an outside enforcement entity should be offered as part of Pelosi's first 100 hours. "My goal is to make this ethics process as strong as possible, and that doesn't include studies - it only includes action."

We done our civil duty, paid our biennial dues, and now we can go home and watch the A-team beat the B-team on our HDTV. Spectator sports and spectator politics. An elephant never forgets. Pin the tail on the donkey!

And what's the result? They kick out that nasty popinjay Rumsfeld. The 76-year-old sycophant-warmonger takes his millions and jockeys his Hummer into a Montana sunset. He's replaced by a younger, less abrasive, more managerial, Bush-41-minted Robert Gates.

Boys and Girls, let's hear it for Buffalo Bob and Clarabelle! They got to us in our Frosty Flakes years, and they've kept the game going ever since.


Diogenes and Zeno's Paradoxes

Actually, I did not vote.

I didn't vote not because I wanted to be in the majority of non-voters (!), but because of two ancient Greeks: Diogenes of Sinope and Zeno of Elea.

Diogenes lived in the world's first democracy in Athens. He saw it rise, expand into the imperial Delian League, and he saw it fall. (Actually, by the time he arrived on the scene, after the good citizens of Athens had poisoned Socrates, it was much more a matter of falling.)

Diogenes hated pretense. He was a "street person" with attitude-and brains. He liked dogs better than people. (Hence his philosophy of "cynicism," from the Greek kyon, for "dog.") Dogs don't bullshit. Dogs make lousy politicians.

There are many stories about Diogenes' outrageousness. Or, maybe he was just clear-headed. (Asked in public how a man might avoid the temptations of the flesh, he masturbated then and there. "Would that I could as easily assuage my hunger by rubbing my belly," he said.)

One day, Alexander the Great shows up in Athens. (Odd that we still call this barbarian "the Great." He was off to conquer the splendid civilization of his day-Darius's Persia, a prosperous empire that was more like a federation of equal sovereigns, living in peace with its neighbors.) Diogenes is living in an old tub at the time, and Alexander, who has heard about him from his teacher Aristotle, out of respect for philosophy, pays him a visit.

Alexander says something like this: "Dude, I'm bad ... I'm the most powerful bastard in the whole wide world. Emperors piss in their Depends when they hear my name. I can make and break people like clay puppets. But just because Uncle Ari says you're a notable dude, I'm going to grant you whatever you wish."

Diogenes looks up from the old tub and he sees the sun glinting off the top of Alexander's helmet. Alex casts a wide, long shadow and Dogman feels a chill in it. "Don't stand between the sun and me," he replies.

And that's pretty much how I feel about the Republicrats now. I want what they can't or won't give me-the world's best antiseptic. Sunshine. Warmth. And truth.

The second reason I didn't vote has to do with Zeno's paradoxes and the Iraq Study Group.

Zeno preceded Dogman by about a hundred years. That was during the heyday of Athenian democracy when "citizens" got to vote directly on shards and there was a shard trail, if you will. Of course, there were more than a few paradoxes in this "democracy," including the fact that women didn't vote and the class depended on the labor of slaves.

Zeno was one of those philosophes who saw the limitations of human thought and logic.
Eight of his "paradoxes" are extant. My favorites go something like this: A body in motion is actually a body at rest at any particular moment. (It's only in the past 100 years or so, since Kodack, that the average person can actually see what Zeno was getting at. Think of stop-action photography capturing the moment Jack Ruby's bullet enters Lee Harvey Oswald's gut. In the next few moments, everything will change. No trial for Oswald, no leaks. Kaput. Finished business. A moment frozen in the amber of time. Like this one, say-like every moment, containing all possibilities within it.)

A related paradox having to do with time tells us everything we need to know about the Iraq Study Group's 79 "recommendations." One of those recommendations is, basically, to cut the number of U.S. troops in half, and train the Iraqis to take up the slack. This is how we're supposed to get to a point where the Iraqis will be able to sustain a democratic society which will join us in our Global War on Terror.

But Zeno tells us it'll never work. If you keep moving halfway to your goal, you never get there.

It's like one of those other "recommendations." Start up the Peace Process again, the one between Israel and Palestine.

Hello? Haven't we been down this road a hundred times already? There was Oslo, Camp David, even a Bush 43 "roadmap." Lots of feints and jabs and jaunts and taunts in the past 60 years, but what "Peace Process"? Did Tolstoy write a book called "War and Peace Process"?

There is either peace or no peace-i.e., war or cold war or preparations for war. We have lived with war, cold war or preparations for war for about 100 years now and the Iraq Study Group will not get us out of this imbroglio.

Managers love crises-makes them feel important. This Group of Ten is providing us a quarterly report about managing the crisis in our foreign relations. They emphasize "moving forward" because they dare not look back at how we got into this mess. Call it the No Blame Game. But if we don't understand how we got here-the lies and complicity of Republicrats-how can we "move forward" without committing the same crimes? The Iraq Study Group's report is a recipe for recidivism.

The Study Group earnestly requests that their recommendations not be "cherry-picked"; i.e., take all 79 as a whole. And, ah, who exactly elected these seers to tell us how to run the Superpower's foreign policy?

And who are these seers? The Bush family's consiglieri, Jim Baker, the guy who strong-armed the Supreme Court into appointing Bush Jr. president in 2000. Then there's co-chair Lee Hamilton, who also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission hearings, behind closed doors, which basically whitewashed the appointed president's responsibility for 9/11.

There's Vernon Jordan and Leon Panetta, Clinton administration operatives, whose presence ensures that criticism will be deflected from the nearly full-fledged Democratic support for this now "Long War," (soon to metamorphose into the "The Interminable War.").

There's Sandra Day O'Connor, Madam Justice, who, questioned by Margaret Warner on PBS about the "recommendation" that the U.S. engage in talks with Iran, responded: We spoke to Stalin during World War II and he was our enemy, wasn't he? (Ms. Warner may have been overly polite in not pointing out that Stalin was one of our two principal allies in that revisionized conflagration.)

So, working in secret, these suspect characters present the nation with their fait acompli, expecting our plaudits and full compliance.

Just as surely as they have removed the citizenry from the process of their deliberations, they have attempted to remove from the citizenry the process of review and oversight-the real work of democracy.

A clever ploy which Zeno would have foreseen in the timing. Wind the reel back nine months and you've got a very worried Republicratic elite kavetching to itself: "Holy Shit! this war is going bad. We've got an idiot in the White House, scary Cheney behind him, and a lot of bloody hands in the House and Senate. And the People are waking up. They're reading the Internet and they're getting ideas."

So, a Baker type comes along and he says, "Let's move forward. Yeah, there's going to be an election in about 8 months. We're gonna send out the Cheerleader to do his shtick, and maybe our puppets Maliki and Talabani will hold things together in Iraq long enough to fool the schlimazels again. But, if we don't succeed, if our Democrat allies actually move forward, we'll boot out Rummy and put everything on hold. We tell the schlimazels we need another month for the Iraq Study Group's report, and then we come out with 79 impossible recommendations to be take whole-cloth. More confusion. Instead of clear-cut proposals that everyone can agree on, we plow the debating ground for the 2008 election. Obama? Hillary? McCain? It doesn't matter. So long as the schlimazels never lose faith in the process!"

Hannah Arendt put it this way: "What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part. Repetition, somewhat over-rated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time."

The show must go on.


What now?

Eighteen months ago, I wrote an article called "25 Reasons to Impeach George W. Bush." It appeared at CounterPunch and a few other sites around the world. It was posted at Representative John Conyers' website.

Eighteen months ago was the time to push for impeachment, the time for Dems to show backbone--if they've ever had any--, to make a clean break from the Republicrats.

It's not going to happen now. The Dems will concentrate on 08--pushing H.C. and Obama, diverting us with the sideshow until it becomes the main show.

I heard Representative Cynthia McKinney, Ray McGovern and Chris Hedges speak a few nights ago at a World Can't Wait meeting. I'd never heard any of them speak in person before and they and the other speakers were impressive.

I voted for McKinney in Georgia two years ago. (Yeah, I'll actually vote if I think there's a real choice. Most of the time, there isn't.)

World Can't Wait is pushing for impeachment now. I think it's a waste of time, sapping the energy of the Left.

We need new paradigms.

Soon after the Cold War ended, that was the catchphrase of the day. Even Gorbachev got in on it. New paradigms.

Then King George Bush 41 came along and said, To hell with New Paradigms! What we need is a New World Order.

I respect McKinney's call-it-like-it-is, no-holds-barred, feisty style. We don't live in an age of niceties-not when we're blowing up children and wreaking havoc for the sake of Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex.

I respect Ray McGovern, who was 27 years with the C.I.A., and, basically, a year or so ago, had the guts to tell Rumsfeld he was full of shit, we weren't winning in Iraq and weren't going to win in spite of Rumsfeld's obscurantism. We need to listen to insiders like Ray McGovern and Paul Craig Roberts, who have seen the light and made their 180's. They write for some of the best sites on the Internet. They write lucidly, and they've got the creds.

That said, let's understand: we'll never get anywhere on the Left if we don't start thinking out of the box.

Gabriel Kolko, whom CounterPunch's editors characterize as the best historian on wars in the 20th century, posted a recent article in which he claims, "We can rule out the Left, that artifact of past history. Socialism ceased being a real option long ago, perhaps as early as 1914 ... I need not say more than that it is no longer a threat to anybody." Perhaps Mr. Kolko has been so focused on wars in the 20th century, he has missed the narrative line of socialist development in Latin America. Perhaps he has missed the story in France where Segolene Royal is set to become the next Prime Minister, and in Spain, where President Zapatero pulled Spanish troops from the Bush-Blair fiasco nearly three years ago. Perhaps he missed Prodi's success in Italy-and much more.

This is not the time to write the Left's epitaph, but it's certainly time for some new thinking.

The Right are always going to outspend us. Since the Supreme Court declared (in Buckley v. Valeo), the equivalence of money and free speech, the Right have been buying the biggest megaphones and calling it democracy! Is this what the Bill of Rights means by freedom of speech? It appears that some of us have a hell of a lot more of it than others.

The media consolidation of the 90's-let's thank Michael Powell, Colin's boy for overseeing that-made it still harder for the Left to be heard. The Right can outspend the Left ten bucks to one-and these are roadblocks we can't get through.

We can't get through, but we can go around. We go around by out-witting, out-thinking, out-imagining the Right. They have their billion-dollar think tanks, and we have people who can think for themselves and meet around the hearth of the Internet.

Old strategies must be re-examined. Voting in meaningless elections is intolerable. Rubber-stamping rubber-duck candidates lends credence to a system that is losing credence daily. (Kolko writes in that same article: "The system has become increasingly vulnerable ... since about 1990, and the formal demise of 'communism.'")

Communism, that kind of centralized, authoritarian planning may be dead, but the Left and Socialism are not. Communism is a closed system with orders originating from the top, carried out by minions upon a disenfranchised populace. In its basic structure it's like Fascism, which accounts for much of the confusion in the minds of Sandra Day O'Connor and "patriotic" Americans. The U.S. has had Fascistic elements from its inception. How else account for the Alien and Sedition Laws, the genocide against Native Americans, slavery, etc.? How else account for a war to seize the resources of the Middle East for the sake of Big Oil's profits and our Defense establishment?

Socialism depends on a feedback loop. It has to be decentralized to work right. Information is fluid, transforming and transformative.

A major problem with the Left today is that it doesn't seem to know who or what it is.
Hence, it gets lost in the Republicratic maze.

In that maze, someone suggests a demonstration-"make a lot of noise." After I attended the 200,000-strong anti-war demonstration in D.C. in September, '05, I asked a Leftist acquaintance, "What now?" He shrugged. So, essentially, did everybody else. Then half of them went out to vote for Republicrats.

The Republicrats have a stranglehold on this system and we're not going to change anything unless we hit them where it hurts-in their wallets.

We can make all the noise we want, demonstrate and clamor for impeachment, but we'll never change anything because Karl Rove and the "grown-ups" are already planning the next show-stopper for some eight months or more down the road. They understand what Zeno understood: all forward movement consists of a series of frozen moments, any one of which they can "spin" off in totally new directions.

The American Left needs to re-think its options. I don't think we use boycotts nearly enough. O'Reilley, Limbaugh, Hannity say something stupid on their shows. Make a list of their sponsors. Disseminate that list. Refuse to buy those products.

We need to reach out to Leftist parties and organizations in other countries. They need our support and we need theirs. The Canadian health care system, one of the best examples of "socialized medicine" in the world, is under assault by the privatization junkies. That affects all of us. We need to think out of our box, beyond our borders. The French award working mothers 3 years paid maternity leave and the guarantee of a job to return to. The U.S. awards unpaid leave of 12 weeks. (But we allow the invidious Rupert Murdoch to post chicken heads on French ministers when they prudently warn us against military adventurism in Iraq! Did any Republicrat call down Murdoch for his blatant warmongering propaganda?) Mexico's Lopez Obrador refuses to cede ground to an election swindle by Felipe Calderon. That's our struggle, too.

How much can we sacrifice? Live in a tub like Diogenes for the sake of our principles, to make a point? Unlikely.

Can we burn up our credit cards, live more simply, create our own creative communities, turn our backs upon this gluttonous, zero-sum game culture? Why not?

Once I lived in a middle-class neighborhood of weekend lawn-cutters. Every weekend, my neighbors were out there on their 1,000-2,000-dollar tractor mowers, trimming their mowing their lawns. "Couldn't we all just chip in and buy one mower for the block?" I once asked and got lockjawed responses.

Hit'em where it hurts. Educate people about money. We need to re-birth the counter-culture and re-establish alternative communities. We need to re-imagine the Arts. (Didn't they used to be about people? We've always had a fair bit of fantasy-art in America, especially in our cinema. But wasn't there once more than the slick and the sick?)

Frankly, in the long run, we need to call a Constitutional Convention. A Republicrat candidate in Maryland, a law professor-vanity candidate for Governor, who just wanted to show his pretty face and exude professorial style, told me that the Constitution was "deeply flawed," but, nevertheless, we had to support it.

And I answered, the Bill of Rights, yes, and some of the amendments which advance human rights, yes, but must I really support the Electoral College and a bi-cameral system that awards citizens in Wyoming some 70 times the voting power in the Senate as citizens in California? Can we not use referenda, as they do in other countries, as is built into the new Venezuelan constitution, to re-call an unpopular president, one who has violated his oath of office repeatedly, as has Dictator/Decider George 43? Isn't a document that defines slaves as 3/5 human-something of which to be ashamed?

We need to think in new directions, out-think, out-imagine these devious Republicrats.

Fabian and fabulist George Bernard Shaw could see the world in a grain of sand. "Nothing can save society," he wrote, "except the clear head and the wide purpose." And, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Gary Corseri has taught in public schools and prisons in the U.S., and at US and Japanese universities. His work has appeared at ThomasPaine'sCorner, DissidentVoice, Sky, Village Voice, The New York Times, Redbook magazine, City Lights Review, Palestine Chronicle, TeleSurtv.net, Common Dreams, Prison Planet, WorldProutAssembly, Atlanta-PBS, etc. His books include: Manifestations (edited); Holy Grail, Holy Grail; and A Fine Excess. He can be contacted at: corseri@verizon.net.

This action made it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.

Boyle, who drafted the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 that was enacted by Congress, says destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."

Calls for comment to two FBI press offices in Washington, D.C., on this charge were not returned. Members of the Senate have been pressing the FBI for additional information on its investigation, thought to be ongoing.

If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored U.S. government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and U.S. laws, Boyle said.

"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were U.S. government-related scientists involved in a criminal U.S. government biowarfare program," Boyle said.

The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.

Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.

In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.

Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th al-Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."

A self-confessed al-Qaeda operative, Moussaoui was detained on immigration three weeks before 9/11 when a Minnesota flight school reported he was acting suspiciously.

Boyle asked if Bowman received an FBI award in Dec., 2002, for "exceptional performance" because of his capacity "to forestall investigations, because of where they may lead?" He goes on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?"

Because of its "bogus investigation," Boyle says, "the greatest political crime in the history of the United States of America since its founding on 4 July, 1776---the anthrax attacks on Congress, which served not only to deliver a terrorist threat on its members, but actually to close it down for a period---may remain officially unresolved forever."

"Could it truly be coincidental, " he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks --- Senators Daschle and Leahy---were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act∑an Act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to U.S. citizens and institutions?"

Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. An anthrax-laced letter to Leahy turned up in a search of Capitol Hill mail in the week of October 15, 2003. The letters sent to Leahy and Daschle were both postmarked from a Trenton, N.J.-area post office.

During its probe of the anthrax attack, the Justice Department identified Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a biological defense scientist and one-time government employee, as "a person of interest." Dr. Hatfill, a medical doctor, took a post in 1997 at Ft. Detrick but left to work the next year for a private firm that helps the government create defenses against germ weapons. Dr. Hatfill repeatedly denied any role in the anthrax attacks and said he knows nothing about anthrax production, The New York Times reported.

Boyle's views are contained in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism", published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, Ga. His previously published titles include, "Foundations of World Order," "The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence," and "Destroying World Order." Dr. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.

In a forward to the book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said the government's "growing bioterror programs (described by Professor Boyle) represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."

A harsh critic of Pentagon biowarfare activities, Boyle points out in inflation-adjusted dollars the U.S. spends more on them today than it did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in World War II. He has accused the Bush administration of diverting the bio-tech industry "towards biowarfare purposes" and of making corrupting payoffs to Academia to turn university scientists to the pursuit of biowarfare work.

Taking up Hamdan's lawsuit, the high court's justices said President Bush had overstepped his power when he created a system of military tribunals for foreign-born alleged terrorists.

In response, Congress passed a law authorizing military tribunals. In addition, it moved to deny access to the courts to "aliens" accused by the president of being terrorists or "unlawful combatants."

Critics in the Senate said the provision was written so broadly that it took away legal immigrants' right of habeas corpus. This right allows people who are arrested and imprisoned to go before a judge and plead for freedom.

In Wednesday's ruling, Robertson said lawmakers had the legal power to close the courts to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

"Congress unquestionably has the power to establish and define the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts," he wrote in a 22-page opinion. Until some recent decisions, he said, it had always been understood that "an alien captured abroad and detained outside the United States" did not have a right to sue in a federal court.

Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay is, technically, sovereign territory of Cuba, Robertson noted.

However, the Constitution protects the right of habeas corpus for people living in the United States, the judge said.

Meanwhile, the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday he would subpoena Bush administration officials if they refuse requests for documents and testimony, including two long-sought memos detailing its detention and treatment of terror suspects overseas.

One is a presidential order signed by Bush authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to set up secret prisons outside the United States to house terrorism suspects. The other is a 2002 Justice Department memorandum outlining "aggressive interrogation techniques" that could be used against terror suspects.

"I expect to get the answers. If I don't ... then I really think we should subpoena," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Congress, but they've thereby virtually inherited from the sovereign US electorate the task of somehow getting the United States out of its deepening Middle East quagmire - and, it is hoped, without it suffering a concomitant geopolitical insolvency, at a critical juncture in modern history when ever more potent and opportunistic challengers to US global power and dominance are rising in the East and when their proxies are (not coincidentally) rising across the Middle East.

The majority of the US electorate think the Democrats lack a real plan, and they do lack one. Their hope to formulate one that is workable based on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) Report is likely to turn out to be a vain expectation at best or the realization of a cruel political betrayal at worst.

The Democrats need, at a minimum, a plan that simultaneously forces Bush to change course, to bend to their will by getting the US out of Iraq soon, insulates them from blame for whatever happens in Iraq afterward while making that blame stick to Bush, and credits them with any US "win" that may somehow result in Iraq and the region after the withdrawal of forces. That is far more than a tall order, and the ISG is not much political help in this regard to the Democrats.

After the November congressional elections, Bush initially appeared to have finally come down off his single-minded, supercilious fantasies and ideological denial to begin to face the harsh reality of massive US over-reach in Iraq. His showing defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld the door and nominating Robert Gates to take his place as Pentagon chief fed the image of a president humbled and willing to listen to new ideas.

However, that facade is slipping as Bush is still refusing to modify the fundamentals of his long-standing "stay the course" policy by taking the Democrats' suggestions seriously. He is still refusing to engage in meaningful talks with Iran or Syria and seriously to consider timetables, benchmarks and a phased withdrawal from Iraq.

Bush has stepped up the bellicose talk directed at Iran and is massively reinforcing US military power in and near the Persian Gulf and also doing likewise within operational range of North Korea. Furthermore, he has reassured top Israeli leaders that they need not fear that his resolve to deal forcibly with Iran has been weakened one iota. Israeli leaders exited jubilant from their recent meeting with Bush.

As Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney asserted before the election, they were not up for re-election and no matter what the voters said, the two would continue to do what they believed were the right things for the national security of the United States.

In fact, Seymour Hersh reports in the The New Yorker magazine that one month before the election, Cheney asserted in a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building that the administration would be undeterred from pursuing the military option against Iran by any Democratic election victory. The report has credibility because after the election, Bush reassured Israeli leaders of his resolve to use military force to stop Iran, as noted above.

At every turn in foreign policy, the Bush administration will battle and/or simply ignore the Democrats, seeking to discredit their proposals and undermine their unity, wherever there is a clash with what the administration believes is right. On foreign policy this remains an entirely unrepentant administration, notwithstanding its post-election pretenses of a switch to bipartisanship, the insistence that it listens to new ideas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's calls for soft-power strategies and negotiations with Iran and Syria, and the personnel change at the Pentagon, the meaning and importance of which have been significantly overplayed by the media.

Now that the "dreaded" election losses for the Republicans have been delivered, what further foreign-policy-based political loss is there for the Bush administration to fear? Why should the administration substantively give in to the Democrats on foreign-policy issues? Short of taking the enormously difficult and risky step of pulling the plug on funding, what can the Democrats actually do now to stop the administration from largely continuing its foreign-policy line for two more years?

The Democrats have their hands full trying to find a way actually to constrain, change the course of, or otherwise humble and check the power of the current administration. The conduct of foreign policy is the prerogative of the executive branch, after all. Under mounting pressure from the Democrats to begin pulling US troops out of Iraq - something that would certainly plunge Iraq and likely the region itself into the uncontrolled fires of sectarian chaos - Bush knows his time to act is probably much shorter than the two years he has left in office.

So, rather than to bridle and make compliant this administration, the effect of the Democratic win has every appearance of emboldening and rushing Bush on a dash toward furthering his own foreign-policy goals while he is still in a position to do so.

Long-overdue success or hastened failure?

But even if Bush had finally come to the point where he was genuinely getting in touch with the position of the electorate and with the reality of the total incompetence and profound destructiveness of his fundamentalist-evangelical, ideologically oriented, militaristic foreign policy, and even if he genuinely wanted to find a multilateral and peaceful solution to the Iraq and wider Middle East crises that employed soft-power levers, is there any real basis for concluding that the door of opportunity to such solutions has not long since slammed irreversibly shut?

The mounting fear is that attempting now at this late date, in the aftermath of strategic blunder piled on top of strategic blunder, to "save" US fortunes in Iraq and the wider Middle East may be turning out to be an exercise in futility. US regional/geopolitical fortunes were massively imperiled, and likely squandered, nearly four years ago when Washington shoved strategic alliances and multilateral considerations aside to occupy Iraq.

When the US and Britain rushed to the military option first they simultaneously scorned as contemptible the germ of traditional, fruitful, multilateral soft-power strategies and they extraordinarily sowed instead the seeds of widespread, thorny, noxious "weeds". How will they now reap instead the tantalizing mangoes, grapes and pomegranates of strategic victory and success?

They have little or no viable chance of doing so. By their distinctly ham-handed militaristic approach they unleashed virulently anti-US counter forces and strategies that have become deeply ingrained across the region. They virtually locked themselves, the wider West and the Middle East region itself into an impasse whose only "solution" is yet additional military action.

Soft-power levers

In the lead-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003, the Bush and Blair administrations blatantly dismissed every semblance of genuine multilateralism and diplomacy and the traditional, strategically oriented soft-power levers in a consequences-be-damned dash to heave themselves on the military levers alone.

For nearly four years since then they have conceitedly and overconfidently continued to disregard both opening and opportunity to extricate themselves from a mounting quagmire they blindly refused to acknowledge, snubbing all along the way the repeated calls to adopt a policy of genuine engagement of the region's players in a comprehensive solution.

They have continued to pursue one-dimensional militarized "solutions" at the near-total sacrifice of all their former soft-power standing and leverage. They have thereby gravely undercut the meaningful cooperation and confidence of their allies and deeply alienated their rivals across the region and beyond.

The US and Britain now occupy a position of profound weakness as respects any possession of genuine and compelling regional/global leverage and they fully own a miserable negotiating position, and their rivals (the "evildoers") fully understand how that provides them the opportunity to capitalize on US/British misfortunes and weaknesses that are largely self-inflicted.

In any negotiations for a grand (or any lesser) solution, the US and Britain would either be mostly forced to accept the favorite terms of Iran and Syria or be left largely unable to verify compliance with and enforce the better terms of an agreement, even if they could get a promise from the regional players to adhere to desirable terms. This is an eventuality the US and Britain simply cannot accept because it would further propel Iran toward its goal of regional ascendancy over the oil-rich Arab regimes - that is the nightmare scenario for the West.

Opportunistic and clever Iran now has the US and Britain pinned into a position of strategic disadvantage, and it fully knows it. So do the much larger sponsoring powers Russia and China. These two have with adroit strategies employed Iran, Syria and other Middle East entities as their proxies and willing adherents in an insidious game to erode further, and even collapse, the Middle East and global leverage and influence of the US.

Syria is offering to "help" the US in Iraq - but it has said the US must first set a definite date for withdrawal of its forces from Iraq. Additionally, ascendant Iran and Syria have massively upstaged a weakened US and Britain by inviting the Iraqi leadership to a closed three-way summit to discuss and plot Iraq's direction. The Iraqi president has accepted the invitation. These are examples of the kind of "help" the US can expect from its regional rivals now that it owns the severely weakened position described above.

In the view of the Bush administration, Iran and Syria have already acquired too much regional influence and leverage and they are misusing those assets to cut directly across US interests and goals. To sit down at this point with them to negotiate an Iraq or wider Middle East solution would only further elevate their respectability, position, influence and leverage and make the US appear as a weak supplicant by comparison. This would boost Iran and Syria along the path of achieving regional control and even dominance.

From the Bush administration's perspective, the only conditions under which the two can be brought into negotiations are that they must first agree unconditionally to bow to the will of the US on a number of key issues. These include Iran's nuclear program and on Syria's exercising of undue influence within Lebanon.

In other words, the administration expects the two virtually to cave in first before it will engage them in an Iraq or wider regional solution. The same is true of Iran and Syria - they expect the US virtually to cave in by "changing its attitude" of seeking to cut them down to size in the region before they will agree to sit at the same negotiating table with the US. Both sides have become more, not less, intransigent as the Iraq situation nears crisis stage. Therefore, any prospect of serious and fruitful negotiations between the US and the two key players is extremely remote, at best.

Top US officials recently stated that they wished to engage Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich regimes (rather than Iran and Syria) in an intensified effort to end the mounting sectarian chaos in Iraq. However, it is unclear along what lines such regimes would specifically be asked to become engaged. These are Sunni regimes. Would they be asked to assist in tangible ways to help stabilize and strengthen the current Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government? It is not likely they would be interested in helping to boost the already worrying rise of Shi'ites in the region.

Many experts have recognized that Iraq's sectarian militias must be disarmed if the violence is to be stemmed. Would the Sunni regimes be asked to assist the US military in its efforts to disarm Iraq's Sunni and Shi'ite militias? That would be a recipe for regionwide conflagration because it would risk spreading rather than containing Iraq's bloody sectarian rivalries.

Additionally, any move by the Sunni regimes to assist materially in the disarming of Iraq's Shi'ite militias and the weakening of the Shi'ite faction would risk an explosion of Shi'ite rage among their own people, since every one of the Sunni regimes must deal with its own large domestic Shi'ite population. If the US somehow succeeds in getting the Sunni regimes more tangibly involved, it will be an impending sign not of a solution to Middle East instability, but of a loss of control over the situation, its spinning out of control.

Even if the US engages in real negotiations with Iran and Syria over the Iraq crisis, the Sunni regimes are extremely unlikely to cast their lot with a severely weakened United States in any negotiations over a regional solution that would end up codifying de facto Persian dominance of the Gulf.

Yet those very regimes have no viable solution among themselves - they cannot stem Iran's regional rise. With the US increasingly in impending forfeiture in Iraq, they may wish to play Israel secretly as counterweight to Iran, but even the hint of such a policy shift risks the total alienation of their vehemently anti-Israel populace and the prospect of sharply increased domestic unrest and an overthrow of the current Sunni regimes. That would play directly into Iran's hands: the oil-rich Arab regimes are strategically stuck, and they know it.

Military, military and more military

Against this backdrop, ongoing Iranian efforts to "bear-hug" Iraq and intimidate other Gulf Arab states into a Tehran-led alliance are intensifying. Iran is suspected in the November 4 explosion and fire in one of Kuwait's refineries, and Shi'ite unrest and ever more serious threats against the Sunni regimes in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region. These are only some of the more easily recognizable tactics employed by Tehran to herd the Gulf Arab states into an alliance.

According to recent reports from the Middle East Newsline, for agreeing to ally with Tehran it will "reward" regimes by ceasing its provocative destabilization tactics. The growing Arab openness to such a regional "solution" deeply concerns Washington, which is now pointedly increasing its naval military presence inside and within striking distance of the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, Iran's recent 10-day Great Prophet II war games shocked the West with respect to Iran's ability to launch many dozens of assorted ballistic missiles in perfect coordination in mock retaliation against an Israeli/US/European attack. This demonstrated that all US bases in the Middle East and even Europe are in Iran's retaliatory striking range.

Only days after Iran's coordinated ballistic-missile launches, France successfully test-launched its newest nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, obviously pleased to let that test launch serve as a non-verbal warning to Iran that it faces a potent European retaliation if it targets Europe with its own missiles. Taking the measure of the powerful and growing US naval armada now in and near the Persian Gulf along with European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, it is no stretch to surmise that something much more than a mere passive containment of Iran may be in the offing much sooner rather than later.

What is the likely purpose behind the mounting US and European NATO naval forces in and near the Persian Gulf, if not merely for an ongoing and passive attempt at containment of Iran? Diplomatic attempts at the United Nations aimed at strapping Iran with punishing sanctions over its nuclear pursuits have miserably failed, and they are most likely to continue to fail. Russia and China will see to that. Iran has shown a stubborn determination to continue its nuclearization at almost any cost. If the West absolutely cannot get what it wants solely within the confines of conventional interpretation of UN measures, then it is preparing to accomplish the stalwart isolation of Iran by hyper-extending those measures to a significant degree.

The strategy of the West that is building here against Iran is illuminated by an examination of what has transpired in the North Korea crisis. Pyongyang played into the West's hands by forging ahead with its October nuclear test and thereby galvanizing the UN Security Council, which subsequently voted to place sanctions on the regime.

The measures were not nearly everything the US wanted, and left much to be desired in the way of stringency and comprehensiveness, but they provided a diplomatic rallying point. Under this, US allies could gather to construct what is for all practical purposes a supplementary coalition ostensibly equipped and designed to enforce UN measures, but which actually seeks to go significantly beyond the conventional interpretation and intent of the provisions of the Security Council. This means naval and other sanctions and a virtual embargo/blockade targeting North Korea.

South Korea has steadfastly refused to join the de facto supplementary coalition. But key European naval powers are actively participating with the United States, as is Australia. The US is rapidly building its military forces in the region to prepare for the ever more likely eventuality of a military strike on North Korea. Thus it has the muscle to back up its efforts at getting a cave-in of the regime at the negotiating table. While such a cave-in is still not very likely, the US and its allies pursue the possibility anyway. But they keep the full-blown military option at the ready to be exercised when it is deemed that time has run out on "diplomacy".

This is the "diplomacy" of the gun barrel - "measured" options along the military line, namely embargo and blockade designed to weaken and collapse the regime, with a crushing air campaign held at the immediate ready.

Apparently, Russia and China were caught significantly off guard by the US strategy - they assumed that by ensuring inherent weaknesses and limitations in the Security Council measure against North Korea, the US would in effect be stifled.

They miscalculated. If Iraq represented the numbskulled and disastrous US/British unilateralist strategy of UN circumvention, North Korea and Iran represent their newest (though not entirely surprising), West-slanting multilateralist strategy of UN hyper-extension. This is the strategy of getting even a weakened measure at the Security Council that can subsequently be interpreted (hyper-extended) to serve as a rallying point for "measured" multilateral military action.

The US hopes that by pursuing its military options in a measured sequence and in parallel with diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, rather than by shoving aside the UN to rush to the all-out military option first, then it can garner enough support among its allies to place strapping sanctions on rogue regimes and then either bend them or instigate actual regime changes.

There is also the distinct possibility that the regimes targeted with the embargo/blockade will strike out at the naval assets and provide the US with the "justification" to unleash a full-blown air campaign. Fully realizing and appreciating that strategy, Russia has begun to push to get Iran's case taken out of the Security Council and returned to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, and both Russia and China have issued warnings about the dangers of backing North Korea and Iran into a corner.

The flood of military assets into and around the Persian Gulf signifies an impending naval embargo or blockade of Iran designed to attempt to weaken and collapse the regime over several months, with a crushing air campaign held at the immediate ready.

Simultaneously, according to recent reports by intelligence expert Bill Gertz, Arab intelligence sources say the US and Britain have given Western-supported Iranian opposition groups the go-ahead to sabotage energy and other assets and otherwise destabilize the Iranian regime from the inside.

On November 10, a bomb exploded in Ahwaz, the most active oil production center in Iran's Khuzestan.

Stricter financial and banking sanctions have been put into place by the US and its allies. The Iranian regime acknowledged that fact when it recently stated it was decreasing its dollar-based transactions to an absolute minimum because of added US financial measures against it. US strategy is recently showing more finesse and has a more potent covert component, as compared with the much more ham-handed strategies of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It may be that we are witnessing the beginnings of the influence of new Pentagon head Robert Gates and the former team of president George H W Bush.
Why would Europe possibly be interested in participating with the US in an impending naval embargo of Iran and perhaps a massive military strike on the radical Iranian regime? The achievement of Iran's goals of regional hegemony would place Europe in grave energy-based jeopardy, because of its heavy reliance on Middle East oil. Iran's notable advancement toward achieving that goal on the ground since the 2003 US-British invasion of Iraq is not letting European leaders sleep well at night.

Despite the Europeans' apparent single focus on diplomatic solutions, they fully realize that if diplomacy fails (and it surely is miserably failing to put Iran back into Pandora's box), then the radical regime and its destabilizing agenda must be halted - period. The Europeans dislike military options, but they dislike being virtual energy-based hostages even more.

What if Russia and China see to it that no Security Council measure against Iran is adopted or, if one is adopted, that it specifically rules out the kind of hyper-extension the US seeks to employ? The US can be expected to move forward with its plans to implement stalwart sanctions and an embargo or blockade anyway, and it will likely get key European support in tangible ways, but with the usual public condemnations. If anyone thinks the US is going to be thwarted in its plans to attempt to cut Iran down to size sooner rather than later, then they haven't been paying sufficient attention.

Iran is rapidly progressing and is now dangerously close to achieving its regional aim of dominating the oil-rich Persian Gulf, all without the possession of any nuclear weapons. Employing its multiple and potent regional tentacle-like proxies and its mounting energy-based leverage, Iran is advancing on the position that will enable it to herd the oil-rich Arab regimes largely along the lines it wishes. It has far more influence in Iraq and across the region than does the US, whose leverage has collapsed. It is almost single-handedly guiding Iraq's direction and is fully able to hand a complete forfeiture to the US in Iraq, and in the wider Middle East region as a direct result.

The recommendations of the ISG, of Tony Blair, of Henry Kissinger and of many others for direct US-Iran negotiations on the mounting Iraq crisis are a full-blown acknowledgement that Iran (and to a lesser degree its ally Syria) holds the trump card. In the event of the US being made to suffer a forfeiture in Iraq, in the aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of US influence, Iran is firmly positioned to pick up all the geopolitical pieces with which to finish construction of the radical Islamic regional hegemony it seeks. The Bush administration is absolutely right about one thing - if the United States fails in Iraq, the "evildoers" will achieve a triumph of incalculable expense for the US and the West.

Again, it must be powerfully emphasized that Iran is well along the path to achieving such goals without the possession of even one nuclear weapon. Therefore the nuclear issue, though certainly incorporating a significant degree of validity, is mostly being cynically used by the US and Europe to "sex up" the Iran issue, as it were, to get notoriety for the problem of what to do about Iran's regional ambitions and conveniently to justify early and collective action - even massive military action - if diplomacy fails, as it surely appears to be failing.

Yet though the issue has been sexed up by the West, Iran's push to continue with its nuclear program is fueling a strident Sunni Arab quest for nuclearization, with the region's states looking to the East - to Russia and China - for the incubation required to bring them up to Iran's nuclear speed.

That has concomitant and extremely toxic repercussions for the West as the oil-rich Arab regimes align ever more closely with the East in a growing array of spheres, further placing the West's strategic energy security in doubt. The crucial Middle East region is quickly slipping away from the West, and Western leaders know it fully. As the tipping point nears and the West stares into the abyss of a Middle East clearly dominated by Iran and its proxies and leaning heavily toward the East, actions that only recently were viewed as "crazy" and unjustified come to be viewed in a more justifiable light as all else fails, and the full range of military options against Iran has risen to become the foremost.

The consequences of recklessness
The Pandora's box of regionwide radical Shi'ite-Iranian ascension, thrust open in 2003 by Bush and foolishly backed by virtually all of Washington, is widely and rapidly spreading all manner of "evils" and "curses" on the world, from the US perspective. The oil-rich Middle East is being plunged into ever deeper radicalism and instability. Radical political-militarist Iranian tentacles such as Hamas and Hezbollah are making regional advances, while anti-Americanism thrives and US leverage collapses.

The fervent Iranian agenda - a Middle East dominated by a de facto Shi'ite caliphate anchored in Tehran - is much closer now than before the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Blair "axis vs evil" pushed its way into Baghdad to take out the only viable restraint on Iranian regional ascendancy. In its supposed zeal to battle "evil", that axis has only more firmly established "evil".

The highly militaristic strategies the US is largely left with in its mission to try to put those "evils" back into the box are ones that carry enormous risk. At the same time, the range of soft-power options and strategies carries greatly diminished potency, along with the very real risk of bolstering the status and leverage of the very regimes the US is trying to put back into Pandora's box.

Not only is there deep anxiety about the potential for strong Iranian-Shi'ite retaliation throughout the region in the event that the West begins to take "measured" military action against the regime in Tehran, there is another far more serious risk, especially for the West - the prospect of a serious deterioration in its relations with Russia, China and their energy-exporting global partners. The latter have collectively acquired potent energy-based economic and geopolitical leverage over the West and have acutely tired of continued US global dominance and the current unipolar order.

With tensions running ever higher between the West and the rising East, a spark like that of military action against Iran or North Korea could re-ignite a neo-Cold War, the consequences of which would be much worse for the West than for the East this time around.

Many observers saw the recent Democrat election victory as signaling the arrival of the long-awaited change in the direction of US foreign policy, a turn back toward multilateral soft-power strategies and away from the destructiveness of the neo-con line of the past six years. However, those six years of destructive policies and their deeply entrenched and mounting deleterious effects cannot be erased merely by the "magic wand" of an election win.

The US has tied itself into a knot of unprecedented complexity and tensile strength. Cutting across that knot by further militaristic strategies will unleash an array of pent-up regional and global forces the US isn't remotely prepared to deal with successfully.

It hasn't begun to position itself in a place of independent economic strength, energy independence and geopolitical strength - quite the opposite is true as the knot tightens around the US. The current US administration will cut across that knot very soon because the mounting crises in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and North Korea are all reaching their "moments of truth" virtually simultaneously and are therefore pushing it to do the "cutting" before all is lost.

Next: Why multipolarity is a misnomer

W Joseph Stroupe is author of the new book Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West and editor of Global Events Magazine, online at www.GeoStrategyMap.com.

(Copyright 2004-2006 GeoStrategyMap.com & W Joseph Stroupe. All rights reserved.)