Another socialist blog

The latest issue of Mother Jones reports on the growing opposition to the Iraq war among soldiers and veterans, organized in part by the Iraq Veterans Against the War. A poll last August in Pennsylvania showed 54% of households with a member in the military said the war was “the wrong thing to do.” Only 48% of the population as a whole felt that way. A 2003 Gallup poll showed that nearly a fifth of soldiers returning from Iraq felt the situation in that country had not been worth going to war over.

As you know, we invaded Iraq to make America safer because Saddam was a threat and had lots of weapons of mass destruction. So how embarrassing that 350 tons of high explosives have gone missing from al-Qaqaa, an Iraqi military facility near Baghdad.

You might think that securing the explosives would have been central to the military’s mission in Iraq, or at least that it would be close to the top of the invasion to-do list. But you’d be wrong. Apparently keeping track of 350 tons of stuff that blows up took a lower priority than protecting the Oil Ministry building from looters.

The New York Times reports that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has served subpoenas in an investigation of payola, the illegal practice of bribing radio stations to play particular songs. “According to several people involved, investigators in Mr. Spitzer’s office have served subpoenas on the four major record corporations - the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the EMI Group and the Warner Music Group - seeking copies of contracts, billing records and other information detailing their ties to independent middlemen who pitch new songs to radio programmers in New York State.”

Everybody who feels sorry for the record companies, raise your hand.

In their continuing effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, the U.S. military has been raiding Ramadi mosques in an effort to root out opponents of the occupation. Local residents accused US forces of breaking down doors and disrespecting the sanctity of Ramadi’s mosques. “This cowboy behaviour cannot be accepted,” said cleric Abdullah Abu Omar of the Ramadi Mosque, quoted by Associated Press. “The Americans seem to have lost their senses and have gone out of control.”

A new article in the New York times gives details on how the Bush administration lied about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program in order to sell the war to the public.

Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America’s leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.

The Times article is valuable because of its detail, and because it makes clear that administration officials weren’t just misinformed, but deliberately lying, about the prewar intelligence.

John Kerry’s speech at the National Guard’s annual convention yesterday has been widely reported as a scathing attack on Bush administration policy in Iraq. Kerry said the President “didn’t tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are actually getting bolder - that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists.”

This, of course, is precisely the lie that Bush has been trying to sell us since before the beginning of the war: that Iraq is the latest front in his so-called War on Terror, and that Iraqi resistance to U.S. aggression is terrorism. Kerry has thus conceded the single largest proposition, and the biggest lie, of the Bush campaign. All he can do now, is quibble about the details.

With the Republican National Convention well underway, George Bush is basking in praise for his leadership in the so-called War on Terror.

Fallujah residents are not cheering after a U.S. air strike that has killed 17 people including three children. The U.S. military described the action as a precision strike, which presumably means they killed exactly the people they meant to kill.

Another capitalist criminal has been found out, and is presently a fugitive from the law. Massachusetts businessman Jay Echouafni paid for distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) against his competitors. The attacks took down his competitors’ web sites and caused millions of dollars in losses.

David McReynolds shared an excerpt from The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time by J.K. Galbraith, who argues that corporate power is the driving force behind US foreign policy.

In 2003, close to half the total US government discretionary expenditure was used for military purposes. A large part was for weapons procurement or development. Nuclear-powered submarines run to billions of dollars, individual planes to tens of millions each.

Such expenditure is not the result of detached analysis. From the relevant industrial firms come proposed designs for new weapons, and to them are awarded production and profit. In an impressive flow of influence and command, the weapons industry accords valued employment, management pay and profit in its political constituency, and indirectly it is a treasured source of political funds. The gratitude and the promise of political help go to Washington and to the defence budget. And to foreign policy or, as in Vietnam and Iraq, to war. That the private sector moves to a dominant public-sector role is apparent.

This week’s Not a Team Player Award goes to Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice President, who has publicly opposed the gay marriage ban being debated now by the Senate. This puts her at odds with the Bush administration. Ms. Cheney says the states should decide whether to permit gay marriage, in contrast to Bush and Mr. Cheney, whose vocal support for states’ rights ends when states disagree with them.

“During the 2000 campaign,” reports ABC News, “vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney took the position states should decide legal issues about personal relationships and that people should be free to enter relationships of their choosing.” But for the 2004 election Bush and Dick Cheney are actively courting the anti-gay bigot vote, so out the window go both Dick Cheney’s tolerance, and his support for states’ rights.

Not to mention his gay daughter, Mary.