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The Iraqi government is sticking to its story on the whole sovereign-nation thing.  Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had this to say during his meeting with Arab ambassadors in Abu Dhabi:

…I told you that we today search for the need to end foreign presence on Iraqi territory, restore full sovereignty, and get rid of all the international resolutions and sanctions imposed on us based on Chapter VII. Therefore, the idea, as announced in August, was an agreement on a declaration of principles and intents, which stipulated that the agreement between the two states should be based on full sovereignty, that this year will witness the last extension of the mandate of the international forces on Iraqi territory, and that Iraq should be liberated from the mandate of Chapter VII.

(Emphasis added.) So the Bush administration, which has said time and again that we’ll leave Iraq when the sovereign Iraqi government says they don’t need us, has two embarrassing turds in its punchbowl.

First, the Iraqis’ nominally elected government wants us out by a date certain, and Washington is in the awkward position of having to refuse to leave. The White House even fell back on denying the multiple press accounts of al-Maliki’s comments and suggesting there had been an error in translation.

Second, al-Maliki has talked about Iraqi sovereignty as if it were not something the Iraqis have, but rather something Iraqis hope to restore through negotiations with the U.S.  This sovereignty is what the U.S. claims to have bestowed on Iraq by invading their country in the first place.  Bush’s response is going to have a pretty package, but it’s going to boil down to “We gotcher sovereignty right here, pal.“

The Iraqi government apparently thinks that the security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq must respect Iraqi sovereignty. A letter to Congress about the treaty, signed by a majority of the parliament, insists that:

The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq.

Ouch.  Did no one explain it to them?  Are they missing the last few pages of the script?  The U.S. doesn’t recognize Iraqi sovereignty.  That much was clear as soon as Bush invaded.  Since then there have been some half-hearted efforts to create the pretense of Iraqi sovereignty, but really, what sovereignty does a country have that is under military occupation by a foreign power?  The U.S. appointed collaborators to run the government, exerted complete physical control of the 2005 election (U.S. troops handled all the ballot boxes and decided which districts would get ballot boxes at all), and operates beyond the reach of Iraqi law.  What part of the word “colony” do they not understand?

If former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan isn’t going to Hell, nobody’s going.  He helped the Bush administration use big-lie tactics to sell a war that has killed over six hundred thousand people.  Now he’s written a memoir in which he simultaneously accuses the Bush administration of dishonesty, and denies that he himself was an enthusiastic part of the conspiracy.

He must think we’ve all got short memories.  McClellan claimed to possess proof that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons.  He claimed Iraq supported terrorists.  He claimed that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.  (These are documented at the excellent searchable database on Bush administration lies at http://www.publicintegrity.org.)  He strongarmed reporters who dared ask embarrassing questions about the war.  He lied for Bush about the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and then refused even to stand by his own remarks about the subject.

These lies, told with his very own lips, he spins as “It’s just the way the game’s become played in Washington….”  You’ve heard this argument before, usually from fourteen-year-olds, and usually phrased as “Everybody’s doing it.”  Bullshit.  He’s a liar.  He knew he was lying.  He could have refused to lie, but he didn’t because he knew he’d get fired.  Simple as that.  And he’s still lying now.  Because “I was deceived” sells more books than “I’m a lying scumbag.”

Now that the meaningless “showdown” is over, and George Bush has vetoed the war funding bill, it’s time for Democrats to step back and think. They should be thinking about how to do the right thing in Iraq, but if that’s too much to ask (and it is), they should at least think about how to avoid being left holding the bag in 2009.

The Bush regime has no motive to pull troops out of Iraq. War profiteers are still making money hand over fist, and Bush doesn’t want to stop the infusion of cash to loyal Republican supporters. Like every war, this war distracts people from repressive domestic policies, and allows Bush to continue beating the September 11th drum to scare people into voting Republican.

So it’s likely, very likely, that the troops will be in Iraq through 2008 and will become the problem of a Democratic White House. Republicans hope that the Democrats will get the blame for “losing” the war when they pull the troops out during a Democratic administration. And given our experience with Congressional Democrats, the Republicans are right: Democrats can be counted on to continue trying to avoid “defeat” in Iraq by withdrawing oh-so-slowly.

The answer is to end the war now. Rather than passing a war funding bill with conditions, rather than passing a short-term funding bill, the Democrats should heed the voters and pass no funding bill at all. Republicans will cry foul and say the Democrats are causing chaos in Iraq. But that’s happening already. It can only get worse, whether we stay or go, but chaos and American occupation of the Middle East is still worse than chaos.

The Democrats have a lot to answer for. They voted for this war, and they’ve voted for every funding bill for the last four years. Now they want us to believe they “get it” about the war. Well it’s time to prove it. If you’re serious about ending the war, stop paying to prolong it.

Poor George Tenet. The former CIA director is on his book tour, whining about how the Bush administration trashed his reputation.

The hardest part of all this has just been listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on “Meet the Press” on the fifth year of 9/11, you know, and say, “Well, George Tenet said ’slam dunk,’” as if he needed me to say “slam dunk” to go to war with Iraq, as if he needed me to say that….

[Y]ou know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. That’s all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. When you don’t have that anymore, well, you know, there you go. Trust was broken.

He’s right about the importance of trust and honor. And he’s right to say (now, too late, when everybody knows it) that the Bush regime has proven itself unworthy of trust.

But excuse me, where was George Tenet four years ago? If it was dishonorable for Bush to lie about whether the CIA director was doing a good job, how much more dishonorable was it to stand silent while the White House was lying to drum up public support for the war? Tenet had to know they were lying, because he was in a position to compare what he told Bush, to what Bush told us. And what Bush told us, turned out to be unverified rumors, cherry-picked to serve the decision Bush had already made back in 2000. It’s all very well to denounce them as liars when you’re promoting your book, but a really honorable man would have stood up and spoken the truth when there was nothing to gain. Nothing, that is, but a bit of honor.

But just a little bit. The media should be much, much more skeptical of the honor and trustworthiness of anyone who would agree to serve as head of the CIA in the first place. Historically, the CIA is a criminal organization, and I’ve seen nothing in the last several years of political assassinations and secret prisons to change my mind.

Now that even our government admits that Iraq policy has to change, we are hearing lots of statements that we must change the policy, but avoid “defeat.” The President says he listens to all opinions, but he rejects the ones that would “lead to defeat.” The new Secretary of Defense, Roberts M. Gates, warns that “failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

Sounds a lot like the consequences if they succeed. It does no good to talk about whether “America” succeeds in Iraq, or whether “we” succeed in Iraq, only about who succeeds in Iraq. There are the people who wanted the war and started it, and there are the rest of us. We don’t have the same idea of what victory would be.

We’ve known for some time what the White House thinks. George W. Bush and the ruling class he represents are after a renewed American empire, starting with a colony in the Middle East. Bush has publicly admitted what he denied for years, which is that he is after the oil reserves. The more than half a million dead in Iraq were expendable in the cause of U.S. imperialism.

For the rest of us, “success” is stopping a war of aggression before it can do more damage, and bringing the perpetrators to justice. Success is exposing the war profiteers who started two wars for private profit. Success is permanently discrediting imperialism in general and U.S. imperialism in particular, and convincing the rest of the world that the majority of Americans are willing to respect the sovereignty of other countries. David McReynolds notes:

I understand those who feel that it would be irresponsible “to turn and run”. But to think the US can “fix” things now is like thinking a rapist is the ideal person to stay and provide therapy to the victim.

We have been told over and over that the war against Iraq is not about the oil. The U.S. is not looking out for its own selfish interests, they told us, no no, we are altruistically promoting democracy, not to mention defending ourselves. Well. Not everyone was fooled, of course, and many of us knew we’d been lied to from the outset and before. Indeed, U.S. troops were protecting the Iraqi Oil Ministry from looting while all other government buildings were being stripped bare, so I thought it was pretty obvious that the peace movement was right. I never expected Bush to admit it.

I was wrong. Today, Bush argued we must protect Iraqi oil otherwise we run the risk that the new owners of the oil would cut oil production. Phillip Verleger of the Institute for International Economics, hardly a bomb-throwing radical, noted that

Essentially, by making that statement he has stated that his energy policy is totally bankrupt…. The reason they have studiously avoided [any link between oil and the U.S. mission in Iraq] is it provides a huge incentive for taking big steps now to reduce U.S. oil imports. The only way you can do that is through conservation measures .. such as imposing an oil import fee or raising the gasoline tax.

Why such an apparent wild shift in policy? I’m sure it’s not a newfound commitment to honesty. Rather, I imagine the White House calculates that the payoff for fearmongering the day before the election outweighs the cost of being caught in yet another lie later on this week.

A recent study published in The Lancet reports that the actual death toll of the Iraq war is over 655,000, a figure at least eight times higher than previous estimates, and twenty times higher than what the President admits to. The study says that nearly a third of those deaths were caused by coalition troops, more than 13 times the number estimated by Iraq Body Count.

How can we even think about a number like that? What can I compare it to without trivializing it? It’s more people than the entire population of Baltimore. But I don’t know anybody in Baltimore. If Baltimore were wiped off the map I wouldn’t lose any loved ones, so talking about the obliteration of every man, woman and child in Baltimore doesn’t really get me in my gut, and probably doesn’t get you either.

Perhaps this will help. Imagine the worst funeral you ever attended. That one. You weren’t just there out of respect, you were there because you knew and loved the deceased. You dragged yourself around that day like you had an iron ball chained to your leg, and you spent a lot of time wondering how God could let this happen. Now imagine having to relive that funeral every day, for sixteen centuries.

Naturally the perpetrators of this outrage against humanity discount the study without telling us exactly how they suddenly discovered a knack for epidemiology. It will be another contest of science versus ignorance, with the U.S. government firmly against science. Daniel Davies has an analysis of the campaign to discredit the study.

This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. If a Mori poll puts the Labour party on 40% support, then we know that there is some inaccuracy in the poll, but we also know that there is basically zero chance that the true level of support is 2% or 96%, and for the Lancet survey to have delivered the results it did if the true body count is 60,000 would be about as improbable as this. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.

The US should cut its losses, pull out of Iraq promptly and never again use its military might to build a nation according to its own values, according to former CIA chief John Deutch. That’s a pretty damning pronouncement coming from someone who used to hold George H.W. Bush’s job as head of the United States’ covert army. These are the guys who intervene in other countries for a living. If they think the war is hopeless, it’s really hopeless. Gradually more and more members of the ruling class are speaking aloud of the need to get out.

Several commentators quoted by ZNet

…take issue with the conventional assumption that the U.S. military presence is a stabilising factor without which Iraq’s descent into civil war would be more certain or bloody.

They also argue that the administration’s argument [for] Washington’s global “credibility” is outweighed by other considerations, including the damage that the continued U.S. presence does to U.S. interests in the Arab and Islamic world more generally and the reduced ability of the U.S. to deal with other important security challenges while it remains bogged down in Iraq.

As noted by Deutch, continued investment in a losing proposition could result in “an even worse loss of credibility down the road.”

Of course Deutch thinks the U.S. has some credibility to lose, with which I strenuously disagree.

The New York Times reports on the details of two Afghan prisoners tortured to death by American jailers at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. A 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the top of his cell for much of a four-day period, and was repeatedly beaten by guards for several days. “Most of the interrogators,” reports the Times, “had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

Another prisoner named Habibullah was also chained to the ceiling of his cell as well as being repeatedly beaten for “noncompliance.” It isn’t clear that Habibullah had any idea what his captors were ordering him to do, since the MPs were assigned no interpreter of their own. Specialist Brian E. Cammack beat Habibullah when Habibullah was both chained and either unconscious or already dead. “It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,” said the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, who later examined Habibullah.

This would be a good time to look up the word systematic in a dictionary, and then wave the Times’ article in front of your own member of Congress. They’ve got time to hold hearings on baseball, so they clearly have plenty of time to hold hearings on the U.S. government’s torture policy.