Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq.

By: Daniel Benjamin  

..."There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes", she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers-called 'werewolves' - engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them - much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."

Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted: "One group of those dead-enders was known as 'werewolves'. They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?"

Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.

By: James P. Pinkerton  

What are we doing in Iraq? The latest explanation is the so-called flypaper thesis. That is, it's a good thing that we have 140,000 troops in Iraq, because the terrorists are going after our men and women there, lured like flies to flypaper.

The "flypaper" line seems to be working with the American public right now, but if the Iraqis continue to go from mad to worse, don't be surprised if the Bush administration argument shifts yet again, in the service of a new set of objectives. Someday soon, the neo-Wolfowitzian line might go as follows: "America's presence in Iraq is a 'huge recruiting device' for the terrorists. So that's why we must now shift our forces - and 'regime change' our way into Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia."

Could the Pentagon's armchair warriors get away with such a bleed-and-switch? Why not? They've ginned up and used up so many reasons for war that it should be no trouble for them to invent a few more.

The Bush Cartel Takes the American Public for Fools: Now They Say Saddam "Duped" Them Into Believing He Had WMD's. You Wouldn't Accept This Sort of Inept Lying From a Five-Year-Old.

By: Doug Basham  

As evidence, "officials" say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases - the Bush administration tall tale goes - Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites. See [Link].

Now let's forget for a moment the reported pressure this administration (read Dick Cheney) placed on our intelligence agencies to "cook the intelligence books". Let's forget for a moment that the primary "defector" the administration was taking their cues from was their very own handpicked Saddam successor, Ahmed Chalabi, who the Busheviks even touted as the possible "George Washington of Iraq". (You might recall that Chalabi was convicted in absentia in a Jordanian court for embezzlement and fraud - personally, I don't think it had anything to do with stealing cherry trees.) The Jordanians have sought Chalabi's extradition. See [Link].

Chalabi has dearly wanted Hussein's job. I think it's safe to say any information Chalabi handed this administration was for Ahmed's benefit, not brother Saddam's...

By: Maureen Dowd  

With Iraqis in Najaf screaming: "There is no order! There is no government! We'd rather have Saddam than this!", we had one more ominous illustration that the Bush team is out of its depth and divided against itself.

You can't conduct a great historical experiment in a petty and bickering frame of mind. The agencies of the Bush administration are behaving like high school cliques. The policy in Iraq is paralyzed almost to the point of nonexistence, stalled by spats between the internationalists and unilateralists, with the national security director, Condoleezza Rice, abnegating her job as policy referee.

The State Department will have to stop sulking and being in denial about the Pentagon running the show in Iraq. And the Pentagon will have to stop being dogmatic, clinging to the quixotic notion that it only wants to succeed with its streamlined force and its trompe l'oeil coalition. Rummy has to accept the magnitude of the task and give up running the Department of Defense the way a misanthropic accountant would.

"The war on terror will last as long as we're in office."

- 'Dickless' Cheney

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