Associated Press in the USA reports:
Heavy Metal Becoming Increasingly Political
As genre nears 30, social commentary weaves its way among power chords
SAN FRANCISCO (MSNBC) – Heavy metal singer Chris Barnes didnt know what people would think of Amerika the Brutal, an anti-war song he wrote after his cousin deployed to Iraq in 2003.
He heard a number of complaints but also received supportive e-mails from American troops in the war zone.
It kind of sent a shiver up my spine because those are the guys I didnt want to offend by sounding anti-war, said Barnes, vocalist for the death metal band Six Feet Under.
Other metal bands are finding similar inspiration.
Lamb of God‘s albums criticize American foreign policy.
Australian anti war band The Molotov: here.
Anti war NYC punk rock by Outernational: here.
Anti Iraq war songs by Burt Bacharach: here.
Iraq: another ten US soldiers die: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the Iraq war away*
Posted by: “hapi22” hapi22@earthlink.net robinsegg
Tue Oct 17, 2006 9:25 am (PST)
Here’s all you need to know to talk to friends and family about the Iraq
war, before they vote.
For Bush, the day of reckoning is at hand. After years of
talking tough, smearing war opponents as appeasers and
demanding “total victory,” he must confront the fact that his
Iraq war has been a catastrophic failure. Terror attacks are
up, American casualties are soaring near record levels, and a
credible study claims that at least several hundred thousand
Iraqis have died as a result of the war, demolishing whatever
moral rationale it had.
.
In the early days of the Iraq war, Bush often said that his presidency
would be judged by the Iraq war. Of course, at that point, he foresaw
victory, not the catastrophe the war in Iraq has become, for us, the
Iraqi people and the world.
So, I say: Let’s take Bush up on his challenge and judge him and his
administration by the Iraq war.
And, if those of the “religious right” have any sense, they will sit out
this election. They cannot possibly think there is ANY moral grounding
to this president or his Republican cohorts in Congress.
———————————————————-
*Fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the Iraq war away*
Bush’s Iraq disaster is taking the GOP down, and his father’s old pal
James Baker is about to tell him what to do.
by Gary Kamiya
Salon.com
Oct. 17, 2006
In perhaps the strangest vindication of that old ’60s chestnut “The
personal is the political,” the fate of America’s Iraq adventure may
hinge on whether George W. Bush can handle being taken to the woodshed
by an emissary of his old man.
For Bush, the day of reckoning is at hand. After years of talking tough,
smearing war opponents as appeasers and demanding “total victory,” he
must confront the fact that his Iraq war has been a catastrophic
failure. Terror attacks are up, American casualties are soaring near
record levels, and a credible study claims that at least several hundred
thousand Iraqis have died as a result of the war, demolishing whatever
moral rationale it had.
Of more immediate concern to Bush, Americans have turned against the
Iraq war so strongly that the issue now threatens to take down Bush’s
party, not just in the midterms but in 2008 as well. After a brief
uptick in the polls driven by a major GOP “war on terror” P.R. campaign
in September, Bush’s ratings have again dropped into the low 30s, and
with the Republicans reeling from the Mark Foley scandal and no hope on
Iraq’s bloody horizon, they will probably continue to fall. The
Democrats look increasingly likely to take back the House, and perhaps
the Senate too.
The country is at a tipping point, which could be described as the
moment when even those Americans who get all their information from Fox
News abandon Bush’s sinking ship. GOP leaders know that if the U.S. is
still bogged down in Iraq in 2008, their chances of capturing the
presidency will be severely lessened. Senior GOP leaders like John
Warner are firing warning shots across Bush’s bow. He is under
increasing pressure to do something — anything — to stop the bleeding.
But Bush, declaring that nothing less than the freedom of the world is
at stake, has continued to insist that only a total victory in Iraq is
acceptable.
[NOTE FROM ME: What some (such as Chris Matthews) see as Bush
being “resolute,”: rational people see as infantile
stubbornness. ]
In a speech on Sept. 4, he said, “we’ll accept nothing less than
complete victory … We’re on the offensive, and we will not rest, we
will not retreat, and we will not withdraw from the fight, until this
threat to civilization has been removed.” On Monday, he assured Iraqi
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that he will not pull U.S. troops out of
the country.
The Republican Party brain trust, such as it is, desperately needs to
find a way to talk Bush off the ledge, pry him away from his neocon
delusions and Darth Cheney, and persuade him to cut his losses. But how?
Enter James Baker, GOP wise man and old Bush family counselor. Baker,
who served as the elder Bush’s secretary of state and secretary of
treasury, is a consummate fix-it man, a kind of cross between Tom Hagen,
Michael Corleone’s consigliere in “The Godfather,” and Mr. Wolf, the
hipster cleanup dude in “Pulp Fiction.” It was Baker who pulled Bush’s
chestnuts out of the fire after the 2000 elections, when he appeared on
television to declaim, with the icy authority of a junta colonel, that
“the votes have been counted again and again.”
Now Baker has put on his bipartisan hat to co-head the Iraq Study Group,
a bipartisan commission of foreign-policy experts that was created by
Congress in March, with Bush’s approval, to look for new solutions to
the Iraq mess. The commission is not releasing its report until after
the November elections, implausibly claiming that it doesn’t want to
politicize them. But a leak campaign to the media has made it pretty
clear what the report is going to say — and it is not going to be music
to Bush’s ears.
Baker’s report, according to reports in the New York Sun and the Sunday
Times, will rule out the possibility of “victory” in Iraq. Instead, it
will recommend that the U.S. either simply withdraw or try to cut some
kind of deal with the insurgents that could provide a modicum of
security and stability in the country. The United States should abandon
dreams of democracy. Instead, it should search for anything that will
minimize the damage — whether installing a strongman or a junta, or
splitting the country into three parts. It should negotiate with Iraq’s
neighbors, including Iran and Syria. Left unspoken is the obvious larger
point: The U.S. mission has failed, and once we do everything we can to
prevent Iraq from descending into a hellish civil war, we should get
out.
For Bush, the Baker report will be about as welcome as an invitation to
attend a two-week Earth First teach-in in Berkeley. Following these
recommendations would mean changing his policy in radical and
humiliating ways. No matter how he tries to spin it, pulling U.S. troops
out when Iraq is still in meltdown will make his policy
indistinguishable from the one proposed by Democrats — and which he,
Cheney and Rumsfeld have been virulently denouncing as appeasement and
surrender to evildoers. Having just claimed that the war in Iraq is “the
calling of our generation” and the equivalent of World War II, it’s
going to be hard for Bush to suddenly say, “Never mind!”
[NOTE FROM ME: A historical note. At the moment America was
dragged into WWII, the two mightiest military machines on the
face of the Earth were the German and the Japanese. It may be
difficult for young people to grasp the reality that America,
on Dec. 7, 1941, had a military that was not much more than a
National Guard. It took FDR less time to turn this country
into a industrial war-making machine and gear up the military
to beat the Germans and the Japanese than it has taken Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld — with the mightiest military the world
has ever known — to beat some insurgents in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Which they haven’t even managed to do. In neither
Iraq nor Afghanistan, is there even a national army facing us,
just a bunch of self-organized insurgents. Shame on Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld … they are all bluster and no brains.]
Even worse, there is no guarantee that any of these new tactics would
work — in fact, they could easily make things even worse.
In short, Baker’s report will be a heaping plate of crow. The big
question is: Will Bush be able to bring himself to eat it — especially
since it’s being served up by an emissary of his father?
Baker may have saved Bush after the Florida debacle, but in every other
way he represents the clammy and unwelcome hand of Bush’s dad, also
known as 41 (a reference to his being the 41st president). Baker is not
just close to Bush senior, he shares his approach to foreign policy —
one that the younger Bush, aka 43, has completely rejected. Baker, like
his old boss, is a so-called realist, who regards 43’s neoconservative
messianism about “transforming the Middle East” as dangerously
delusional. Baker strongly opposed George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, and
clearly believes that 43’s neoconservative Mideast policy, with its
overwhelmingly pro-Israeli tilt and its hard line toward Iran and Syria,
is misguided. In 1992, Baker delivered one of the most stinging rebukes
ever given to Israel by any U.S. administration, telling Yitzhak Shamir
that the United States would not honor $10 billion in loan guarantees
unless Israel stopped building settlements in the occupied territories.
Although 41 has quite properly refused to criticize his son, it is clear
that he shares Baker’s views of the Iraq war and 43’s Mideast policies.
In his new book, “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward quotes Barbara Bush as
saying of the impending war, “Well, his father is certainly worried and
is losing sleep over it.” But according to Woodward, the father did not
want to butt in. When Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United
States, asked Bush why he didn’t talk to his son about his concerns, he
replied, “I had my turn. It is his turn now. I just have to stay off the
stage.”
For his part, the younger Bush has kept his father at arm’s length. In
his 2004 book “Plan of Attack,” Woodward asked Bush whether he had ever
asked his father, whose decades of foreign policy expertise dwarfed his
own blank résumé, for advice about the war. Bush replied he hadn’t,
saying — frighteningly — that the Iraq war was not like Gulf War I,
but “is part of a larger obligation that came to be on Sept. the 11th,
2001.” He then added the now-famous quote, “You know, he is the wrong
father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that
I appeal to.” (In the same conversation, Bush said of the war, “I
haven’t suffered doubts.”) In “State of Denial,” Woodward quotes Sen.
John McCain as saying of Bush, “One time he said, ‘I don’t want to be
like my father. I want to be like Ronald Reagan.'”
One could speculate endlessly about the relationship between the two
Bushes. Woodward presents it as loving but oddly constrained. It is
reasonable to believe that 43, whose nepotistic, crony-assisted career
until he became president was far from illustrious, felt that he needed
to strike out on a new path to be his own man and prove his worth. (The
legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh mockingly calls 43 a
“rebel with a bedtime.”) Bush’s well-documented lack of intellectual
curiosity also probably played a role in his lack of interest in
communicating with his father: If you already know the answer, are in
touch with the higher father, don’t have any doubts, and don’t want to
think about alternatives, why bother? Whatever the reasons, Bush has
rejected his father’s moderation in order to strike out on a radical new
course.
This is true of many areas, but perhaps most strikingly so of Bush’s
Middle East policies. As Ron Suskind reports in “The Price of Loyalty,”
his book about Paul O’Neill’s ill-fated tenure as Bush’s treasury
secretary, at the very first meeting of his National Security Council,
on Jan. 30, 2001, just 10 days after his inauguration, Bush announced,
“We’re going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on
the Mideast conflict. We’re going to tilt it back toward Israel.” When
Secretary of State Colin Powell warned that abandoning attempts to be
evenhanded and simply unleashing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
could have dire consequences, especially for the Palestinians, Bush
replied, “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify
things.”
Bush has followed that philosophy not just in the Israeli-Palestinian
crisis but also in Iraq. The Iraq war was driven by the neoconservative
belief that 9/11 proved that the status quo was no longer acceptable,
and the way to change the region was to pound Arab evildoers until they
saw the error of their ways. It didn’t matter which Arab evildoer was
being pounded — any one would do, and Saddam was convenient. This credo
was summed up by Bush’s close advisor Henry Kissinger, who according to
Woodward told Bush’s speechwriter, “We need to humiliate them.”
The verdict on a war based on that bizarre ideology is now in — and
Baker is about to deliver it. It cannot be pleasant for George W. Bush
to be told that his “lower” father really did know best.
Will Bush listen to Baker, take his political punishment and begin the
agonizing process of winding down the Iraq war? At his press conference
last week, Bush was told that Baker had said a change in strategy might
be needed, and was asked if he would be willing to change. Bush said,
“We’re constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal. Our
strategic goal is a country which can defend itself, sustain itself and
govern itself.”
The problem is, what Baker is likely to recommend goes far beyond mere
tactics. And even the strategic goal of a stable Iraq may simply not be
attainable — Iraq may no longer be salvageable. If there was any
obvious way to sugarcoat Baker’s proposals so as to make them seem less
like a surrender and more like a tactical adjustment, Bush would be more
likely to embrace them. After all, Bush has made substantial policy
shifts before and gotten away with it. No one was outraged, for example,
when he reached out to the Sunni insurgents whom he had denounced just
months before as terrorists. But this change would be an order of
magnitude bigger, and there’s no way to spin it. It would amount to an
admission that the entire war had been a mistake. There is nothing in
Bush’s history to suggest he is capable of making such an admission.
On the other hand, Bush has a powerful incentive to embrace Baker’s
plan: politics. As Robert Dreyfuss points out in The Washington Monthly,
“If — and it’s a very big if — Baker can forge a consensus plan on
what to do about Iraq among the bigwigs on his commission, many of them
leading foreign-policy figures in the Democratic Party, then the 2008
Democratic presidential nominee — whoever he (or she) is — will have a
hard time dismissing the plan. And if the GOP nominee also embraces the
plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining
issue of the 2008 race — a potentially huge advantage for Republicans.”
It’s hard to believe that Bush, who is nothing if not a shrewd and
cutthroat politician, doesn’t want to take Iraq off the table. Of course
he would take a big short-term hit for cutting and running, but
declaring victory and getting out is a time-honored political move, and
Bush might get away with it.
But this may be bigger than politics. Beyond the Oedipal dimension, Bush
has staked his entire presidency on this war, and he really seems to be
utterly convinced of the righteousness of his cause. According to
Woodward, he and his neocon brain trust see the battle against Islamic
extremism lasting two generations, and he believes it is his sacred duty
to stand and fight.
Baker’s report will be an irresistible force, colliding with the
immovable object that is George W. Bush. Something will have to give.
But what?
Read this at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2006/10/17/baker/print.html
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