DICK CHENEY IS AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Dick was preaching to the choir today.
And he was preaching the same old sermon (Not the Sermon on the Mount).
Dick isn't shooting any lawyers these days, but he is shooting off his mouth about pouring more blood into the sands of Iraq.
Afghanistan should be the central focus of the U.S. empire and its mighty military right now, but Dick and The Decider want to continue to jog on their tragic treadmill of insanity.
Dick is beholdin' to Halliburton, so the "show" must go on in Iraq.
Dick, as so many have already noted, is quite delusional.
But both The Long War President and Dick are in massive states of denial.
The Decider's approval rating is 29%.
Maybe there should be a Federal Law that says a president must resign when his approval rating dips below 30%.
In some countries the populace might have already gotten rid of a big, lying leader who took their money to start an unnecessary war.
But Americans are glued to the Wheel of Fortune and American Idol (or dozens of other vapid programs).
Forget any revolts.
Bush and Dick will never resign, nor quit the mess that they generated in Iraq.
They will just make others the heirs to their errors.
Both are quite content to leave office in 2008 with their nefarious nest eggs, and leave the quagmires to a new administration.
Some gifts just keep on giving.

First, although it has a familiar and thus unsatisfying ring to it, the most viable long-term route to preventing mass atrocities is to use remaining U.S. leverage to bring about a political compromise that makes Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds feel economically stable, physically secure and adequately represented in political structures. This is consistent with the position of leading U.S. generals and the members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, who have stressed that there is no military solution to Iraq's meltdown and urged the administration, the Iraqis and regional players to reopen broad-ranging political negotiations.
Although critics of withdrawal do a masterful job of painting a grim picture of the apocalypse that awaits, they offer no account of how U.S. forces in Iraq will do more than preserve a status quo that is already deteriorating into wholesale ethnic cleansing. Although more than 115,000 U.S. troops have been in Iraq for the last four years, about 3.8 million Iraqis have fled their homes and at least 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month. It would be nice to think the surge of troops to Baghdad would help to staunch the flow. But with only one-third of the new troops on duty at any given time in a city of 6 million people, they will have no more success deterring the militias intent on carving out homogeneous Shiite or Sunni neighborhoods than U.S. forces have had to date. About 74% of Shiites polled and 91% of Sunnis — the people who have the most to fear from genocide — would like to see U.S. forces gone by the end of the year.
Many of those who say U.S. troops should stay in Iraq to prevent genocide are the same people who for political reasons refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the calamity unfolding on our watch. The same people who modeled a war on best-case scenarios are now resisting ending a war by invoking worst-case scenarios. But after years of using the alleged needs of the Iraqi people to justify U.S. political postures, it is long past time to use the leverage we still have to actually advance Iraqi welfare.From How to stop genocide in Iraq
Offering the carrot of U.S. withdrawal may be the best way to end ethnic cleansing in Iraq.

By Samantha Power/latimes.com/March 5, 2007
[SAMANTHA POWER, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning " 'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide."]


IT'S THE OIL STUPID!