Survey: 76 per cent of Americans support defense spending cuts

 The Air Force Times reports on a survey of 665 Americans on defense spending. The survey was conducted by the Program for Public Consultation, the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity.
   While a majority do not support cutting pay raises, they do want to raise some health cost related fees and even cut military retirement benefits. While Republican politicians often oppose defense spending cuts their base may not actually share that view.
   Democrats are more in favor of cuts than Republicans but more than two thirds of those in Republican congressional districts supported cuts. Those in Republican districts supported a cut of 15 per cent on average while Democratic districts supported on average a much larger 28 per cent cut.
   Americans both in Republican and Democratic districts believe that there is waste in the defense budget. Eighty per cent polled in Republican districts and eighty six per cent in Democrat districts held this view. On this issue there is obviously bipartisan support among Americans if not politicians. Only 15 per cent in Republican districts want the defense budget increased and a mere 4 per cent in Democratic districts. For much more see this article.

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Pelosi did not object to waterboarding in 2002

The Democrats are creatures of the moment moving with the winds except where the winds are definitely against their basic principles such as supporting US imperialism. On minor matters such as torture, opportunism based upon polls and weaknesses in Republican policy are the norm. At least a late howl is better than staying mute or even supporting the practice. This is from rawstory.


Secretly briefed, Pelosi did not object to waterboarding in 2002John Byrne
Published: Sunday December 9, 2007










Pelosi would later boot sole objector to program from chance to chair Intelligence Committee

Two senior Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- were briefing on the CIA's program to use waterboarding on terror suspects in September 2002 and did not object, according to Sunday's Washington Post.

In the long-ranging article, which seemingly takes the lawmakers and the Bush Administration to task by discussing the practice's emergence in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian states, a Pelosi aide said the Speaker remembered discussion of "enhanced" interrogation techniques and "acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."

"In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody," the Post wrote. "For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."

"Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill," the Post added. "But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said."

Democrats Aim to Reframe Iraq Debate

By implication the bi=partisan approach will involve dropping any reference to specific withdrawal dates. The Democrats are just flailing around with no tough strategy at all, a complete cave-in. Why would anyone vote for them and think that they were getting a real alternative. One of these decades perhaps the US two party, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum system will break down. The strident partisan debate in the US always strikes me as surreal. It is as if there were a tremendously significant difference between the two parties instead of marginal differences. The differences are a form of "branding" but with essentially similar products that need to be distinguished to be marketed.

NY Times, September 5, 2007
Democrats Aim to Reframe Iraq Debate
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — As Congress reopened for business on Tuesday,
the
Democratic leadership promised to force a change in President Bush’s
war
strategy, and lawmakers maneuvered to frame the debate over Iraq ahead
of reports next week by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C.
Crocker.

“Many of my Republican friends have long held September as the month
for
the policy change in Iraq,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the
Democratic
majority leader, said in his opening speech on the Senate floor.
“It’s
September.”

“The calendar hasn’t changed,” he said. “It’s time to make a
decision.
We can’t continue the way we are.”

Mr. Reid’s speech, which included sharp criticism of President Bush,
reflected an aggressive effort by the Democrats to shape the discourse
over the war before General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testify.

Aides said Senator Reid was trying to signal a new willingness to
compromise across party lines when he called on Republicans to join in
finding a way “to responsibly end this war.” Such a deal would
almost
certainly require Mr. Reid to drop his demand for a fixed deadline for
withdrawal, which brought the Senate to an impasse on the war in July.

In a hearing later in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, war
critics seized on a new report by the Government Accountability Office
showing virtually no political progress by the Iraqi government as the
latest evidence that the president’s military strategy was failing.

It is too soon to say how far either side in the deeply divided
Congress
is willing to bend, and the hearing before the Senate committee, which
is not as sharply partisan as the full Senate, offered few clues.

The report on Iraq that was presented there, while scarcely a glowing
assessment, was noticeably rosier than a draft version that began to
circulate last week, which found that Iraq had fallen short on 13 of
the
18 standards for progress, partly meeting two. The Pentagon disputed
that finding, saying it was too cut-and-dried a depiction of a fluid
and
complex situation.

The final version, released Tuesday, found that 3 of 18 benchmarks had
been met and 4 others had been partly met. It was written by David M.
Walker, comptroller general of the United States, who testified at the
hearing.

“It is hard to draw any assessment except that there is a failing
grade
for a policy that is still not working,” said Senator John Kerry,
Democrat of Massachusetts, who ran the hearing in the absence of the
committee chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who is
running for president and will go to Iraq this week.

Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, suggested that the
report
did not include data from August and that more recent numbers presented

a more positive picture. “The data in August, I think, would be very
clear about the reduction in violence,” Mr. Coleman told Mr. Walker.

But some Republican committee members, including the ranking member,
Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, said they accepted the report as an
independent accounting of the Iraqi government’s performance to date.

And Mr. Lugar, one of the Senate’s top experts on foreign affairs,
raised some broad and probing questions about the overall prospects for

success in Iraq, including the possibility that Iraqis did not really
want a unified government.

“Do Iraqis want to be Iraqis?” Mr. Lugar asked. “Is there a sense
of
those 25 million people that they want to be one nation, as opposed to
some Iraqis wanting to dominate the whole lot?” He added, “If the
answer
to that question is that, fundamentally, Iraqis have not come to the
conclusion they want to be Iraqis, then we have an awesome problem.”

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, there were growing signs — some subtle,
others shrill — that lawmakers were growing frustrated with
partisanship
and increasingly eager for a change of direction in Iraq that would
signal progress to American voters.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader,
who
urged in his opening speech on Tuesday that Congress wait for General
Petraeus and “listen to what he says without prejudice,” also
sounded a
note of bipartisanship. At a separate news conference he said that he
envisioned a long-term American military presence in the Middle East
but
perhaps not in Iraq.

“I would like to see us with at least some level of bipartisan
agreement
that we need a long-term deployment somewhere in the Middle East in the

future for two reasons: Al Qaeda and Iran,” he said.

And in a letter to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the minority
leader, John A. Boehner, 11 lawmakers — six Republicans and five
Democrats — urged cooperation in developing a new war strategy.

“We ask that you, our leaders, work together to put an end to the
political infighting over the war in Iraq, and allow the House to unite

behind a bipartisan strategy to stabilize the country and bring our
troops home,” the members wrote.

The letter was publicized after Representative Boehner, Republican of
Ohio, issued a strongly worded statement criticizing the G.A.O. report.

He called it “an unfair way to judge our troops’ progress,”
adding, “The
report was designed to guarantee an unsatisfactory result.”

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat and the House
majority leader, issued an equally biting statement, saying the report
“confirms what the large majority of Americans already know: the
president’s stay-the-course policy in Iraq is not working.”

The renewed push-and-pull over Iraq occurred as Congress returned from
a
four-week recess that was in many ways more tumultuous than relaxing.

At his news conference, Mr. McConnell spent much of the time taking
questions about Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho, who announced his
resignation after the disclosure that he pleaded guilty to a disorderly

conduct charge after being arrested by a police officer cracking down
on
sexual activity in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

The absence of Mr. Craig, who did not return to Washington even though
his resignation is not effective until Sept. 30, and the expected
return
Wednesday of Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, who had
been
recovering from a brain hemorrhage that he suffered last December,
effectively widened the Democrats’ slim majority, though they are
still
well shy of the 60 votes needed in the Senate for most bills to move
forward.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting

The Democrats Get Hawkish

This is from Spiegel On Line. The sad truth is that neither of the two main US parties disagree about continuing the US aggressive foreign policy that continues to cost it billions and may just eventually cause the US economy to collapse from the weight of military expenditures. Military Keynesianism will not work indefinitely to expand the economy. Already the US dollar is plunging in value, American individual debt load is staggering and government debt is growing. Needed infrastructure expenditures have long been delayed to finance military adventures. The departure of Bush will not make all that much difference to US policy.


The Democrats Get Hawkish
By Gabor Steingart in Washington, D.C.

The American people may want to get rid of Bush, but they in no way want to risk losing the war on terror. The consequences: America's Democrats are seeking to position themselves as being more hawkish than the Republicans and Congress has just approved the biggest military budget ever.


AFP
Opponents Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: Voters want a candidate tough enough to fight a multifront war.
Newt Gingrich was more than satisfied. The archbishop of America's conservatives was purring like a cat when he appeared at a luncheon with foreign journalists. Better yet, a cat that had just devoured a couple of mice.

Gingrich's mice are Democrats who have recently begun challenging wartime President George W. Bush by trying to beat him at his own game. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama had just raised the issue of terrorist cells in Pakistan and suggested the idea of a US military attack on the nuclear state. "If Musharraf won't act, we will," he told an audience at Washington's Wilson Center. With that kind of rhetoric, the Democrats' new shining hope might as well be called Barack Bush-Obama.


FROM THE MAGAZINE
Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. A man like Gingrich, who has conveniently replaced the now-defunct image of the Soviet communists as his public enemy No. 1 with that of the Islamic fanatic, should feel vindicated. In fact, he even praised -- patronizingly, of course -- the young senator, saying that what Obama had to say about Pakistan was spot on. Gingrich is pleased to see a political adversary calling for a new military campaign when everyone else these days is talking about withdrawal. Pakistan, said Gingrich, "is enormously dangerous ... we need to have a strategy for Pakistan." Of course, when someone like Gingrich talks strategy he really means the use of missiles, mortars and flamethrowers.

The wind has shifted in Washington. America, not just its president, is at war. The Democrats are still critical of the failed Iraq campaign, but they are no longer opposed to the "War on Terror" in general. It has been accepted, and not just as a metaphor.

Hunt for Bin Laden 'Not Aggressive Enough'

Opinion polls have shown consistently for months that while most Americans disapprove of Bush, very few are opposed to the worldwide fight against terrorism. Most Americans believe that the campaign against al-Qaida and its ilk is the only conceivable -- in fact, the natural -- reaction against the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The president is not faulted for his declaration of war against the terrorists, but he is blamed for having botched the war in Iraq.


ABOUT GABOR STEINGART
MARCO- URBAN.DEGabor Steingart, 45, has been a journalist for SPIEGEL since 1990. He is currently reporting from SPIEGEL's Washington, D.C. bureau. His best- selling book "The War for Wealth" will be published in the United States in April 2008. Ninety-two percent of Americans are opposed to an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a majority doesn't want to see the US's special detention camp at Guantanamo Bay closed. At the moment, the American electorate's biggest criticism of Bush is that he has "not been aggressive enough" in pursuing terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

The results of opinion polls weigh heavily in the third-largest nation on earth, a country spanning four climate zones. Politicians, no matter how affable, are simply incapable of fully gauging public opinion by meeting with their constituents or making local campaign appearances. In a country as vast as America, professional pollsters play a more important role than anyplace else on earth, especially with elections just around the corner.

The candidate Americans elect to be their next president in November 2008 will serve a parallel role as commander-in-chief of the US military, a position that affords the president virtually totalitarian powers to shape policy.

Who Is Tough Enough for the Job?

Indeed, when voters hit the ballot box in November 2008, they will be looking for more than just a candidate charismatic and clever enough to lead the country politically. They will also ask themselves which of the candidates is sufficiently tough, crafty and brutal to win the multi-front war that the Bush administration has begun.

In these early weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign, the candidates from the two major parties are literally vying for the distinction of being the most crafty and pugnacious of the lot in the public eye. The Republicans, especially former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have kept their steel-plated combat armor on. Their take on the fight against terrorism is to up the ante. Giuliani is fond of saying: "Weakness produces aggression."


REUTERS
U.S. President George W. Bush Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai at Camp David: Is Bush still even a conservative?
Anyone who hopes to win the support of middle America -- geographically, sociologically and politically -- has to perform a balancing act of appearing capable of leading the country in war while at the same time not coming across as too eager to fight. Americans want a strong leader, a tough decision maker, not an adventurer. The worst charge one could hurl at a presidential candidate these days is that he or she is soft on terrorism.

In this atmosphere, even the Democratic presidential candidates are lining up to show their support for the troops. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, African-American presidential candidate Barack Obama writes that the US military urgently needs "revitalization." More than any other candidate, Obama insists that a strong military machine is necessary to preserve peace.

Left-leaning Democrat John Edwards, a lawyer who earned a fortune arguing class-action lawsuits, is taking pains to hold his own on national security. Edwards has said that he favors spending more money on special counterterrorism units within the military and CIA. "There is no doubt in my mind," Edwards said, "that we must confront the terrorists with the full force of our military."



New York Senator Hillary Clinton agrees. But what exactly is the "full force" of the American military? Clinton was recently asked whether this also means the use of nuclear weapons. She responded that she would not rule it out, knowing that the question is seen as a test of strength for every presidential candidate.

Given that shrugging and vacillation are seen as a sign of weakness, though, Clinton added: "Presidents have used the nuclear deterrent ever since the Cold War ... I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons."

But during a Senate debate over Iran some time ago, Clinton said that the government should "take nuclear weapons off the table." The explanation a spokesman for her campaign team provides for her change of heart is as straightforward as it is obvious: She wasn't speaking as a presidential candidate at the time.

Upon closer inspection, the time plan Clinton has proposed for a gradual US troop withdrawal from Iraq also proves not to be a call for an end to combat operations, but merely as a new chapter in the fight against terrorism. The architects of this withdrawal plan see it as a joint effort with regional Kurd, Sunni and Shiite leaders, as well as the regular Iraqi army. In fact, the plan calls for expanding all Iraqi forces.

No Signs of War Fatigue

The intended result is that tomorrow's dead would no longer be America's dead -- a renaissance of the classic proxy war.

The clearest reflection of this expansion of the combat zone is the American military budget, which has almost doubled -- to $500 billion annually -- during the course of the Bush years. "This level of military spending will endure, both economically and politically," predicts conservative essayist Robert Kagan.

It has been five years since the attack on the World Trade Center, and yet the majority of Americans are still far from disenchanted with the war. But they are deeply dissatisfied with the way the war is going.


AFP
A US soldier in Iraq: "Weakness just encourages aggression"
Many Americans now despise Bush, who not only fabricated the reasons for going to war in the first place ("weapons of mass destruction") but also falsely claimed, with his now-famous "Mission Accomplished" speech, that the war had ended when in fact it had not. Nevertheless, Americans are still loath to admit defeat.

This is precisely what distinguishes Europeans from Americans. After experiencing the horrors of two world wars, the nations on the Old Continent prefer the power of diplomacy. The Americans favor the power of force, even in its crudest form, which explains why US military might is so superior to that of all other nations. The country spends 10 times as much on its military budget as Great Britain.

A Major Roll for Preventative Wars

Even the American left, which refers to itself as "liberal," has no fundamental objection to the men and women in uniform. Indeed, US liberals are especially fond of a strategy Germans consider obscene: preventive war.

This has nothing to do with a "conservative revolution," but a lot to do with Germany itself, or, more specifically, Nazi Germany. It was Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, who drew a conclusion from the events of the day that was as logical as it was disturbing: A preventive occupation of Germany in 1938, which would have been a year before Hitler started the war, could have spared the world another world war and the Jews the concentration camps.

This concept of preventive attack has not lost any of its appeal in America. It plays an important role in the debate within the American left over the pros and cons of military invasions of Iran and Darfur. Obama has now weighed in on this debate.


AP
An anti-American protest in Pakistan: Is rooting out terrorists in the country a matter for militaries or intelligence agencies?
In his speech at the Wilson Center, Obama said that terrorist activity in northwestern Pakistan poses the greatest threat to America's security. "Al-Qaida terrorists train, travel and maintain global communications in this safe haven," he said, adding a thinly veiled threat to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf: "It's a tough place. But that is no excuse. There must be no safe haven for terrorists who threaten America. We cannot fail to act because action is hard." As the commander-in-chief of the US military, Obama said, he would not hesitate "to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America."

Co-opting the Arguments of Political Adversaries

And there it was. It took President Bush, who, in his earlier days, would have been just as likely to recommend such preventive attacks on the territory of sovereign nations, a few days to come up with a response. When he did, it was to say that finding terrorists in Pakistan is a matter for the intelligence agencies, not the military.

But the lame duck commander-in-chief found himself pretty much alone with his politically astute admission. Senator Joe Biden, the old master of Democratic foreign policy, said that this is the sort of thing a government does -- but doesn't announce publicly. At a campaign appearance in Chicago, Hillary Clinton responded to the president's comment by saying: "It was a big mistake, blurting it out like that."


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To shore up her own national security credentials, Senator Clinton made sure early on that she would be appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where she gained a reputation as a strong proponent of military strength. She has also visited Baghdad once -- in the company of right-wing Republican John McCain.

But there is one question that remains unanswered, at least for now: Who in fact benefits from this strategy of co-opting the arguments of political adversaries? Who will emerge as the winner if the candidate's basic positions are so similar?

Newt Gingrich thinks he already knows the answer: the Republicans. At least, he says, they would stand a solid chance of winning the race for the White House if there is a shift in the public mood. Gingrich firmly believes that one of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's principles still holds true today: "First you win the argument, then you win the vote."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan




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Dealing Democrats

Another article about the Democrat betrayal of the peace movement. The Democrats are truly a pitiful party. The best solution for activists would be to work outside the political system or try to form a third party. Boring from within will have only the result that activists will be bored to death or exhausted without achieving much of anything.

Dealing Democrats
By JEAN DANIELS

President Bush can meet with family friend, Prince Bandar while Vice President Cheney meets with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, but neither leader are able to meet with Cindy Sheehan and the mothers who ask to know why their children have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress, the Democrats in particular dealt Cindy and the families of these soldiers another blow. Instead of voting-all the democrats voting against this 120 billion dollar spending bill lacking any deadline for troop withdrawal, the Democrats, as Cindy writes in her open letter to the Congress and the American public, May 28, 2007, handed the Bush administration more money for political expediency. "It is a moral abomination and every second the occupation of Iraq endures, you all have more blood on your hands."

The country was lied to by this administration.

The country has witnessed the unraveling of the Halliburton and Blackwater scheme for war profits.

We have had Katrina and a despicable response from the administration before and after the hurricane.

Eight million dollars sent to Iraq, handed over to the Iraqi "government" under Paul Brenner's control, is missing. It is a good possibility that this money was distributed as treats to hands held out, including the hands of El-Qaeda and other insurgent groups who, in turn, are maiming and killing U.S. soldiers.

What deal have the Democrats made with the Bush administration?

Over 3000 soldiers have died without the media in this country covering their return home. The President has not attended one funeral. Over 50, 000 wounded soldiers are returning to no homes and are ending up on the streets. Many are coming back to wives who are stressed out from trying to care for children while they face the possibility of foreclosures on their homes and or farms. More soldiers are suffering from devastating injuries, particularly brain trauma, requiring life-long care. Others are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Did I mention the criminal conditions suffered by returning Vets at Walter reed Hospital right there in Washington D.C.?

Teaching people to kill-to shape an "enemy" in their minds rather than incubate or foster ideas for living with others has resulted in soldiers returning home and seeing wives and other family members as the enemy. When those responsible for leading this country, betrays its military for oil profits for the few and an idea of world control for mega-corporations, should the American public speak up in outrage? Shouldn't all of America have joined Cindy in demanding accountability to the countless deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens alike? Shouldn't the Democrats have done more than capitulate to Bush's spending of billions for war?

Families have lost mothers and children have lost parents. These young soldiers serve as fodder for the war machine, and like the victims of Katrina, know something suffering governmental indifference.

Even if a soldier does not lose his or her life, they lose in the long run while Bush, Cheney, Rice, Halliburton, Blackwater trip over the money bags on the way to Swiss banks. They and their friends are the ones who are thought of when contracts worth billions pass from one hand to the other, when control of the "globalization" of the world is the only idea worth considering.

The atmosphere in this country for the right to dissent is as cruel and as brutal as the activities at detention campus operated by the U.S. in its "war on terror."

This "war on terror" has successfully produced terror! Read and try to feel the terror as Cindy writes of the "thousands of broken hearts." "How do you put behind you the screaming mothers on both sides of the conflict? How does the agony you have created escape you? It will never escape me I can't run far enough to get away from it."

The Democrats did not do it! They did not listen to Cindy or those mothers or the American people who gave them their vote last November. They did not do it!

Cindy wrote that the Camp Casey Peace Institution will meet in Philadelphia on July 4th "to try and figure out this 'two' party system that is brought and paid for by the war machine which has a stranglehold on every aspect of our lives." Cindy is leaving the Democratic Party because to stay with the Democrats is to "stay the course" of disaster lead by the Republican administration.

She is leaving the Democratic Party, for they "have failed" those who put them in power "to change the direction our country is heading."

"We did not elect you to help sink our ship of state but to guide it to safe harborWe gave you a chance, you betrayed us."

Dr. Jean Daniels lives in Madison, Wisconson and writes a column for the City Capital Hues and the Black Commentator. Email: Darlkofi2002@yahoo.com

Democrats: A Symbolic Opposition

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/nyt1_10_7_1.htm


While the US public wants significant change in Iraq and withdrawal of troops the Bush administration is presenting the stay the course plan wrapped in new packaging. The Democrats instead of mounting a real attack and forcing a change in policy are content to make symbolic gestures through non-binding resolutions against the policy.