This is how it starts:

US 'seizes Iranian group in Iraq'
Seven Iranians working for the Iranian Electricity Ministry have been arrested by US forces in Baghdad, the Iranian embassy says.
A spokesman told the BBC the embassy had contacted the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs and would send a formal protest letter in the morning.

He said the Iranians were in Baghdad in connection with the building of a power station.

The group were detained at the Sheraton Hotel where they were staying.

Video footage showed soldiers leading a group of men, blindfolded and handcuffed, out of the hotel in central Baghdad.

Other soldiers were seen leaving the hotel carrying what appeared to be luggage and a laptop computer bag.

The arrests come shortly after a speech by US President George W Bush in which he criticised Iranian interference in Iraq.

Tension between the US and Iran is running high - with the US accusing Iran of providing arms, money and military training to Shia insurgents in Iraq.

President Bush specifically stated that he had authorised his military commanders in Iraq to confront what he called "Iran's murderous activities" in the country.

Earlier the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that American power in Iraq was on the verge of collapse and this would lead to a huge vacuum which Iran would be willing to fill.

In January, five Iranians - who the US say are linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard and were training militants in Iraq - were captured in the northern city of Irbil.

The five remain in US custody.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/in_depth/6967850.stm

Published: 2007/08/28 21:34:47 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Let me make clear that I do not know the details of this case, these "electricians" (too bad it's not plumbers) may well have had other "duties". I address that in my previous post. My point here is simply that it is looking very much like war with Iran is next on the agenda. And that's not a good thing.

"Bush warns Iran over insurgents
US President George W Bush has warned Iran to stop supporting the militants fighting against the US in Iraq.
In a speech to US war veterans in Reno, Nevada, Mr Bush renewed charges that Tehran has provided training and weapons for extremists in Iraq.

"The Iranian regime must halt these actions," he said."

This is the kind of situation a country can easily find itself in when it sets out to remake a region. I know the Bush team did a poor job of planning for the post-invasion situation, expecting to be greeted as liberators and all, but they have had four years plus to adjust to the realities of the situation. Do they really expect the other countries of the region to "butt out"? Seriously?

Everybody in the region should just stand by while we prop up a puppet regime that has virtually no popular support until we get what we want. Which is, of course, control. Of the oil, of their political process, what am I leaving out?

Word to Mr. Bush: It's not our country! We have no business there! We never did! Osama is in Pakistan! You talk about respecting their sovereignty as a reason for not going after him there, hello! That's a pretty good reason for staying out of other countries and their internal affairs in general. Did you maybe get this one backwards?

"Earlier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned that US authority in the region was rapidly collapsing, and Iran would help fill the void.

"Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region," Mr Ahmadinejad said.

"Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbours and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation."

Well the Bushies only know one way to deal with something like this. You know what that way is, right? Attack! Of course they have our forces stretched pretty thin already, but...

But what? Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran? Doesn't take many troops. It would be "easy" to do. We certainly have the planes, the flight crews and the bombs. What's to stop us?

Well, not that the Bushies care, but a massive bombing campaign would kill a lot of innocents, women, children, old people, even men that aren't "terrorists". It would also further the idea that we are the world's biggest bully, which probably isn't the best way to present ourselves. If we really want to head off terrorism and make the world a better, safer place for peace-loving people, which the last I heard we were still professing to be, wouldn't it make more sense, and be more morally defensible, to seek a peaceful resolution? Is now maybe the time for the U.N. to step in, to bring all parties to the table, to determine what is best for the people of Iraq and for the region as a whole (and not worry about what is best for the U.S. as its first priority)?

We got into this mess by rushing in with our military, asking no questions, U.N. be damned, just take what we want by force. Where has that gotten us? The brink of WWIII? I certainly hope not but what if Iran doesn't just roll over and withdraw? (This is assuming that they actually are playing a role in arming, training, supporting insurgents, which I have little doubt of). Of course we may well have armed about 190,000 of them, let's not forget that.

"In his speech to the American Legion, Mr Bush hit back, accusing Iran's Revolutionary Guards of funding and arming insurgents in Iraq.

"And he said Iran's leaders could not avoid some responsibility for attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

"I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities," he said.

"In a wide-ranging speech, Mr Bush also tackled the issue of Iran's nuclear ambition - which Tehran insists is solely to provide power, but the US believes may be used to develop weapons.

"Mr Bush said Tehran's pursuit of nuclear technology threatened to put the Middle East "under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust".

Some might say that the shadow exists already because of our involvement. We're involved. We have very little left to commit in the way of ground forces. We're threatening to take further action.

Indeed, isn't the fact that we have the world's biggest and most awe-inspiring nuclear arsenal most of the reason we behave on the world stage with such a large chip on our shoulder?

We act like everybody has to just accept what we say because if they don't, we'll just nuke them out of existence, but guess what? This "new enemy" isn't afraid of that. Hell, I think they are hoping for that. They are hard to pinpoint, their so-called leaders anyway, and they have a decent chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust and emerging to point a condemning finger at us. Look what the evil empire just did, nuked a whole bunch of civilians.

Are we really stupid enough to fall for that? I hope not, but...


Story from BBC NEWS Online

Gone: Wolfowitz (twice), Rumsfeld, Rove, Gonzales.

Still to go: Bush, Cheney.

Here's hoping.

President George W. Bush, in a speech at the annual convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City today, compared the current situation in Iraq to that in Vietnam 32 years ago, saying "The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens...", his point being, of course, that our withdrawal caused the deaths of "millions."

What about that?

This administration has previously chafed at any comparisons of the situation in Iraq with that of our attempt at "democratizing" Vietnam in the previous generation. I would guess that they would like to stop the analogy there but I don't think it works that way.

To understand our "pull-out" it is first necessary to understand what led us to that point.

There are still people who insist that we "could have won" if we would have been more united at home and "stayed the course' in Vietnam.

But what does that mean? Could have won what? We could have indefinitely continued to prop up a puppet government of a state created by us in 1954 and claimed that as some sort of triumph over "communism"?

Perhaps a chronology is called for at this point.

We could go back much farther but let's begin in 1945, the end of WWII. Japan, which had been occupying the country for almost a decade, was removed and it appeared possible that home-rule loomed for the Vietnamese people for the first time in over a century. France, however, had other ideas and moved quickly to reestablish the colonial rule they had been enjoying before the outbreak of WWII. They were aided, first with transport ships and soon with money, by the good old US of A. This despite the fact that during the war the U.S. "had been allied with the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese liberation movement led by Ho Chi Minh and had actually provided some arms to their guerrilla forces commanded by Vo Nguyen Giap. American fliers rescued by Giap's guerrillas testified to the rural population's enthusiasm for both the Viet Minh and America, which they saw as the champion of democracy, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.*

Were they wrong?

"In September of 1945 the Viet Minh issued the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which began with a long quotation from the U. S. Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The regional leaders of the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) and U.S. military forces joined in the celebration, with General Phillip Gallagher, chief of the U.S Military Advisory and Assistance Group (USMAAG), singing the Viet Minh's national anthem on Hanoi radio.*

Within two months the U.S.A. began changing its tune and actually diverted troop ships scheduled to bring American servicemen home from the war to transport American-armed French troops and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam.

Why?

And it gets worse.

By 1954 the "recolonization" wasn't going so well. The Vietnamese people weren't interested in being "colonized" and a war of suppression had ensued. The Viet Minh were skilled jungle fighters and victories for the French were few and far between. In 1954 their shocking loss at Dien Bien Phu and increasing dissatisfaction on the home front caused the French to abandon their attempt. Once again it looked like the Vietnamese people would have home-rule

But...

Ho Chi Minh was a bit farther to the left than the folks in the Eisenhower administration were comfortable with. He was, in fact, an avowed Communist and proposed to set up a government, should he win the proposed national election (and this appeared to be extremely likely), based upon the principles of Communism/Marxism.

So...

Why should the Eisenhower administration, or anybody else for that matter, care?

Well along about this time there was an idea floating around that came to be known as the "Domino Theory", an idea that if one country in Asia "fell" to Communism the rest would soon follow.

So it was decided that this could not be allowed to happen. The U.S. took it upon themselves to declare a Republic of South Vietnam and to install a Mr. Ngo Dinh Diem as its puppet ruler. This government never had any authority other than the artificial authority given it by the U.S. and it never had popular support. To say that it was doomed from the start is to state the obvious.

Years of civil war followed as the Viet Minh sought to unify the country under one leader and expel the foreign invaders (now us). Eventually, in 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a coup staged by the Kennedy administration and the CIA and control of the "State of South Vietnam" was put into the hands of U.S. picked generals (who ironically had trained in the north as anti-colonial fighters).

A gradual escalation of American involvement continued, especially after the American Presidential election of 1964, despite LBJ's persistent campaign pledges to "not send American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do."

Have I mentioned yet that there was protest on the home front and within the military right from those diverted troop ships in 1945 forward? So the decision was made to wage the war "in secret", to the extent that that was possible and to vilify the protesters as "unpatriotic". Sound familiar? This led to the creation of an "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to win congressional approval for an expansion and Americanization of the war, an incident which we now know to have been contrived by the Johnson administration.

From that point forward it was all-out war, waged by the United States of America against the people of Vietnam, a war that included saturation bombing of civilian targets, schools, hospitals, commercial buildings as well as
"defoliating" huge sections of jungle and dropping napalm on men, women and children.

We'll skip ahead a little through "Operation Phoenix", My Lai and "Operation Rolling Thunder", but I must mention the January 1968 "Tet Offensive", the point at which even the heretofore acquiescent mainstream media turned against the war. After Tet, with "victory" seemingly out of the question the discussion turned to what would be the terms for peace? You may be interested to know that the terms that were finally accepted by the Nixon administration in January of 1973 (after one last all-out bombing campaign beginning in December 1972) were the same terms that were put forward at Geneva in 1954 beginning with point number 1: "The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Viet-Nam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Viet-Nam."

The U.S. signed this agreement in 1973. Respect the sovereignty of Vietnam. That means leave. Some time was negotiated for a gradual pull-out but at some point we had to be gone. We could have taken anyone with us whom we wanted to and that wanted to come. We chose to leave everyone behind. Nobody made us do that but you see, it was never about the Vietnamese people, or even the South Vietnamese people. It was about American foreign policy and dominoes and "opposing communism" and after almost three decades that just wasn't reason enough to continue and evidently we felt no obligation to any "allies" over there. The "bloodbath" that followed with the "re-education camps" and the internments and executions etc. does not a make for a pretty image for the history books but consider what brought it on. Thirty years of American murder, rape and yes genocide perpetrated on the people of the Republic of Vietnam. How would we expect collaborators with something like that to be treated?

So Mr. President Bush, amateur historian and moralist, was it our withdrawal from Vietnam that caused the deaths of millions of innocents (actually an exaggerated figure by the way) or was it our entry into and occupation of and war of aggression in The Republic of Vietnam that actually caused the deaths of millions. And do you really want to be drawing an analogy between Iraq and Vietnam? And do you have a clue about any of this? I would love to hear from you.

A tax increase is being proposed in Wisconsin that would increase the price of cigarettes. Oh no! A lobbyist has taken exception. She makes a pitifully weak case in today's Wisconsin State Journal. I couldn't resist writing a rebuttal. I don't actually care what they do here but I felt the need to attack what was written. Does that make me a bad person?


In a Monday guest column, Polly Reber does her best to present a case that it is unfair to single out smokers for an increased tax on cigarettes to provide "the only funding source for a $35 billion expansion of...a program known as SCHIP -- the State Children 's Health Insurance program." If hers is the best case that can be made I think they are lost.

Consider her key points:

"...adult smokers shopping at Wisconsin retail stores would have to pay $30.20 per carton in cigarette excise taxes alone!"

They would not "have to" though many might choose to. Some may choose to exercise their right to avoid this tax by not buying this completely unnecessary product. She makes room for this possibility and points out that

"Also, because one-third of the total sales revenue of the average convenience store comes from tobacco, such an explosion of tax charges would create a substantial decrease in sales resulting in substantial job loss."

Using this logic I guess we should commit to always having a war going because of the jobs that would be lost during any peace time.

Also she seems to get it backwards when she says "And many of these employees are among low to moderate wage earners who can least afford to lose their jobs."

That would seem to be the easiest kind of job to replace or even improve upon.

She finishes with

"Many say that raising tobacco taxes to pay for these new programs is a good idea because people will quit smoking. What will happen when they succeed? Will the new programs go away? I do not think so."

But what would be gone (in her worst case scenario) is a smelly annoying habit and public nuisance that I don't believe anybody would miss (except the profiteers, I guess).

At which point, as she says, some other source of revenue would need to be found. I can think of one or two but let's see if this doesn't work first; either it will provide sufficient revenue or it will virtually eliminate cigarette smoking. I'm not sure which would be better, either would be good.