I hope the Democrats are not going to shoot themselves in the foot again with iffy candidates!
I think any white,male,prominent Democratic politician could easily win the presidency in 2008. The republicans for the nounce are in limbo we should take advantage of that opportunity. But I am afraid that we will run a candidate who is at best a possibilty of winning because the dems want to prove we are what democratic? and possible lose with Clinton or Obama. Edwards,Biden,Dodd or Richardson could easily win in 2008 but we will pick and run an idea, to prove the point that America is ready for a minority or female candidate. Lets forget ideals and go for winning for a change! I am neither a misogynist nor a racist but rather a realist who wants to end the republican stranglehold on the presidency. I know that most white males and many white women when it comes to the lever in the booth will, if given the choice, vote for a white male. It's that simple. It is the harsh reality. Just as the black writer in yesterdays blog said all blacks will vote for a black candidate most whites will do likewise and vote for a white male candidate. Forget the coasts think southern, middle and western America. If you think differently then you have greater faith than I. The country, indeed the world, is still tribal.
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How to win peace in the middle east arm them to the teeth!
50 billion in arms giveaway no wonder the US is going broke
Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S
By
STEVEN ERLANGERPublished: August 17, 2007
JERUSALEM, Aug. 16 —
Israel and the United States signed a deal on Thursday to give Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next decade in what officials called a long-term investment in peace.
The officials insisted that the deal was not dependent on a simultaneous American plan for $20 billion in sales of sophisticated arms to its Arab allies, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But Israeli officials acknowledged that the aid to Israel would make it easier for the Bush administration to win Congressional approval of the arms sales to Arab countries.
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Despite Violence Drop, Officers See Bleak Future for Iraq By Leila Fadel McClatchy Newspapers
Baghdad - Despite U.S. claims that violence is down in the Iraqi capital, U.S. military officers are offering a bleak picture of Iraq's future, saying they've yet to see any signs of reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims despite the drop in violence.
Without reconciliation, the military officers say, any decline in violence will be temporary and bloodshed could return to previous levels as soon as the U.S. military cuts back its campaign against insurgent attacks.
That downbeat assessment comes despite a buildup of U.S. troops that began five months ago Wednesday and has seen U.S. casualties reach the highest sustained levels since the United States invaded Iraq nearly four and a half years ago.
Violence remains endemic, with truck bombs on Tuesday claiming as many as 175 lives in northern Iraq and destroying a key bridge near Baghdad, the first successful bridge attack since June.
And while top U.S. officials insist that 50 percent of the capital is now under effective U.S. or government control, compared with 8 percent in February, statistics indicate that the improvement in violence is at best mixed.
U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim.
The number of car bombings in July actually was 5 percent higher than the number recorded last December, according to the McClatchy statistics, and the number of civilians killed in explosions is about the same.
How long the U.S. will be willing to maintain its military commitment without any sign of progress on the political front will be a key question for Congress and the administration in September, when the U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David Petraeus, is required to provide his assessment of the situation.
"If we can't have political reform that can precede more rapidly than has been the case already," said Col. Toby Green, the operation officer for the U.S. command in Baghdad, "then there is always the possibility that we won't realize what can be."
When President Bush announced plans to increase U.S. troop strength in Iraq to help calm Baghdad, U.S. officials had hoped that any decrease in violence would lead to greater willingness from Shiite and Sunni political leaders to reach an accommodation.
But that hasn't happened. Sunnis have accused the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki of making no effort to stop Shiite militias from forcing Sunnis from their homes. Sunni ministers have withdrawn from the government in protest.
In the meantime, the most touted success of the campaign - an alliance between U.S. forces and some Sunni insurgent groups against al Qaida in Iraq - has angered many in the Maliki government, who accuse the United States of supporting groups that could ultimately turn against the government.
Former Sunni insurgents and tribal leaders will expect some kind of payoff for having turned on al Qaida, said Lt. Col. Richard Welch, who works primarily with Sunni tribal leaders and has negotiated with insurgents. Maliki's government, however, has been hesitant to grant concessions, he said.
"Reconciliation is a goal, it's a process, it's the end result of what we'd like to see, but it could take generations - and that is if people were serious about it," Welch said. Welch said it took him two weeks to persuade the government to agree to incorporate more than 1,700 Sunni fighters into Interior Ministry forces in the western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib after they'd turned against al Qaida.
He also said the Shiite government's inability to deliver services to Sunni neighborhoods is a problem.
"Politically there is still corruption and sectarianism in some of the police security forces," Welch said. "Politically, the government doesn't seem to be able effectively to deliver services in a way that dramatically improves their situation."
Welch said he remains concerned about whether the government will be willing to take steps to resolve a number of political issues when parliament returns from its August recess.
"Are they going to be ready to tackle the hard issues?" he said.
Military officers serving in Iraq say much of the difficulties they're encountering are owed to mistakes that U.S. officials made in the early years of the war when the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved the Iraqi army and banned many members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist party from serving in government.
The actions drove many of those affected into resistance groups against the new government and U.S. forces.
"I think we tried to build the house before we built the foundation," Welch said, adding that the current U.S. strategy is "four years overdue."
U.S. officials have said that the new security plan needs time to work. But many have expressed disappointment at the continued sectarian violence.
The military has been trying to stanch that violence by building walls between neighborhoods and around potential bombing targets. But bombings and sectarian violence still take place.
The number of Iraqis killed in attacks changed only marginally in July when compared with December - down seven, from 361 to 354, according to McClatchy statistics.
No pattern of improvement is discernible for violence during the five months of the surge. In January, the last full month before the surge began, 438 people were killed in the capital in bombings. In February, that number jumped to 520. It declined in March to 323, but jumped again in April, to 414.
Violence remained virtually unchanged in May, when 404 were killed. The lowest total came in June, the first month U.S. officials said all the new American troops were in place, with just 190 dead, but then swung back up in July, with 354 dead.
One bright spot has been the reduction in the number of bodies found on the streets, considered a sign of sectarian violence. That number was 44 percent lower in July, compared to December. In July, the average body count per day was 18.6, compared with 33.2 in December, two months before the surge.
But the reason for that decline isn't clear. Some military officers believe that it may be an indication that ethnic cleansing has been completed in many neighborhoods and that there aren't as many people to kill.
One officer noted that U.S. officials believe Baghdad once had a population that was 65 percent Sunni. The current U.S. estimate is that Shiites now make up 75 percent to 80 percent of the city.
Whatever the rate of violence, however, military officers believe that military progress will last only if there's political reconciliation.
Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, a planner for the U.S. military command in Baghdad, described the current strategy as "emergency medicine."
The military is "putting on tourniquets, things that are going to leave scars and are messy and we know that," he said. But ultimately the healing has to come from the Iraqi government.
"Baghdad is to Iraq what Paris is to France," he said. "You change Baghdad, you change Iraq."
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Cheney, Lieberman and Iran War Conspiracy
Gareth Porter
I was never one of those who believed the Bush administration was getting ready to attack Iran in 2006 or early 2007. But it is now clear that at least Vice President Dick Cheney is conspiring to push through a specific plan for war with Iran. And Senator Joe Lieberman is an active part of that conspiracy.
We have known for a long time that Cheney wants a major air attack on Iranian nuclear sites and other military and economic targets. But an
August 9 story published by McClatchy newspapers reveals that, instead of waiting for a decision to go ahead with such a strategic attack against Iran, Cheney now hopes to get Bush to approve an attack on camps in Iran where Iraqi Shiite militiamen have allegedly been trained in recent years.
The McClatchy story says Cheney proposed such a strike within the administration "several weeks ago," citing "two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy." The official sources say Cheney "argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq." An example of such "hard new evidence," according to one of the official sources of the report, would be "catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran."
The story also indicates that the same officials say Condoleezza Rice "opposes this idea" and suggest that Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates agrees with her position.
The Cheney proposal for an airstrike against three bases in Iran can have only one purpose -- to provoke an Iranian retaliation that would then make it possible to unleash a full-fledged strategic air attack against Iran. The provocation strategy would be an obvious way around the political obstacles in the way of an unprovoked attack.
This is not the first time that such a provocation strategy has been attributed to the Bush administration. In February 2007, Hillary Mann, the National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs until 2004,
told CNN that the Bush administration was "pushing a series of increasing provocations against the Iranians in, I think, anticipation that Iran will eventually retaliate, and that will give the United States the ability to launch limited strikes against Iran, to take out targets in Iran that we consider to be important."
The revelation of the Cheney attack proposal throws a new light on a series of developments relating to Iraq since early June. The first event that takes on new meaning is Joe Lieberman's public call on June 11 for
exactly the same kind of attack on the alleged training bases in Iran as Cheney was advocating inside the administration.
Lieberman, appearing on CBS's Face the Nation, said, "I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."
Was that just a coincidence? Not a chance, says one Washington insider who is very familiar with Lieberman and the inner workings of the whole neoconservative demi-monde. "Lieberman is not the kind of guy who goes off on his own to make a proposal like this," says the observer. "He's very disciplined. He's a foot soldier, an integral part of the neoconservative movement.
In other words, Lieberman was acting as a stalking horse for Cheney's proposal, softening up public opinion for later war propaganda.
