Ding dong Saddam is dead.

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Ding dong Saddam is dead.

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Go here for Victoria’s Message!
Thanks to Chris at Rocket Promo

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Go here for Victoria’s Message!
Thanks to Chris at Rocket Promo

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A girl can dream can’t she? Nick Budnick of the Portland Tribune/Local News Daily says Potter has put the kibosh on a January fundraiser and has decided to wait until next September to decide whether he’ll run for a second term. Here’s the money quote:

Potter, now 66, gave the impromptu interview just after riding the new Portland Aerial Tram, while piloting his Toyota Prius to a diversity conference at the Oregon Convention Center — a reporter in his passenger seat.

Did he leave anything out of that observation? Oh, wait, he was wearing his yellow bicycle jersey–the one he wore while running stop lights with critical mass back in the day. Or, I know, “piloting his Toyota Prius while visioning his way to a diversity conference, Potter bit into a city approved trans fat free boca burger he picked up from a minority owned corner veggie restaurant run by Craig Rosebraugh.”

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A girl can dream can’t she? Nick Budnick of the Portland Tribune/Local News Daily says Potter has put the kibosh on a January fundraiser and has decided to wait until next September to decide whether he’ll run for a second term. Here’s the money quote:

Potter, now 66, gave the impromptu interview just after riding the new Portland Aerial Tram, while piloting his Toyota Prius to a diversity conference at the Oregon Convention Center — a reporter in his passenger seat.

Did he leave anything out of that observation? Oh, wait, he was wearing his yellow bicycle jersey–the one he wore while running stop lights with critical mass back in the day. Or, I know, “piloting his Toyota Prius while visioning his way to a diversity conference, Potter bit into a city approved trans fat free boca burger he picked up from a minority owned corner veggie restaurant run by Craig Rosebraugh.”

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This is exactly the kind of guy the State Department needs. He’s leaving. WaPo has the story here. Here are some money quotes:

[Henry A. “Hank”] Crumpton was a career covert CIA officer with a secret identity who stepped out of the shadows in August 2005 to take the State Department job. He gained almost mythical fame after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when he headed the CIA’s campaign in Afghanistan, crafting a strategy that partnered elite intelligence and military officers in teams that worked with Afghan opposition to oust the Taliban.
Crumpton is the mysterious “Henry” in the Sept. 11 commission report, which notes that he repeatedly urged U.S. intelligence to do more in Afghanistan before the al-Qaeda attacks.

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By aclamation: The worst rendition of “O Holy Night” ever. In the whole world. Ever. Here it is.
Thanks to Pajamas Media for this jewel.

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This is exactly the kind of guy the State Department needs. He’s leaving. WaPo has the story here. Here are some money quotes:

[Henry A. “Hank”] Crumpton was a career covert CIA officer with a secret identity who stepped out of the shadows in August 2005 to take the State Department job. He gained almost mythical fame after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when he headed the CIA’s campaign in Afghanistan, crafting a strategy that partnered elite intelligence and military officers in teams that worked with Afghan opposition to oust the Taliban.
Crumpton is the mysterious “Henry” in the Sept. 11 commission report, which notes that he repeatedly urged U.S. intelligence to do more in Afghanistan before the al-Qaeda attacks.

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By aclamation: The worst rendition of “O Holy Night” ever. In the whole world. Ever. Here it is.
Thanks to Pajamas Media for this jewel.

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From the Wall Street Journal in March. Read it. Know it. Don’t let the ‘Last Helicopter’ Theory occur here. Man up. Don’t be a squish. We need a leader.

Read this too.

AT WAR

‘The Last Helicopter’
Mideast dictators try to “wait Bush out.” They may be miscalculating.

BY AMIR TAHERI
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Hassan Abbasi has a dream–a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the “fleeing Americans,” forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by “the Army of Muhammad.” Presented by his friends as “The Dr. Kissinger of Islam,” Mr. Abbasi is “professor of strategy” at the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of “running away,” leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of “the last helicopter.” It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein’s generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton’s helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an “aberration,” a leader out of sync with his nation’s character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an “American Middle East.” Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as “waiting Bush out.” “We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies,” says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran’s new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the “Crusader-Zionist camp” led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into “a brief moment of triumph.” But the U.S. is a “sunset” (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu’ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush’s predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just “reached the Mediterranean” thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis the U.N. investigation of the murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy. “They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran last month.

According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the option of “doing a Gadhafi” by toning down his regime’s anti-American posture. Since last February, however, he has revived Syria’s militant rhetoric and dismissed those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight in Iraq and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that country’s democratic ambitions.

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of “waiting Bush out” is played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush’s plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting restrictions against the country’s major political parties and allowing their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year’s elections will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courting Tehran and playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the “moderate” Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector controlled by his party’s supporters. There are fears that next year’s general election would not take place on a level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization process. “What happens after Bush?” demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim that they have to “take precautions in case the Americans run away.”

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush’s democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble. Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters at all levels.

But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his successor will “run away”? It was to find answers that this writer spent several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting ordinary Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential candidates from both parties. While Mr. Bush’s approval ratings, now in free fall, and the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the “helicopter” theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today.

Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than the polls suggest.

Mr. Taheri is author of “L’Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes” (Editions Complexe, 2002).

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From the Wall Street Journal in March. Read it. Know it. Don’t let the ‘Last Helicopter’ Theory occur here. Man up. Don’t be a squish. We need a leader.

Read this too.

AT WAR

‘The Last Helicopter’
Mideast dictators try to “wait Bush out.” They may be miscalculating.

BY AMIR TAHERI
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Hassan Abbasi has a dream–a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the “fleeing Americans,” forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by “the Army of Muhammad.” Presented by his friends as “The Dr. Kissinger of Islam,” Mr. Abbasi is “professor of strategy” at the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of “running away,” leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of “the last helicopter.” It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein’s generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton’s helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an “aberration,” a leader out of sync with his nation’s character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an “American Middle East.” Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as “waiting Bush out.” “We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies,” says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran’s new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the “Crusader-Zionist camp” led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into “a brief moment of triumph.” But the U.S. is a “sunset” (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu’ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush’s predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just “reached the Mediterranean” thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis the U.N. investigation of the murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy. “They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran last month.

According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the option of “doing a Gadhafi” by toning down his regime’s anti-American posture. Since last February, however, he has revived Syria’s militant rhetoric and dismissed those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight in Iraq and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that country’s democratic ambitions.

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of “waiting Bush out” is played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush’s plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting restrictions against the country’s major political parties and allowing their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year’s elections will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courting Tehran and playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the “moderate” Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector controlled by his party’s supporters. There are fears that next year’s general election would not take place on a level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization process. “What happens after Bush?” demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim that they have to “take precautions in case the Americans run away.”

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush’s democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble. Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters at all levels.

But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his successor will “run away”? It was to find answers that this writer spent several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting ordinary Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential candidates from both parties. While Mr. Bush’s approval ratings, now in free fall, and the increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the “helicopter” theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today.

Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than the polls suggest.

Mr. Taheri is author of “L’Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes” (Editions Complexe, 2002).

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Like what Eason Jordan is doing with coverage in Iraq, right? Oregon’s only Republican Senator, Gordon Smith, as you know, comes out to pillory the President on Iraq policy and now it’s believed he was doing the President a favor? He must be working toward the Lincoln Chafee hall of fame honors.
Smith goes to duh.com for these gems, such as it’s a bad thing when US soldiers are killed. Getting blown up by these IED things is bad. Oh, and, because of those things, the President’s plan is immoral. Maybe he’s been taking lessons from the new House Intelligence Committee head, Sylvestre Reyes.
I’ve seen at least two of Gordon’s TV appearances since he went before the empty Senate and made his TV speech which his team sent straightaway to the media and he says the same thing over and over. He says these things at a time when the President is already planning to make changes in strategy. But the biggest thing in Gordon’s mind is: 2008 when he’s up for re election.
I will agree with him on the need for more troops and I only THINK that’s what he wants because he continues to be unclear in what he wants the President to do. Here’s his original comment:

“I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd… But, we have no business being a policeman in someone else’s civil war. So I welcome the Iraq study group but I’d rather do it quicker rather than later. Whatever it is, it will not be pretty. I am looking for answers but the current course is unacceptable to this U.S. Senator…. I’m afraid rather than leveling with the American people saying this was going to be a decade-long conflict because of the ancient hatreds that exist in that part of the world, that we tried to win with too few troops in too fast a time.let us fight the war on terror more intelligently than we have, because we have fought this war in a very lamentable way. I would have never voted for this conflict had I reason to believe that the intelligence we had was not accurate. It was not accurate, but that is history. Now we must find a way to make the best of a terrible situation at a minimum of loss of life for our brave fighting men and women.”

Now Dave Reinhard says Gordon was just doing us all a favor by stating the obvious and then disengenuously claiming it was “immoral.” Sorry Dave I can’t go there with you. Dave says basically, “Gee if you just had a chance to talk with him, he’d explain it to you.”
Been there done that. No. No. NO and no. Gordon won’t come on the show. Amazing. We started calling at 6:55 pm last Thursday.
Here’s the link to Dave’s piece in the O.

PS Gordon I told you the Democrats won’t vote for you just because you triangulate your position. Here’s the latest cartoon from Blue Oregon.

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