Will Jesus Sling Little Children Into Hell For Celebrating Halloween?

the Bible teaches us that Jesus and His daddy (Poppa God) are so darn picky that they are going to send anyone who isn't a Truly Saved® Christian, straight to Hell. That includes every single Buddhist, Muslim, Murderer, Jew, Fornicator, Mary Worshipper, Child Molester, Hindu, Effeminate Person, Wiccan, and Idolater.

Another sin by the media was their failure to publicize the immense archaeological and artistic past of Iraq, to show America that Iraq wasn't just this desert wasteland over a big puddle of oil. Few people realized that until the National Museum was looted after American troops seized Baghdad. Then came -- the utter hypocrisy! -- tear-stained, hand-wringing articles by those big blowhards at the New York Times: "Oh, the Bush administration are such awful vandals!" Well, where the hell were all of you last year? Why didn't you show the architecture and artifacts of ancient Mesopotamia or Islamic Baghdad under the caliphate? The American people were led to believe that Baghdad was just a bunch of Bedouin tents huddled in the middle of the desert.

"THE MORE successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react." So said President George W. Bush on Monday, after a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad that left at least 34 dead and more than 200 wounded.

Such logical acrobatics are nothing new from an administration that has gone to absurd lengths to cast its dismal occupation of Iraq in a positive light. But coming as they did on a day of horrible violence, Bush's remarks might lead Americans to wonder how he defines "success on the ground."

Bush is right that progress is occurring in some places, including this city north of Baghdad. But even here progress is fitful, and dependent on Iraqi confidence that the Americans will not bail out anytime soon. The president's implication that the latest well-coordinated attacks are a last gasp of a desperate opposition seems so much a product of wishful thinking that it can only undermine that confidence, even as it continues to mislead Americans about the difficulty of defeating a ruthless insurgency.

A GUY called Chuck wants to confide in me. "You know the most precious resource about this country, Bob?" he asks. "It's the Iraqi people. There's a lot of protoplasm here." I was contemplating the definition of protoplasm when the first mortar came in, a thundering roar that had the passengers ducking like a theatrical chorus and a big white circle of smoke rising lazily from the other side of the runway. There's a whizzing noise and another clap of sound.

"They're getting better," Chuck tells me. "They must have put that one close to the runway." The other Special Forces lads nod approvingly. Another tremendous explosion, and they all nod together. Another big white ring rippling skywards, as if a giant cigar addict had sat down for a smoke by the runway. "Not bad at all," says Chuck's friend.

If he [Blair] cares so much about the welfare of foreigners that he is prepared to go to war on their behalf, we should expect to see this concern reflected in all his relations with the governments of other countries. We should expect him, for example, to do all he can to help the people of Uzbekistan.

There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

Moving across the region, the platoon of 45 paratroops slaughtered unarmed farmers and their wives and children. They tortured and mutilated victims. A litany of horror has emerged - a baby decapitated for the necklace he wore, a teenage boy for his tennis shoes. A former Tiger Force sergeant, William Doyle, told reporters of a scalp he took off a young nurse to decorate his rifle. The Blade investigation concluded that hundreds probably died. 'We weren't keeping count,' Ken Kerney, a former soldier who is now a California firefighter, told the paper. 'I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice.'

The Mysteries of the Wow Wave

A full size replica of the Simpsons house!

A leading British humanitarian organization, Christian Aid, presented a briefing paper asserting that $4 billion in oil revenues and seized Iraqi assets earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction had "disappeared into opaque bank accounts" administered by the Coalition Provision Authority.

Discussing an NBA player’s drug problems on TV, Limbaugh once said that, experts be damned, "I don’t buy into the disease part of drug abuse. The first time you reach for a substance you are making a choice."

No sooner did Rush get caught in a federal drug probe, however, than he lapsed into therapy-speak. Suddenly drug addiction wasn’t a crime, but a medical problem—just as compulsive gambling mutated from a moral to a psychological problem after "Book of Virtues" author Bill Bennett needed to have his fingers surgically removed from a slot machine lever. "Defining deviancy down," Republicans called it.

To me, the last word on Limbaugh was pronounced by Joe Seehausen, executive director of the Libertarian Party. "America’s drug warriors," he said, "are shameless hypocrites who believe in one standard of justice for ordinary Americans and another for themselves, their families and their political allies."

There is simply no reason to go on living this way, ignoring practical and constitutional limits and defying the prudent advice of our Founding Fathers. The Belgians may not have our material advantages, but they have something we sorely lack: sanity. Small, weak countries have to maintain a sense of proportion. So should big, strong countries, but of course they are naturally tempted to forget their limitations.

The United States now has a bad case of hubris, obvious to everyone but ourselves. And one of the marks of hubris is resentment when others call attention to it. Some Americans are actually calling the French our enemy for opposing the Iraq war. Apparently you can only be our friend if you are willing to be our lackey.

...the danger is that if Asian central banks do stop buying dollars, the result will be a devastating collapse in the US currency. At worst, this could lead to rising US inflation and interest rates, a deep recession, and a stock-market and property-market crash. The rest of the world would suffer a disastrous collapse in trade.

...there is no more eroding effect on an offensive force than duties of occupation. Soldiers are ideally non-thinking, order-taking killing machines, and as such cannot be effective police officers. Good policing requires members of the police force to think, evaluate and make moral judgments, which in turn makes them ineffective soldiers. Killing opponent soldiers on the battlefield is honorable by military code, while killing civilians by armed police, even in self-defense, turns any police force into a tool of oppression. This has been a military truism from the time of the Roman legions down to the German Wehrmacht.

That attack began when a group of women and children motioned to a patrol of Humvees to stop. As soon as several soldiers got out of the vehicles, which had mounted machine guns, Iraqi men with AK-47 assault rifles fired several shots at them. When the soldiers returned fire, jumped back inside their vehicles and started to drive away, hundreds of Iraqis on the street, in alleys and on rooftops opened fire with AK-47s and rocket- propelled grenades.

Staff Sgt. Christopher Swisher, who was commanding the lead vehicle, was shot in the head almost immediately and killed. Pvt. Sean Silva, in the second vehicle, was also killed when he was shot in the head. Four others were wounded, but all three vehicles somehow made it out of a 600-yard gantlet of fire.

Frisbee, in the third vehicle with Vigil, remembered waiting to die. "I knew it was over, it was just a matter of when," he said. "You're busying yourself, because you're just waiting for the bullet to hit you. It felt like it took two hours to get down that road."

It is true, as Bush noted, that the Filipinos endured 300 years of Spanish rule and that they achieved independence in 1946. But Spain ended its rule in 1898. What happened during the 48-year unmentioned interregnum? Nothing pleasant, if the point of the inquiry is to seek parallels with Iraq after Saddam.

The Spanish empire ceded the Philippines to U.S. control in 1898 after losing that "splendid little war" in the Caribbean. The American military then invaded the Philippines and took over the capital, Manila, in fairly short order. Then, as now, the troubles began. Here's how Max Boot described the ensuing conflict in his book The Savage Wars of Peace: "[T]hough successive U.S. generals proclaimed victory at hand, American soldiers kept dying in ambushes, telegraph lines kept getting cut, and army convoys kept getting attacked."

The story began, "In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia supervised the urgent evacuation of twenty-four members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States."

So, with the approval of the FBI and the help of the Saudi government -- and even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been Saudi citizens -- the relatives of the number-one suspect in the terror attacks were allowed not only to just up and leave the country, but they were assisted by our own authorities! According to the Times of London, "the departure of so many Saudis worried U.S. investigators, who feared that some might have information about the hijackings. FBI agents insisted on checking passports, including the royal family's."

That's all the FBI could do? Check some passports, ask a few brief questions, like "Did you pack your own bags?" and "Have your bags been in your possession since you packed them?" Then, these potential material witnesses were sent off with a bon voyage and a kiss goodbye. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker, "When I asked a senior United States intelligence officer whether anyone had considered detaining members of the family, he replied, 'That's called taking hostages. We don't do that.' "

Was he serious? I was dumbstruck. Had I read this correctly? Why wasn't this being reported more widely? Not that this is personal or anything, but I was stranded in Los Angeles on the morning of September 11th. I scrambled to find a rental car, and then drove 3,000 miles to get back home -- all because traveling by air was forbidden in the days following the attack. Yet private jets under the supervision of the Saudi government -- and with Bush's approval -- were allowed to fly around the skies of America and pick up twenty-four members of the bin Laden family and take them to Europe, out of the reach of any U.S. officials. One FBI agent I spoke to told me that the bureau was "furious" that it was not allowed to keep the bin Ladens in the country to conduct a real investigation -- the kind police like to do when they are trying to track down a murderer.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on nuclear cooperation, an unimpeachable source said Monday."It will be vehemently denied by both countries," added this ranking Pakistani source known to this correspondent for more than a decade as a knowledgeable insider, "but future events will confirm that Pakistan has agreed to provide KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) with the wherewithal for a nuclear deterrent."

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.

By day, Jabir Said is a uniformed officer in Iraq's new police force. Recruited by the Americans, given responsibility for guarding the local mayor, he sits in quietly on liaison meetings with US troops.

By night, the coalition loyalist returns home to change into a long white gown and blend back in with the local resistance - planning and taking part in the very attacks on American soldiers that he is paid to prevent.

The ideological rift between father and son has been growing ever since George W. began focusing on Iraq and, with that obsession, proposed ''theories'' of unilateralism (America needs room in the world) and preemption (kill even your perceived enemy before he kills you).

But while family friends say Father Bush has made his disagreements known to his son, they clearly have not found fertile soil in this White House.

More curious, and in many ways depressing, is the fact that this President Bush has embarked upon a policy designed to counter, or even to wipe out, his father's entire political legacy.

The neo-con notion that Arabs need "civilising" and "assistance" in shaping their future differs very little from the attitudes of the first British imperialists in Africa more than a century ago. The British and American officers who now talk of Iraqi "dishonesty", and seek to portray Iraq as a backward and savage land, would rather we forget that up until the imposition of sanctions by Britain and the US, independent Ba'athist Iraq, although a dictatorship, had the most developed infrastructure, the best healthcare and the best universities of any country in the Middle East.

"Iraqis are the world's best dodgers and thieves - they are descended from a direct line of Ali Babas," says Corporal Kevin Harnley of the Royal Engineers, bemoaning the black market in British-issue police uniforms. The irony, that he himself has been an accomplice to one of the most audacious smash-and-grab enterprises in the history of thievery, seems to have been lost on him.

Iraq was a fantasy story for Bush’s people right from the start. The NeoCon commissars like Perle and Wolfowitz went around saying we’d be “welcomed with open arms” in Baghdad because we were bringing “freedom and democracy,” two things that sell worse than women’s soccer in the Middle East.

One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at Fort Stewart -- home of the famed Third Infantry Division -- as heroes on their return from Iraq, approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army Reserves and National Guard are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or illnesses.

The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what the Army calls "medical hold," while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits -- if any -- they should get as a result.

Some of the soldiers said they have waited six hours a day for an appointment without seeing a doctor. Others described waiting weeks or months without getting a diagnosis or proper treatment.

The soldiers said professional active duty personnel are getting better treatment while troops who serve in the National Guard or Army Reserve are left to wallow in medical hold.

one Army Reserve member...said that after being deployed in March he suffered a sudden onset of neurological symptoms in Baghdad that has gotten steadily worse. He shakes uncontrollably.

He said the Army has told him he has Parkinson's Disease and it was a pre-existing condition, but he thinks it was something in the anthrax shots the Army gave him.

"They say I have Parkinson's, but it is developing too rapidly," he said. "I did not have a problem until I got those shots."

"Don't get me wrong, no one in Baghdad is sad to see the back of the Saddam – if the Americans catch him, I hope they hand him over to the people."

But, Mustafa continued, everyone knows Saddam Hussein was "in league with the Americans from the beginning. Saddam brought troops to Kuwait, the Gulf and now to Iraq."

"Saddam claims he is leading resistance so that the Americans won't be shy about killing these men. But everyone knows the resistance is Islamic – not that I support it of course."

It was clear from his huge smile that Mustafa was not unsupportive either.

Just then we had to stop for an Abrams tank – whose commander had decided it was too much bother to drive round the central reservation like everyone else and drove straight through it – bending the metal railings flat.

"Look, real resistance has not started yet. The guys that pop up and shoot off the odd magazine are nothing."

Pointing to the tank, Mustafa added: "But if they don't leave soon … well we are used to war and hardship, they aren't."

“Last week, I was watching the pope on TV mumbling one of his satanic sermons in that Eurotrash voice of his, waving his hand from the balcony like some palsy drunk hailing a cab. The second thing to cross my mind – after Satan in a skirt -- was that that old fool is going to be called home to his pal Lucifer any minute now. He was shaking so much that if that fancy woman’s dress he was wearing didn’t have so much starch in it to hold him up, his little Polish skeleton would have fallen to the ground quicker than an altar boy when a priest walks in the room.

In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.

War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al-Qaida and "galvanised its will" by increasing radical passions among Muslims, an authoritative think-tank said yesterday.

The warning, echoing earlier ones by MI5 and MI6, was made in the annual report of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance.

It said US claims after the invasion of Iraq that al-Qaida was on the run, and that the "war on terror" had turned the corner, were "over-confident". John Chipman, the institute's director, warned that the full effect of the war might never be known, because of the chaos it had left behind.

So much for the alleged conservatism of the Bush administration. The attempt to dictate the terms of a constitution for a foreign country with an alien culture smacks more of microwave cooking than of political wisdom. The Bush crowd knows little of American history and tradition, and even less of those of the Middle East.

Yet the administration is in effect choosing a new set of founding fathers for Iraq and ordering them to compose a constitution, pronto, with a gun to their heads. Is it any wonder that the world sees Americans as both naive and arrogant? And can this be the same George W. Bush who, during the 2000 presidential campaign, voiced a prudent conservative skepticism about nation-building abroad?

BUSHLIST! Finally, a new jobsearch engine - generously provided by the Presidentoid himself! This should shut up all the nattering nabobs on the left who don't think that the economy is starting to recover. There are plenty of jobs to be had - GOOD ONES!

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed — even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

“This isn’t the America I fought for,” said Hughes, who served in the Navy and U.S. diplomatic corps. “You don’t expect that from a great country like ours.”

"The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored, and we are a large part of why that has happened," the letter reads.

It describes people waving at passing troops and children running up to shake their hands and say thank you.

It's not clear who wrote the letter or organized sending it to soldiers' hometown papers.

Six soldiers reached by GNS directly or through their families said they agreed with the letter's thrust. But none of the soldiers said he wrote it, and one said he didn't even sign it.

I waded into the suppertime discussion of Middle East politics. The demonization of Iran was in full flow when I sat down in the dining hall. "Iraq's no better," I said. "Hussein's regime is more repressive than East Germany."

My classmates were outraged. "Saddam Hussein is a loyal American ally," Peter, from Pennsylvania, said. "He's a bulwark against Iran!"

"He's a dictator!"

"You're a communist!"

In recent weeks I have wondered whether Peter remembers calling me a communist for criticizing Saddam Hussein. While our exchange hardly represents the summit of refined political debate, it does highlight the historical amnesia that is a defining characteristic of the United States.

"I hoped the pilot who hit our house would be burned as I am burned and my family were burned." I'm pretty sure that Satan is busy preparing a gigantic lake of fire for the Bushes, Blairs, Saddams, Putins, Arafats and Sharons of this world. Stoke the flames, Lucifer!

The Worst Wing: Episode 1

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."

There are similar stories [of avoiding service in Vietnam] about almost every other prominent rightwing Republican of recent vintage. Newt Gingrich, ex-Speaker of the House, went the Cheney route [of obtaining deferments]; Kenneth Starr, Clinton's legal nemesis, had psoriasis; Jack Kemp, Dole's running mate in 1996, was unfit because of a knee injury, though he heroically continued as a National Football League quarterback for another eight years; Pat Buchanan had arthritis in his knees, though he soon became an avid jogger.

The best story concerns Rush Limbaugh, the ferociously bellicose radio personality, who allegedly had either "anal cysts" or an "ingrown hair follicle on his bottom". It is not my custom to mock others' ailments, but anyone who has listened to Limbaugh's programme can imagine the dripping scorn he would bring to the revelation that a prominent Democrat had skipped a war over something like that. Also, in his case, a pain in the arse is peculiarly appropriate.

Not only liberals but conservatives are feeling qualms about the reckless militarism that has passed, far too long, for conservatism. An older and truer breed of conservatism had deep reservations about trying to “spread human rights and freedom” by raw force.

Conservatism is where you find it. When Teddy Kennedy, the archliberal, charged that we were taken to war in Iraq by “fraud,” he was expressing the kind of skepticism about the uses of power we should be hearing from more conservatives. Liberals are also doing the work of conservatives when they denounce the staggering price of this ill-conceived war.

...a U.S. Army unit has taken to festooning the streets with posters of Saddam Hussein's face superimposed over the bodies of Elvis Presley, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rita Hayworth and Billy Idol (the last also happens to be wearing a crucifix). "Other than offending Muslims by depicting scantily clad women and Christian symbols," asks Holtzman, "what does this campaign hope to achieve?"

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I’d really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about “surrender monkeys” with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You’d piss your dockers.

Shit, we strut around like we’re so tough and we can’t even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the French, who said “calf rope.”

National Geographic reports that 85% of young Americans (18-24) cannot identify Iraq, Afghanistan or Israel on an unmarked map. 56% cannot find the Indian subcontinent, dangling there so conspicuously into none other than the Indian Ocean. Only 19% can name four countries that acknowledge having nuclear weapons...These numbers are not just embarrassing but dangerous, because in such a sea of ignorance swim Bush's neocons, buoyed by it, empowered by it to send U.S. troops to their deaths in a war to conquer and occupy a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11.

Anarchy is now so widespread in post-war Iraq that it is almost impossible for international investors to work there. There is no insurance for them - which is why Mr Bremer's occupation administrators have secretly decided that well over half the $20bn (£12bn) earmarked for Iraq will go towards security for its production infrastructure.

During the war, a detailed analysis by Yahya Sadowski, a professor at the American University of Beirut, suggested that repairing wells and pipes would cost $1bn, that raising oil production to 3.5 million barrels a day would take three years and cost another $8bn investment and another $20bn for repairs to the electrical grid which powers the pumps and refineries. Bringing production up to six million barrels a day would cost a further $30bn, some say up $100bn.

Iraqis shouting pro-Saddam Hussein slogans have staged an uprising in the important oil refining city of Baiji, burning down the mayor's office, fighting with American troops and forcing local police to flee.

About a thousand people, some holding pictures of Saddam Hussein, were in a stand-off with American troops last night, with tanks surrounding the police station in the city, 160 miles north of Baghdad.

There are millions of these chicken hawks across America. They know who they are. They think President Bush walks on water. They brand anyone who criticizes his policies as liberals, communists or Al-Qaeda supporters. They think that bumper stickers saying "Iraq First. Then France." are rip-roaringly funny. They cheerlead for Bush's military missions as if they were rooting for their favorite football teams.

And they have never lifted a finger to serve in the military.

Many of those who scream the loudest in favor of the Iraq war never spent a day in the military. Limbaugh, Hannity, Bennett, Perle, Wolfowitz . . . the list of politicians and pundits goes on and on. The only member of Congress with children currently serving in the military is Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD). Imagine a platoon composed entirely of chicken hawk politicians' sons staging a midnight raid on Baghdad.

Imagine monkeys flying out of my eyeballs.

Iraq under the US-led occupation is a fearful, lawless and broken place, where murder rates have rocketed, 80% of workers are idle and hospital managers despair at shortages of IV sets and basic antibiotics. Police are seen as thugs and thieves, and the American and British forces as distant rulers, more concerned with protecting their troops than providing security to ordinary Iraqis. The governing council they created is simply irrelevant. A mile away from one of the richest oilfields on earth, the queues at petrol stations stretch for hours. "We completely underestimated how broken this system was," says Andrew Alderson, the financial officer of the British-led administration in Basra.

World War II had its "krauts," Vietnam had its "gooks," and now, the War on Terrorism has its own dehumanizing name: "hajji."

That's what many U.S. troops across Iraq and in coalition bases in Kuwait now call anyone from the Middle East or South Asia. Soldiers who served in Afghanistan say it also is used there. Among Muslims, the word is used mainly as a title of respect. It means "one who has made the hajj ," the pilgrimage to Mecca.

That's not how soldiers use it.

Some talk about "killing some hajjis" or "mowing down some hajjis." One soldier in Iraq inked "Hodgie Killer" onto his footlocker.

Census figures, released a week ago, show that 1.7 million more people have dropped below the poverty line over the past year. Nearly 34.6 million Americans are living in poverty. The middle classes and the Midwest - people like Prentice and places like Ohio - have suffered badly. Income levels for the middle class have dipped 1.1 per cent, after rising throughout the 1990s. At the same time, Bush's tax cuts have turned a budget surplus into a predicted deficit of $480 billion for next year. The cumulative deficit over the next decade is now expected to hit a staggering $1.4 trillion...

...The bare statistics are shocking; employment growth is the lowest for any recovery period since labour statistics were first kept in 1939. More than three million jobs have been lost since Bush took power in 2001, a record not seen since the days of President Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.

As I see it, this pre-emptive war is unjustified. There is no real threat to the United States, only a theoretical one based on faulty premises. It is unjust, in that it is not a war of last resort. It will kill lots of people. It will run up tens of billions of dollars in costs, and it will lead to the limiting of civil liberties at home. Furthermore, America will be managing Iraq for years, perhaps decades, and our presence there is more likely to destabilize than democratize the region. It's also a war based largely on the unrealistic Wilsonian sentiments that democracy can be imposed on people at gunpoint.

Suzanne Werfelman is a mother and a teacher who has been shopping for individual body armor. This is not in response to threats from her elementary-class students in Sciota, Pa.; it's a desperate attempt to protect her son in Iraq.

Like many other U.S. service members in Iraq, her son was given a Vietnam-era flak jacket that cannot stop the type of weapons used today. It appears that parents across the country are now purchasers of body armor because of the failure of the military to supply soldiers with modern vests.

Bush has also asked for $100 million for 2,000 trash trucks -- which works out as $50,000 per truck. He wants to spend $400 million on building new jails able to hold 8,000 additional prisoners -- which works out to $50,000 per bed. "I have a lot of constituents in my state of South Dakota who live in homes that don't cost $50,000 per bedroom," Senator Johnson says. Or how about the $30 million we've reportedly set aside to teach Iraqis English as a second language. "Undoubtedly there will be a contract to be 'bid' out, surely to that great educational institution, Halliburton, to provide ESL teachers from the US at wartime salaries," writes Tom Englehardt, editor of the indispensable TomDispatch.com.

It seems the top career elite at the CIA, plus Tenet, has pulled out all the stops to try to bust up the Rove machine. That suggests they're worried about something much bigger than just bureaucratic turf or the WMD blame game.

In fact, if this were a Third World country, I'd say we're witnessing the early stages of a coup d'etat -- or of a desperate effort to prevent one. But of course, those kind of things never happen in America.

American soldiers fired warning shots over the heads of Shiite Muslims throwing stones outside the Ali Kazem al-Bayai mosque in southwestern Baghdad.

The Shiites said they were angered by the brief detention of their preacher, Moayed al- Khazraji, over allegedly inflammatory sermons. Mazen al-Saedi, the assistant mosque preacher, said the Shiites wanted a written apology for the detention within three days and warned that if one were not forthcoming, "the Shiite stand on the (U.S.) occupation will change."

...I noticed a small advertisement in my local newspaper. It was from my school district, and buried in the ad's fine print was an announcement that the local high school would be sending the names and phone numbers for all juniors and seniors to U.S. military recruiters.

Some astute foreign observers think that time is running out. "We are losing the consent of the Iraqi people," warned John Sawers, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's emissary in Baghdad. "We have until Ramadan [Oct. 27-Nov. 25] to turn it around," Sawers told American officials in Washington two weeks ago. "After that it will be too late." At least one old Middle East hand is a pessimist. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently passed a message to Rumsfeld. It ran roughly: "There's a 5 percent chance you get Saddam tomorrow, the energy goes out of the resistance and things get dramatically better. There's a 5 percent chance a car bomb takes out the entire Governing Council, and things go to hell. In between those, it will get better over time, or worse over time. Right now, I say it's twice as likely that it gets worse." It's not known how Rumsfeld responded.

The attack on Iraq was indeed shocking and awesome. If the United States can now subdue the country, and bend it to chosen ends whatever they may be, America will presumably be the dominant power in the world for decades to come. Syria and Iran will take note and behave prudently. Everyone will understand that the US can enforce its will almost anywhere and impose such political solutions as it thinks wise.

On the other hand, if the US cannot hold on in Iraq, no one will fear it for a long time. Instead of gaining influence in the Moslem world the US will lose any it had. Iran for example will understand that it can whatever it likes. America will shrink from overseas involvement as it did after Vietnam. The occupation will be seen less as the beginning of the new American century than as the end of the last.Which?