Grateful Dead - Truckin'

Just seems appropriate for the end of the semester...and the end of US troops in Iraq.

What a long strange trip it's been!

US Troops Leave Iraq

As the American war in Iraq comes to an end, some troops find themselves grappling with a question that has dogged them through multiple deployments: Was the sacrifice worth the price that US forces paid here?

“I’ve had people come to me, ‘Why were we there? What did we do? Why did 4,000 die in Iraq? Why did I lose my friend?’ ” says Lt. Col. Mark Rowan, an Air Force chaplain who has served 12 deployments and who has counseled troops returning from Iraq. “We don’t really know the answer to that yet.”

Commanders say it’s a question that they can’t readily answer, either. “My opinion about sacrifice is that it’s a very personal thing,” says Maj. Gen. Russell Handy, the senior US Air Force officer in Iraq. To pronounce whether the war was “worth it,” he says, would mean “putting words in the mouths of family members” who continue to mourn for loved ones.

Beyond those directly connected with the war, few Americans will ever understand the scale of loss for the US military, many here also believe.

It’s “almost impossible for the American people to comprehend the level of sacrifice” that US troops have made in this war, says Handy.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, flying into Baghdad for the official “close of mission” ceremony Thursday, addressed the troops, as well as the question that many silently ask themselves.

“To be sure, the cost was high,” he said. But “those lives were not lost in vain: They gave birth to an independent, free, and sovereign Iraq.”

US forces who have been working with their Iraqi counterparts up until their last hours here wrestle with whether America did indeed accomplish what it set out to do.

They wonder, too, whether the answer to the war's worthiness hinges on another question – the question of, say, whether America won the war.

“We came to give them a democracy,” says Staff Sgt. Donald Rice of the 447th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron. “We gave them a chance at democracy. Was 4,400 lives worth the cost of giving them the chance at democracy?” he wonders.

“I’m not going to judge personal sacrifice,” says Handy, “but I can tell you it’s tremendously important for this country to be stable.” Iraq today has a “democratically elected and inclusive government,” he adds, and there remains hope for “what that might mean to the region,” as the Arab Spring enters the winter season.

Rowan, the chaplain, says he has fielded agonized questions from troops, particularly among those who have experienced the heartbreak of losing their comrades.

He recalls presiding at the moment of death of a soldier, a married father of three who was shot while out on a 2009 patrol in northern Iraq.

“I stayed with him and held his hand,” Rowan says, “and did all the last rites before he passed.”

When his fellow soldiers learned that he had died, “they exploded and threw their helmets down.”

They wondered, too, whether the war was worth this – the loss they witnessed again and again.

Rowan says that sometimes it helps to turn the question around: “I ask them, 'What do you think you accomplished there? For the Air Force, or outside the base, maybe you were part of a team that got terrorists out of a town. Were people able to live free again?' ”

The point, he says, is to focus on, “What good did you do there.” For America, for the politicians, he tells them, “History will decide the rest.”

John Lennon - "Beautiful Boy"

Remembering yesterday:

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans"

Strong

How many of the political ad concepts can you find in the newest Perry web ad?

Election Fraud at Center of Russian Protests

A few months ago the last thing that former KGB colonel Gennady Gudkov could imagine was that he would lead thousands of people to an anti-Kremlin rally, shoulder to shoulder with somebody like Boris Nemtsov, a man the authorities call a liberal marginal politician. A member of a moderate opposition party, Just Russia, and member of Parliament, Gudkov has criticized the Kremlin’s politics in the past for “feudal, horrifying, corruption.” Still, like a majority of Russians, he was not fond of the liberal opposition. But the vote count during the parliamentary elections last weekend made Gudkov furious: at least a fifth of his party’s votes were stolen in several regions of Russia, he said. “If there is no option of taking power from swindlers and thieves through fair elections, there is only one way left—street protests,” Gudkov said. He plans to lead the opposition rally against alleged election fraud on Saturday.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin does not use Twitter, Facebook, or any Russian social networking site, his spokesman claims. Otherwise he would have seen how the number of people who say they will come to Revolution Square is growing. By Thursday evening, about 30,000 Russian Facebook users said they would show up at the Moscow protest this weekend. Considering that the number of permitted protesters was limited to 300 people, the opposition leaders expect more violence over the weekend. It is a rather a chaotic movement, and not inspired by Hillary Clinton’s signals, as the prime minister suggested.

Russian special services do monitor the Internet thoroughly, the leader of environment defense movement Khimki Forest, Yevgenia Chirikova believes. “As soon as I wrote in my Twitter blog yesterday that I would coordinate the protest on Revolution Square, I got detained by the customs police at the airport. Nobody else but me,” Chirikova said. On the way back from Brussels, where she said she was telling European Union officials about the violations during the parliamentary elections, Chirikova was stopped in Sheremetyevo airport and kept for two hours, she said, for “a rather humiliating procedure” that involved undressing. She said it was intended to threaten her. “If the only answer Putin has for people is arrests and clubs, we will push him into a corner with that club in his hand. We’ll come out and there will be more of us than they expect.”

Robert Schlegel, a United Russia parliament member responsible for information policy, said that to be more appreciated, United Russia—the ruling party—should improve its Internet propaganda. “Blogging and surfing social nets is for the younger generation. United Russia should have become more active on the Internet,” Schlegel admitted. Commenting on this week’s protests, Schlegel called the opposition leaders Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin “provocateurs using well-known technologies of the Orange revolution.” He does not believe that all 27,000 signed up Facebook users will actually show up at the Revolution Square for the Saturday rally. “I read hysterical comments on Facebook and Twitter, then I step outside and see absolutely calm peaceful Moscow,” he said. Schlegel also predicted there would be more arrests and beatings at unapproved protests. Nearly 1,000 protesters were detained during street rallies this week.

Meanwhile, security in Moscow’s center has been tightened—busses full of police and interior troops patrol the streets and squares. More protesters came out to unapproved rallies in St. Petersburg, Riazan, Samara, and other Russian provinces this week, provoking police crackdowns and detentions. As an alternative peaceful struggle, bloggers started a new movement: activists wear and decorate their offices and cars with white ribbons, as a symbol of Russians disagreeing with fraud.

“When millions of us show white ribbons, we will see each other and the authorities will see us,” one of the movement’s activists, Arsen Revazov, suggested in his blog. The theater and film director Ivan Vyrypayev supports the idea of the upcoming protest on the Revolution Square and expresses hopes that the event will play an awaking role in the mentality of both authorities and public. “It is important for Russians to realize that they can decide themselves what politics they choose. And for the authorities it is important to begin to respect the people’s true voices.”

Treaty Could Collapse Euro Zone

I thought disasters were all meant to happen over the weekend? Somehow, in Brussels, European Union leaders contrived Thursday night to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory, leaving Friday for finger-pointing and recriminations and wondering whether anybody who signed on to this deal has any chance at all of even getting reelected, let alone being remembered as one of the leaders who saved the euro.

Remember how Wolfgang Münchau said the euro zone had to get it right at this summit or it would collapse? Well, the euro zone most emphatically has not got it right. Take any of the list of prescriptions—from Münchau, from Larry Summers, from Mohamed El-Erian—of the minimum necessary right now, and the one thing that jumps out at you, especially in light of the most recent news, is that if you look at anybody’s list, there’s an enormous number of items that have zero chance of actually happening.

Here’s how the Financial Times put it on Wednesday:

“It borders on hysterical to say there are but hours to save the euro, but there is a risk that if the crisis is not now tamed the price of a rescue might start to spiral out of politicians’ grasp. The stakes are therefore very high at Friday’s summit. The world cannot afford another half-baked solution.”

And yet, inevitably, another half-baked solution is exactly what we got. Which means, I fear, that it is now, officially, too late to save the euro zone: the collapse of the entire edifice is now not a matter of if, but rather of when.

For one thing, fracture is being built into today’s deal: rather than find something acceptable to all 27 members of the European Union, the deal being done is getting negotiated only among the 17 members of the euro zone. Where does that leave EU members like Britain, which don’t use the euro? Out in the cold, with no leverage. If the U.K. doesn’t want to help save the euro—and, by all accounts, it doesn’t—then that in and of itself makes the task much more difficult.

But that’s just the beginning of the failures we’re seeing from European leaders right now. It seems that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is insisting on a fully fledged treaty change—something there simply isn’t time for, and which the electorates of nearly all European countries would dismiss out of hand. Europe, whatever its other faults, is still a democracy, and it’s clear that any deal is going to be hugely unpopular among most of Europe’s population. There’s simply no chance that a new treaty will get the unanimous ratification it needs, and in the mean time the EU’s crisis-management tools are just not up to dealing with the magnitude of the current crisis.

The fundamental problem is that there isn’t enough money to go around. The current bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, is barely big enough to cope with Greece; it doesn’t have a chance of being able to bail out a big economy like Italy or Spain. So it needs to beef up: it needs to be able to borrow money from the one entity actually capable of printing money, the European Central Bank.

But the ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, has made it clear that’s not going to happen. Draghi is nominally Italian but in reality one of the stateless European technocratic elite: a former vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs, he’s perfectly comfortable delivering Italy the bad news that he’s not going to lend her the money she needs. He’s very reluctant to lend it directly, he won’t lend it to the EFSF, and he won’t lend it to the IMF. Draghi has his instructions, and he’s sticking to them—even if doing so means the end of the euro zone as we know it.

And there’s more bad news, too. All of Europe’s hopes right now are being placed in something called the European Stability Mechanism—a permanent successor to the temporary EFSF. Since it’s permanent, the ESM is going to have to be constructed with the ability to put out fires of any conceivable size. And as such, it’s going to have to be able to borrow enormous amounts of money, and lend them on to countries that have found themselves in trouble.

But that would make the ESM, essentially, a bank. And the European leaders seem determined, today, to prevent the ESM from operating as a bank at all. Which means it will never get the firepower it needs to be taken seriously.

Oh, and did I mention that the ESM seems set to be capped at a mere 500 billion euros? That’s a lot of money, of course, but compare it with Italy’s total debt of roughly €2 trillion. And that isn’t even counting Spain, or Portugal, or Ireland, or whatever money Greece might yet still need.

There's simply no chance that a new treaty will get the unanimous ratification it needs.

Don’t think that Europe’s banks might be able to step in and lend their governments the money they need, either. The European Banking Authority, with exquisite timing, informed the world on Thursday that the continent’s banks need to raise €115 billion in new capital, including more than €15 billion for Spain’s Banco Santander alone. Where are they going to find that kind of scratch? Certainly not from their beleaguered governments. And there aren’t many private investors clamoring to invest in this particular train wreck, either.

It all adds up to one of the most disastrous summits imaginable. A continent that has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. Its individual countries will survive, of course, albeit in unnecessarily straitened circumstances. But the dream of European unity is dissolving in real time, as the eyes of the world look on in disbelief.

Europe’s leaders have set a course that leads directly to a gruesome global recession, before we’ve even recovered from the last one. Europe can’t afford that; America can’t afford that; the world can’t afford that. But the hopes of arriving anywhere else have never been dimmer.

Iran Show Alleged Downed U.S. Drone

Iranian state television aired footage of what newscasters said was a U.S. drone brought down in Iran last week.

Iranian state television used its main newscast to unveil the drone. The drone was shown in a video on an undisclosed location where two men in military fatigues could be seen walking around it. The belly of the plane was covered with posters saying, “We’ll trample America underfoot.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House, President Obama said Thursday that Iran is more isolated now than ever, and he called on Iranian leaders to forswear nuclear weapons if they want to end their isolation. He made the remarks in response to a question about Iran, but he was not asked specifically about the downing of the U.S. drone.

The Associated Press reports that a former U.S. official confirmed to the news agency that the drone seen in the video was the U.S. drone lost over Iran and reported missing by American military in Afghanistan.

As shown on Iranian television, the left wing of the aircraft seemed broken and mended, and the drone had a beige color, different from the ones shown in stock footage. It also seemed smaller.

“They wanted to spy on Iran, but it has turned against them,” said a news presenter. “Iran’s wisdom is keeping the Americans awake at night.”

According to the semiofficial Fars News Agency, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Aerospace Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh recently announced that his forces had obtained information that spy planes were active over Iran.

“After entering the country’s eastern space, the plane was caught in an electronic ambush by the armed forces, and it was brought down on the land with the minimum damage,” Hajizadeh was quoted as saying.

He added the length of the wings of this plane is about 26 meters, the length of its body is 4.5 meters, its height is 1.84 meters, and it is equipped with advanced systems for gathering electronic, visual and telecommunication information and possesses various radar systems.

“This action has boosted Iranian national morale,” said Saadullah Zareie, a political analyst writing for Iran’s most conservative paper, Kayhan. After the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in 2010 and the U.S. disclosure in October of an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, the capture of a U.S. spy plane was a great success, he said.

“Now the West will realize that confronting Iran is not so easy,” Zareie said. “And those who advise Obama to attack Iran clearly do not know what they are talking about.”

The drone is said to be an RQ-170, one of the more sensitive surveillance platforms in the CIA’s fleet. RQ-170 drones have been used in stealth missions into other nations’ airspace, including the months of surveillance of the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding when he was killed in a U.S. raid in May.

In his remarks on Iran at the White House on Thursday, Obama reiterated that all options are on the table in dealing with Iran, but he declined to specify them. “No options off the table means I’m considering all options,” he said.

He said his administration came into office with the world divided on Iran and since then has “systematically imposed” tough sanctions on the country. “Today Iran is isolated, and the world is unified in applying the toughest sanctions that Iran has ever experienced,” he said, adding that the sanctions are “having an impact” inside Iran.

“Iran understands that they have a choice,” Obama said. “They can break that isolation by acting responsibly and forswearing the development of nuclear weapons . . . or they can continue to operate in a fashion that isolates them from the entire world.” If Iran is pursuing nuclear arms, Obama said, “that is contrary to the national security interests of the United States” and of American allies including Israel. “And we are going to work with the world community to prevent that.”

On Monday, U.S. officials said an unmanned surveillance plane had been lost in Iran and was being used for secret missions by the CIA.

The Politics of Kids Movies

As Warner Bros. executives, box-office watchers and Wall Street analysts search for clues as to why Happy Feet Two is stumbling, perhaps they should check its progressive politics.

Like its predecessor in 2006, the current iteration of the franchise – though its status as such is now in doubt – has penguins and other cold-weather creatures not only entertaining children but also conveying environmental messages to them. Where the two movies are dissimilar, though, is that the first was a hit and the second one is not. Happy Feet earned $42 million its opening weekend in 2006 while Happy Feet Two, which opened Nov. 18, took 10 days to surpass that mark.

Some are speculating that global warming, which both movies portray as a big problem for penguins and the rest of the planet, doesn’t resonate with audiences nearly as much as it did five years ago, especially with the 40 percent of American adults who call themselves “conservative.” Amid a couple of scandals that revealed shenanigans between climate scientists, the percent of American adults who believe the planet is getting hotter due to human activity has fallen to 47, and it's much less among conservatives.

Director George Miller acknowledged five years ago that he reworked the script for the first Happy Feet to amplify the environmental themes, and conservatives who weren’t turned off by them the first time around expected similar messages in the sequel. Some, though, complain that Happy Feet Two ramped up the liberalism to the point of propaganda, and these disenchanted right wingers are getting the word out to like-minded moviegoers.

Kyle Smith at the NY Post, for example, says he loved the first Happy Feet but he wrote that the sequel promotes collectivism, feminism, international bailouts, vegetarianism, same-sex marriage, the United Nations and even Occupy Wall Street, which he acknowledges didn’t exist during the moviemaking process.

“Well played, lefties: This is Kiddie Karl Marx,” Smith writes of Happy Feet Two.

There’s about 123 million adult conservatives in the U.S., so if Hollywood insists on inserting liberal messages in its family fare, it risks alienating a huge chunk of its potential audience. And many conservatives are accusing Hollywood of doing just that.

After Pixar head honcho John Lasseter revealed ahead of the opening of Cars 2 that the oil industry would be the “uber bad guy,” a blogger at LonelyConservative.com wrote this: “We conservatives and believers in free markets are accused of being paranoid when we say the Hollywood industry is trying to indoctrinate our children with left-wing propaganda. But now movie directors and producers are coming out and admitting what they’re doing. I’m just glad I found this out before I allowed my kids to persuade me to take them to see the movie Cars 2.”

Cars 2 this year, by the way, took in 22 percent less at the domestic box office than its predecessor did in 2006.

“Films geared toward children contain left-leaning perspectives on the environment, big business and morality,” says Stephen Winzenburg, communications professor at Grand View College in Iowa and author of TV’s Greatest Sitcoms. “Tolerance of others is taught as the highest form of morality, while absolute right and wrong is ignored.”

The U.S. military and Christianity are also favorite targets for progressives who make family movies, wrote Christian Toto at Human Events, citing, among others, DreamWorks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens and its character dubbed Gen. W.R. Monger.

“The general and his military pals cruelly hold the titular monsters in prison until they’re needed to save the day," Toto wrote. “All the film needs is to name-drop Gitmo and the effect would be complete.”

When it comes to proof of liberal propaganda in family films, though, many conservatives list as Exhibit A an unsuccessful, 2-year-old Lionsgate release called Battle for Terra.

“The key villain is – what else? – a very American looking general who quotes from the Bible,” Toto writes.

“Children should be off base for the industry’s thought police,” he says. “No such luck.”

Conservatives, of course, aren't in lockstep in regard to the politics of children's movies. Case in point is Disney's The Muppets, which makes oilman Tex Richman the bad guy and nearly earned back its $45 million production budget in its first week.

"If any kiddie franchise can yank audiences back in time, it's the new, improved Muppets," writes Toto. On the other hand, Iris Somberg of the conservative watchdog group Newsbusters, writes: "Yes, it's a Muppet movie -- farcical and silly. But how sadly predictable that the villain is the perennial bogeyman of liberal environmentalists, and how sadly telling that the writers politicized a children's movie. Again."

Then again, perhaps conservatives are just overreacting, says John Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, and it’s not filmmakers who are pushing their agenda on kids but film watchers who are perceiving messages based on their own political biases.

Disney’s Mulan, for example, is a “progressive story about gender roles,” says Pitney, though it’s also “a conservative parable about terrorism. After all, Mulan doesn’t reason with the Huns – she kills them.”

Congress, White House at Odds Over Defense Bill

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress and the White House are headed for a showdown over a massive, $662 billion defense bill that would require the military to hold suspected terrorists linked to al-Qaida or its affiliates, even those captured on U.S. soil, and detain some indefinitely without trial.

The Senate voted 93-7 Thursday night for the legislation, which must be reconciled with a House-passed version in the closing days of the session. The White House has threatened a veto of the Senate bill over the policies on handling terror suspects and has criticized similar provisions in the House bill.

Overall, the bill would authorize money for military personnel, weapons systems, national security programs in the Energy Department, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Reflecting a period of austerity and a winding down of decade-old conflicts, the bill is $27 billion less than President Barack Obama requested and $43 billion less than Congress gave the Pentagon this year.

In a resounding vote, the Senate unanimously backed an amendment to impose harsh sanctions on Iran as fears about Tehran developing a nuclear weapon outweighed concerns about driving up oil prices that would hit economically strapped Americans at the gas pump.

"Iran's actions are unacceptable and pose a danger to the United States and the entire world," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

In an escalating fight with the White House, the bill would ramp up the role of the military in handling terror suspects. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and FBI Director Robert Mueller both oppose the provisions as does the White House, which said it cannot accept any legislation that "challenges or constrains the president's authorities to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists and protect the nation."

Late Thursday, a White House official said the veto threat still stands.

The bill would require military custody of a suspect deemed to be a member of al-Qaida or its affiliates and involved in plotting or committing attacks on the United States. American citizens would be exempt. The bill does allow the executive branch to waive the authority based on national security and hold a suspect in civilian custody.

The legislation also would deny suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention.

The series of detention provisions challenges citizens' constitutional rights, tests the boundaries of executive and legislative branch authority and sets up a confrontation with the Democratic commander in chief. Civil rights groups fiercely oppose the bill.

"The bill is an historic threat to American citizens and others because it expands and makes permanent the authority of the president to order the military to imprison without charge or trial American citizens," said Christopher Anders, ACLU senior legislative counsel.

The bill reflects the politically charged dispute over whether to treat suspected terrorists as prisoners of war or criminals. The administration insists that the military, law enforcement and intelligence agents need flexibility in prosecuting the war on terror after they've succeeded in killing Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki.

Republicans counter that their efforts are necessary to respond to an evolving, post-Sept. 11 threat, and that Obama has failed to produce a consistent policy on handling terror suspects.

The House-passed bill would limit Obama's authority to transfer terrorist suspects from the U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to installations in the United States, even for trial. It also would make it difficult for the administration to move detainees to foreign countries.

On Iran, Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., had widespread bipartisan support for their amendment, which would target foreign financial institutions that do business with the Central Bank, barring them from opening or maintaining correspondent operations in the United States. It would apply to foreign central banks only for transactions that involve the sale or purchase of petroleum or petroleum products.

The sanctions on petroleum would only apply if the president determines there is a sufficient alternative supply and if the country with jurisdiction over the financial institution has not significantly reduced its purchases of Iranian oil.