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If these Bushies want to come on the air to attempt some turd polishing about why the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq, a country that was not a threat to us, then they should be treated the way Paul Begala treated lying propagandist Ari Fleischer on Anderson Cooper's AC360.

COOPER: Out of Iraq by the end of next year, that was the promise from President Obama. He said the combat mission's over, but America and will provide support for the Iraqi people as both a friend and a partner.

Ari, you were obviously working for George W. Bush. I'm curious to what you thought as you listened to this. And obviously, not a great speech but a historic moment.

FLEISCHER: Well, my first thought was 7 1/2 years ago I was in the Oval Office when the president gave a speech committing us to Iraq. And it's appropriate. Americans don't like to commit troop abroad. And when we do, we want to win, and we want come to come. And the president -- I think President Bush has won because of the surge.

And then, in December of 2008, remember when the shoe was thrown at him? That was actually the announcement of a security agreement with the Iraqi government to bring our troops hope at the end of 2011.

The day had to come. So I'm glad the day was able to come and that President Obama gave a speech where he could thank the troops who also made this possible who really deserve all the credit for making it possible.

COOPER: Do you think he should have said more about President Bush?

FLEISCHER: You know, I think it would have been gracious of him if he'd mentioned the surge, but the problem he has, for President Obama to put the words "President Bush," "Iraq" and anything good in the same sentence, the Democrat base, which already doesn't want to show up in November -- what will Nancy Pelosi see if he starts talking like that?

So I understand -- I wish he was more gracious about it, but he has his own Democratic political imperatives, and he has -- he followed those tonight.

COOPER: Paul, what did you think of the speech? We haven't heard from you tonight.

BEGALA: Well, I think it was -- first, he was trying to do three different things, right? Say we're going to withdraw from Iraq, but we're going to surge into Afghanistan, but we're going to withdraw from there, too. But then, we're going to take care of folks here at home. I want to pick up, though, on this point that Ari makes about the surge, because it is staggering to me. First off, the surge was only necessary because President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld went to war with too few troops, because they wanted to prove General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, wrong. That's why we needed it in the first place.

Second, it could have never succeeded without the preceding Sunni awakening. Iraqis themselves had to decide. It wasn't the American surge and then -- that cured it. It was the Sunni awakening.

But I'll make a deal with President Bush. We'll give you all the credit for the surge if you take half of the blame for the lies that got us into the war, by which I mean Iraq -- excuse me, Ari, by which I mean...

FLEISCHER: No, Paul, it's not right.

BEGALA: ... by which I mean Ari himself saying Iraq was an imminent threat to America, by which the president of the United States saying it was a mushroom cloud that could become a smoking gun, by which I mean the threat of unmanned aerial drones that Saddam supposedly had that would gas America, the connections that they allege which were false between al Qaeda and -- and Saddam's regime.

So, you know, there was so much they got wrong about this. Some of it just was botched, and some of it was deeply dishonest. And the notion that somehow George Bush is owed any moment of grace here is appalling to the history.

FLEISCHER: Neither you nor anybody else, including your old boss, Bill Clinton, challenged George Bush when he said that, because the intelligence that they all saw, too, led them to the same conclusion. So I think seven years...

BEGALA: You know they didn't see...

(CROSSTALK)

FLEISCHER: First off...

BEGALA: They didn't see all the intelligence, because you guys weren't sharing it.

FLEISCHER: This is the night that President Obama said thanks to the military; our troops are coming home. I was gracious enough to praise President Obama for saying that. It's an appropriate moment for our country to bring them home and to welcome them home.

But for you to say that President Bush lied about this, Paul, that is exactly the type of divisiveness we're trying move beyond in this country. When you know as well as I do he followed the intelligence that he was given by the CIA.

BEGALA: He manipulated -- he manipulated and cherry picked the intelligence...

FLEISCHER: No.

BEGALA: ... as did Mr. Cheney, as did Mr. Rumsfeld, and that's why 4,427 Americans are dead.

(CROSSTALK)

FLEISCHER: It was nothing to cherry pick. That's everything we needed to know.

BEGALA: When Dick Cheney said, as he did, that Saddam has long- established ties with al Qaeda, the evidence is overwhelming, you know, the Iraq study group said no that wasn't true.

FLEISCHER: The 9/11 Commission report said Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.

BEGALA: It's just incredible.

FLEISCHER: The 9/11 Commission Report, it said they weren't operational. Our point of view is never let them become operational.

BEGALA: This is -- this is the thing: he was no threat to America. Ari, himself...

FLEISCHER: Now you're changing your tune because you're recognizing the 9/11 Commission report agreed with the president...

BEGALA: They said there were no operational links. There were none.

FLEISCHER: That's correct. We didn't want them to become one.

BEGALA: Well, we don't want Canada to have operational links either. How about we go -- how about we go have Operation Canadian Freedom?

No, look, this was from the beginning, it was a war of choice. It was Mr. Bush's choice, and it was a tragic choice; 4,427 Americans are dead. Thirty-five thousand Americans are wounded, plus those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, plus those suffering from traumatic brain injury. This has been a catastrophe for America, a catastrophe for our armed services who served with such heroism. And for Mr. Fleischer to sit here and expect a pat on the back, it is appalling. It is, as we would say in Texas, I guess it's chutzpah.

FLEISCHER: In Paul Begala's view of the world, we'd all be better off and safer off if Saddam Hussein was still running Iraq.

BEGALA: And those 4,427 Americans were alive.

FLEISCHER: Any time anybody loses their lives in the military, our nation suffers for it. Any one individual, anywhere.

But the point is we now have a new Iraq, an Iraq that has a chance to become a bastion of freedom and, hopefully, an Iraq that can change the Arab Middle East, so it's a more peaceful area where wars don't start. That's what Iraq now gives us a chance to do. And that's why I hope, now with the 50,000 remaining troops, we will be successful, and they don't lose the peace in Iraq, which is...

BEGALA: And we have -- we have a diminished America, a depleted America. We have a divided America. And we have, tragically, military cemeteries that are filling up. That is a hell of a price to pay to get rid of a guy who was no threat to America.

FLEISCHER: No threat to America?

BEGALA: Zero.

COOPER: I want to bring in other panelists in just a second. We've got to take a quick break, though.

The problems of the Middle East will be with us for the foreseeable future. They are primarily the responsibility of the peoples of the area, but they also affect us closely, for the Middle East provides 80 per cent of the oil required by the European economy, is crossed by the major trade routes between Asia-Africa and Europe, and could be the seedbed of a war. The question then is whether we can find in the steps leading up to the Iraqi coup d'tat any clues to what lies ahead for Jordan and the Arabian peninsula.

In our talk [Polk writes], I found no sign of animosity toward me or even, as I expected from his autobiography, toward America and Americans. After preliminaries, I asked what he saw ahead and how the Afghan tragedy could be solved.

In reply, he said, " it is very hard to devise a way, but we should know that fighting is not the way. It won't work. And it has many bad side effects such as dividing the people from the government." ... It was clear that he was thinking in terms broader than Karzai. He meant that the Afghans must have an accommodation to government, per se, if they are heal their wounds and improve their condition.

The only realistic way ahead, he went on, "is respect for the Afghan people and their way whereas America is now relying wholly on force. Force didn't work for the British or the Russians and it won't work for the Americans." The word "respect" often figured in his remarks, as from my study of Afghanistan and the Arabs and Iranians, I knew it would....

So how do the Taliban see a post-US-controlled Afghanistan? I asked.

He replied that "it all depended on how it comes about. If it comes through negotiation, then probably the Taliban will be content with genuine participation in the government, but if it comes through force, then the Taliban will take everything."

I asked about what he has been doing since his autobiography was translated. He perhaps did not quite understand my question and said that he was in Guantnamo until he was released. He suddenly asked me how old I am and, when I replied with my august status, he said "good. There was a man in Guantanamo who also was old and he was gentle with me. The younger men were not."

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Having returned hours earlier from a conversation with troops at Fort Bliss, Texas troops who had seen every phase of what has become one of America's longest wars the President spoke to the Nation for just the second time from the Oval Office to announce the end of America's combat role in that war. Americans in high school today may barely remember a time when America was not in combat in Iraq, and young adults including so many of our troops who have sacrificed so much have almost by definition gone their entire adult lives in a country divided over the war. Today, as the President put it, was a day to begin to turn the page a day when America could turn its focus towards building itself back up from a devastating recession.

Over all that time, though, as the President pointed out, there has been one constant amidst those shifting tides:

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According to the government, the war in Iraq ends tonight at midnight. Given the war's inescapable presence in our politics over the last eight years, you would think we'd take this as the occasion for, if not celebration, at least some sort of commemoration. But so far, there's not even been much media coverage. Earlier in the month, the Pentagon staged a nighttime movement of combat troops from Iraq to Kuwait, timed to coincide with the evening news broadcasts, but aside from cutaways on NBC's cluster of channels (with some definite enthusiasm from MSNBC), it received about as much attention as a state visit to Senegal. A factoid about the impending end of aggressions made it onto the cable networks' bottom-of-the-screen crawl on Saturday, but then it was topped literally and figuratively by Glenn Beck's elaborate prank on Washington. Tonight, Obama will make with the official End of the War speech, to who knows what kind of ennui. No only do people think that the substantial residual force remaining in Iraq means that the occupation is continuing, many just simply seem to not believe the government when it says that the war is over.

Now, granted, this is the same institution that lied repeatedly (though, let's be honest here, not particularly convincingly) to the public about the war. Why should we believe them now?

For one thing, all the leaders are actually different; even the lone Bush holdover was less known for supporting the war than for bringing it to a close. Rumsfeld, Bush, and Cheney have been removed from office and have been repudiated politically by Obama's election. It's a totally different government, and they're doing what they promised: ending the war.

And yet many don't believe the leaders we have now. Even more than that, we don't care. After all, if either side thought this could be used as a football or a hammer, it'd be all over the news.

Do we just want to forget the whole thing happened? Has the war in Iraq and the relationship between Americans and our government that it produced been so normalized that declaring it over seem as ridiculous as declaring sadness over? Do we just think this is how it's going to be, forever?

The major political story that we have to tell about the last decade is that of the 9/11 attacks and our response. That includes the foreign policy response (Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, rendition) and the domestic response (the PATRIOT act, warrantless wiretapping, immigration crackdowns, the expansion of the security state, probably Katrina somehow), because they're all of a piece. When something occupies a central place in our political discourse for so long, importance or timeliness are necessary but insufficient conditions.

Rather, our national focus turned to this story because it served as an exemplar, something that could be used not to debate ideological disagreements, but to resolve fundamental differences between our expressed values and the actions taken on our behalf.

Because as politically unusual as our 9/11 story was (our former president seemed determined to ignore almost every truism that presidential scholars had discovered, and suffered the consequences), our response to 9/11 did not represent anything unusual in terms of policy. This was pretty much what George W. Bush's government would have done anyway. To rattle off a few things we all already know: Cheney wanted to attack Iraq on the morning of September 11, 2001; the Bush family has a long entanglement with Iraq and their regional enemies stretching back for decades; 9/11 was used as an excuse to push through a foreign policy strategy Rumsfeld and others had been developing since the Ford administration and a theory of executive power that David Addington had been pursuing just as long; it goes on.

But those dark acts are tied up unavoidably with other aspects of the American government we feel more comfortable benefiting from as citizens. Iraq fits into the general thrust of American foreign policy, and while imperialism is a dirty word on much of the right and the left, its outcomes are more ambiguously valued. Some hate that our military has been reduced to a vehicle for ensuring the continued flow of oil, but we do like all the things oil makes possible. How can we resolve American values with the apparent need to guarantee our consumer cornucopia with lethal force?

And the expansion of presidential (and vice-presidential!) power is part of a larger movement over the course of the 20th century, from government merely protecting rights to government actively helping people. We might not like government helping us by reading our e-mail, but we do like the government helping us to, say, health care or Social Security. (Even the ones who say they oppose all government programs aren't usually, in practice, foes of Social Security.) Without that fundamental shift away from small government, neither warrantless wiretapping nor Medicare would be possible.

Bush pushed these long-simmering conflicts to such an extreme that they represented a kind of crisis point. We could no longer ignore the fact that the way our government was acting fundamentally differed from how we thought the government should act. We either needed to find a new way of doing business, or we needed to be able to explain how our longstanding values actually fit in with our public policy. By bringing that conflict to a head, the 9/11 story became the moment at which a choice had to be made.

And in the end, we chose well, nothing.

But OK, smart guy, I hear you saying at this point, what are American values? Good question! Here is a fairly good list, a number of which were brought into question by the progress of the Iraq war.

What we thought was a morally obvious situation turned out to be confusingly complex; what we thought would be a triumph for American values turned out to be a failure; and what we thought was a patriotic mission turned out to be an ideology- and clan-driven crusade. There are even more problems with the domestic stuff, given the values of individualism and equality. Maybe this just means these values are stupid and not-American, but I like American values, when we actually bother to follow them; I'm suspicious of patriotism and nationalism, of course, but I do like America, you know? I like America in the same way I like New York City, really, because they have the same values: achievement, individualism, equality, progress. Those values have led to some great things. (And some awful things!) We just need to figure out how to continue to pursue them without, as certain interests would have us do, abandoning everything we've done over the last century.

Iraq raised the question without providing an answer. It's clear that what we did was wrong, but we don't know what's right. Conservatives were wrong, sure. But liberals aren't really right, either. We're leaving Iraq and it doesn't seem to be doing any good. There's still not really any government in Iraq, but we're leaving anyway. That's sort of what everyone wanted? But we don't feel good about it actually taking place.

Without that ending, our decade-long debate lacks a resolution. So what gives? Do we have different values now, ones more in line with what we've been doing in Iraq and at home? Or do we still have the old values without actually abiding by them? Orand this is the option most people seem to be going with nowdo we just have no shared values at all anymore?

If that's the case, then we're in trouble. Without shared values, we can't actually talk about politics. Lacking an agreed-upon outside standard for what's right and what's wrong, there's no way to resolve conflicts over policy. We can't argue about what the best thing is to do when we don't know what best means.

Moreover, there is absolutely nothing the government can do, and very little that Obama can say tonight, that will make us happy. As long as the federal government is pursuing the same general path as it has been for the last fifty yearsand given how things have been going, there's no reason it won'tit will, in the understanding of the vast majority of Americans, be acting in an un-American way. So it's no wonder that we don't believe the government when it says the war is over.

We can have a discussion about whether or not, in strictly factual terms, this ending is really an ending. But it seems to me that declaring the end of the combat mission in Iraq certainly means something. Maybe we're loathe to admit it, because we just don't like what that meaning has turned out to be.

Two years ago, it seemed like ending the war in Iraq would fix America, just like it seemed like electing Barack Obama would fix America. Both things are an improvement for the country, but we're still dissatisfied. Why?

Well, that fix is not something we can find in policy. It's only to be found in the way we think about ourselves. Do we like what America's doing? Do we think it is, in some way, American? If so, how? That's a hard debate to have. It would certainly be easier to pile up symbolic acts and hope they accumulate into a meaningful heap. But that won't work, and resolving our own ongoing conflict is a debate we need to have. Otherwise, the great American experiment will have to be abandoned, and then we'll be just another country.

Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

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Yep.

The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending, the Republican co-chairman of President Barack Obama's deficit commission said Tuesday.

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson's comments came a day after The Associated Press reported that diabetes has become the most frequently compensated ailment among Vietnam veterans, even though decades of research has failed to find more than a possible link between the defoliant Agent Orange and diabetes.

The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess, said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has also allowed Vietnam veterans to get money for ailments such as lung cancer and prostate cancer, and the agency finalized a proposal Tuesday to grant payments for heart disease the nation's leading cause of death.

Simpson declined to say whether the issue would become part of his work on Obama's panel examining the nation's debt. He looked to Congress to make a change.

Sen. Daniel Akaka, a Hawaii Democrat who currently chairs the VA committee, said Tuesday he will address the broader issue of so-called presumptive conditions at a hearing previously set for Sept. 23. The committee will look to see what changes Congress and VA may need to make to existing law and policy, Akaka said in an e-mail.

It is our solemn responsibility to help veterans with disabilities suffered in their service to our country, said Akaka, who served in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. That responsibility also requires us to make sure limited resources are available for those who truly need and are entitled to them.

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat and Vietnam combat veteran, has also raised questions about the spending. The leading Republican on the committee, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, has not responded to several requests for comment on the topic in recent months.

Because of concerns about Agent Orange, Congress set up a system in 1991 to grant automatic benefits to veterans who served in Vietnam at any point during a 13-year period and later got an ailment linked to the defoliant. The VA has done that with a series of ailments with strong indications of an association to Agent Orange, including Hodgkin's disease, soft-tissue cancers and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Other ailments have been added even though and Institute of Medicine review has found they only have a potential association and that they could not rule out other factors. Those maladies include prostate cancer, lung cancer and diabetes. The committee has said that, for diabetes, more powerful influences include family history, physical inactivity and obesity.

The AP found in reviewing millions of VA compensation records that diabetes is now the most frequently compensated ailment, ahead of post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds. VA officials use a complex formula when awarding benefits and do not track how much is spent for a specific ailment, but AP calculations based on the records suggest that Vietnam veterans with diabetes should receive at least $850 million each year.

The VA also acknowledged in its heart disease rule Tuesday that it could cost billions more than initially anticipated. The initial projection was that the new ailments, mostly heart disease but also Parkinson's disease and certain types of leukemia, would total $42.2 billion over 10 years. But that was based on disease prevalence rates for the general population, not representative of the aging class of Vietnam veterans.

VA used an age-adjusted formula in its latest proposal and estimated that it could cost some $67 billion in the next decade.

It's the kind of thing that's just driving us to this $1 trillion, $400 billion deficit this year, Simpson said. It's not that I'm an uncaring person, but common sense is the most uncommon thing in Washington.

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE As he prepares to herald the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, President Barack Obama has spoken by phone to former President George W. Bush.

Aides say Obama placed the call from Air Force One Tuesday as he flew to Fort Bliss in Texas to speak to U.S. troops. Obama is scheduled to address the nation on Iraq from the Oval Office at 8 p.m. EST.

A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.

That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.

Matt Taibbi draws the obvious parallel between Fox News and the infamous Radio Rwanda broadcasts (something I've thought about myself) and wonders why we aren't boycotting Fox:

A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues -- where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn't explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we're seeing.

In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer's blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts warning Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in self-defense. A sample of some of the stuff we've seen and heard on the air this year:

On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. "They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it." He also said that "we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, 'Kill all white babies.'"

CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: "Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls."

[...] There's nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer's media hate-fest is different than anything we've seen before. What we're watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They're telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

The Fox/Rush/Savage crowd in the last 18 months has taken the anti-Muslim fervor that launched a phony war in Iraq, carried George Bush to re-election, and pushed through the Patriot Act, and re-directed that anger at a domestic nonwhite enemy. In doing so they've achieved a perfect storm of political cross-purposes: they've almost completely succeeded in distracting the public from the real causes of their economic misfortune (i.e. Wall Street corruption), they've re-energized a Republican party that was devastated by eight years of Bush-era corruption and incompetence, and, as usual, they've made Rupert Murdoch a sh*tload of money.

I'm convinced that none of the key actors here the Wall Street banks shrieking about government takeovers and advertising on Rick Santelli's CNBC, the Republican Party's career hacks who have been scheming for a new horse to ride ever since Bush imploded, and the right-wing TV and radio networks none of these actors is pushing this crazy movement out of any real desire to stoke a race war. For these institutional leaders and patrons of the Tea Party movement, this is all about material expediency: overcoming the real threat of new financial regulations after the crash, winning elections, and making TV profits. It's just our bad luck that driving frustrated/broke white suburbanites into a race-hatred frenzy happens to be good business for these folks. And all of this is race-baiting-for-cash is borne out of the same short-term, indifferent-to-consequence thinking that we saw from the Wall Street guys in recent years -- who created mountains of deadly leverage capable of destroying the global financial system for the sake of a few one-year bonuses.

The fact that Fox and co. are doing what they do for these dreary commercial reasons makes it even worse, of course; at least Hitler really hated Jewish people. But that also means there's a bright side. One of the few positives in this Tea Party phenomenon is that it's shown how quickly masses of Americans can be convinced to completely change their minds about sh*t. The same Americans who six or seven years ago were looking skyward in search of poison-distributing Saddam-drones and buying duct tape and bottled water to protect themselves against imminent Muslim attack are now probably not spending five minutes a week worrying about Muslim terrorists -- and instead arming themselves against the coming black-Mexican-leftist-communist state. To me that indicates that if Fox and Glenn Beck can be induced to jerk off to some perhaps similarly profitable but less toxic hate-fantasy (midgets from New Zealand are taking our jobs!), all of this well, it maybe won't go away, but it won't have us steaming toward widespread racial violence like we are now.

I'm beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven't been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic Love slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the f**k? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I'd like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn't that at least the first move here? It's beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.

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hmm

AL-FARIS, Iraq Just about every man from the village of al-Faris has worked at the nearby Taji military base. The American money and influence is seen in the new cars, the additions to houses, even the billiards hall with a guitar from an American soldier.

But now, as the American military winds down its time in Iraq, the Iraqis who once worked so closely with U.S. forces are starting to wonder what will happen to them.

The military is starting to withdraw and its influence is being felt, said Sheikh Lukman Rahman Hama, the village's senior administrator. We were lucky because the Americans offered us jobs. The Iraqi government did not offer us jobs.

For the vast majority of Iraqis, their closest contact with Americans has been with troops hidden behind layers of body armor, wearing tinted glasses and riding in armored Humvees that used to run Iraqi vehicles off the road.

But there has always been a relatively small group of Iraqis who have worked with Americans over the years. According to U.S. military figures, a little more than 13,000 Iraqis now work for contractors hired by the American military as translators or in other jobs such as laundry or maintenance. That's down from a high of more than 43,000 in January 2009, reflecting the drawdown as the U.S. went from about 170,000 troops to just under 50,000.

Additionally, a small percentage of Iraqis not included in those numbers operate businesses on bases.

The drop is also being seen at al-Faris, where the number of Iraqis from the village working at U.S. military facilities has plummeted from 800 to 100. Those who have lost their jobs clutch recommendations given to them by their former employers testifying to their dedication and professional manner, in hopes that the words of a former staff sergeant or colonel will help them find a job.

With unofficial estimates on unemployment in Iraq ranging as high as 30 percent, it's a challenging task. Currently, 1,168 Iraqis work on the Taji base, which is home to about 7,000 people 2,500 of whom are U.S. troops. That's down from a one-time high of about 10,000 U.S. troops.

A few of the workers have heard of American asylum programs for Iraqis.

I do not know what to do when they leave, said Riyadh Mohammed Ahmed. I've heard that if I go to the American embassy, they would help me to get out of Iraq.

For the few Iraqis who do work on U.S. bases, it has been a window into American values and culture that will leave a lasting impression long after the last American soldier leaves. Iraqis coming from a culture with few regulations have come face-to-face with a regimented American military culture where even cigarette butts are supposed to be thrown in a trash can and not on the ground.

When asked what they learned or noticed while working with Americans, the word order is repeated over and over.

They give us safety plastic helmets, uniforms and shoes. If an American inspector from the firm came and saw us not wearing any of these safety tools, she would fire our boss, not us, because he is in charge of us, said Riyadh Mohammed Ahmed, 43, who works as a carpenter on the base. It is good to see order applied on all. Order is good.

Not all of the comments are complimentary, of course. One Iraqi discusses how the Americans have taught him how to curse. Another complains that other non-Iraqi contractors don't bother to learn their names.

Being associated with Americans has only in recent years become relatively safe. Sheikh Hama's father was killed, he said, by members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which violently opposed America's military presence in Iraq. His then 5-year-old son was also shot, but survived.

One employee remembers a time when workers were escorted to the bus station by American Humvees as helicopters buzzed overhead.

A suicide bomb attack on the dining facility at a base in Mosul in December 2004 that killed 22 people was considered a turning point in how commanders viewed the employment of local Iraqis, said Col. Barry Johnson.

Every command took notice of this and reviewed all their force protection measures, to include who we were employing from the local population on bases and what access they were being given, he said.

Later, many American military facilities made a concerted effort to boost the number of Iraqis working for them. Officials at Taji say they have made it a priority in recent years to hire as much Iraqi labor as possible and pressed their contractors to employ locally as well.

But it's unclear what will happen to those jobs as the base transitions from U.S. to Iraqi control. First Lt. Shawn S. Tyrie said the military is trying to find out which businesses on the base may want to work with the Iraqi army as it takes over. But some Iraqis consider the Iraqi army so corrupt that only those with connections or bribes can get jobs and contracts.

Few in al-Faris, a village of about 4,000 people, seem to feel their past American work experience will make it harder for them.

Absolutely I should tell people that I worked for the Americans when I apply for a new job. This might help and give me a push forward although it has some danger, said Mohammed Orahman Haman Rahim, the billiard shop owner.

When he lost his job at the Taji base in 2007, Rahim decided to buy the two billiards tables and open up a business. But now even his billiards hall, plastered with pictures of famous soccer stars from Europe and featuring a guitar he was given by an American soldier, is suffering the effects of the drawdown.

Rahim picks up a book where he keeps tabs on everyone who owes him money. He leafs through the pages of people who can't afford the 500 Iraqi dinars less than 50 cents to play one game of pool.

Many of his customers have lost their jobs.

Hadi Mizban / The Associated Press Ahmed Adnan Abdul Hasan is seen in his shop Aug. 22 during an interview in al-Faris, Iraq, north of Baghdad. As the U.S. military is winding down its time here, the Iraqis who at one time worked so closely with American forces that they began to absorb their mannerisms and tastes are starting to wonder what will happen to them when their benefactors have gone.

Consider it a new version of death by PowerPoint. The NATO command in Afghanistan has fired a staff officer who publicly criticized its interminable briefings, its over-reliance on Microsoft's slide-show program, and what he considered its crushing bureaucracy.

Army Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack Thursday from his job as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Kabul. The hammer fell barely 48 hours after United Press International ran a passionate op-ed he wrote to lament that little of substance is really done here. He tells Danger Room, I feel quite rather alone here at the moment.

The colonel's rant called into question whether ISAF's revamped command structure, charged with coordinating the day-by-day war effort, was much more than a briefing factory. Or, as Sellin put it, endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information.

According to Sellin, when his commanding general (whom he doesn't want to name) saw that Sellin described IJC as a blinkered bureaucracy, he informed the colonel that it was time to pack his things. He was very polite and shook my hand and wished me luck, Sellin says.

A spokesman for the command cited the specific regulation that sealed Sellin's fate: NATO Directive (95-1); failure to clear written or oral presentations to the media through a designated public-affairs officer. His comments do not reflect the reality of the work done every day at IJC, says its director of public affairs, Colonel Hans Bush. His insights are his own, however, his duty position and responsibilities did not offer him the situational awareness needed to validate his postings to the media.

Effectively, that means enlisted men and officers are freer to speak their minds in front of embedded reporters than they are while serving on headquarters staff. Additionally troops are basically free to provide their opinions on a blog as long as it doesn't violate operational security, and as long as they don't claim to be speaking for the Defense Department officially. Had Sellin blogged or tweeted his critique rather than published it through a wire service, maybe he'd still have his job.

Sellin says he tried to send constructive criticism up the chain before he typed out his UPI piece. He gave his superiors a briefing on proven organizational methodologies to streamline IJC, but it went nowhere. It was only my rant that everyone read, he says. My hope is that after they stop being angry at me, maybe they will take a serious look at how they operate. The irony? His briefing was a five-slide PowerPoint.

Apparently, not everyone at IJC was as gracious as Sellin's boss when the op-ed began to circulate. Sellin says that a two-star general whom he declines to name told him I was a coward, unpatriotic, ignorant, petty and that he had no respect for me. Sellin gauges that lieutenant colonels and lower-ranked officers support him, as do a few colonels. In regard to most of the other colonels, he concedes, I have marks all over me from where they have been touching me with ten-foot poles.

Sellin is going to head home to Finland, where he's worked for the past several years for an information-technology company that he asks me not to name. He doesn't wish any of his now-former colleagues in IJC any ill will. But he wonders if recently-admitted problems training the Afghan security forces the U.S.'s ultimate ticket out of the ten-year old war is going to yield any greater sense of urgency from IJC.

Mine is not an indictment of people or am I questioning their intentions, just some judgments that are being made and the methods that are being used, he says. It can be done better. We can fulfill our national security needs and get out.

Update: Sellin wrote a lot more for UPI than just his thoughts on PowerPoint. Check out his full archive of columns here.

See Also:

• U.S. Officer In Afghanistan Mows Down PowerPoint Rangers
• Contest: PowerPoint Arsenal
• Paper Pushers & Powerpoint Rangers

Shared by phillip
haha, so true: For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death.

Are you an Aspirin-gulping staff officer who suffers migraines because of the military's over-reliance on PowerPoint presentations? Ever wanted to walk out of a pointless briefing because PowerPoint substitutes for critical thinking? A colonel at NATO headquarters in Kabul is your new patron saint.

In an epic rant published by United Press International, Lawrence Sellin, an Army reserve colonel on his second tour in Afghanistan, rages against the dying of the light amongst his fellow staff officers. Sellin serves on the staff of the International Security Assistance Force's Joint Command, or IJC, the organization formed last year to oversee the war's day-to-day operations. General David Petraeus has praised IJC as a key move to get the right organizational structures in place. Colonel Sellin considers it a waste of time.

Inside IJC, the war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information, Sellin writes. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death. Not that he's complaining or anything.

Each day is guided by the battle rhythm,' which is a series of PowerPoint briefings and meetings with PowerPoint presentations, Sellin continues. It doesn't matter how inane or useless the briefing or meeting might be. Once it is part of the battle rhythm, it has the persistence of carbon 14. (Christian Bleuer, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention.)

How pointless is the so-called Commander's Update Assessment? The commander doesn't bother to show up, but a phalanx of colonels has to attend. There's even a high-school-esque roll call. Briefers rotely articulate what they project for the room in PPT slides, using a tone of voice not unlike that of a congressman caught in a tryst with an escort. One and two-star generals try to stay awake. The briefing slides only change only change when a new commander arrives or the war ends. Guess which comes first!

Next month, IJC will adjust its organizational structure yet again, Sellin writes. He doesn't really describe what the new structure will be, likening it instead to placing a stovepipe for information within another stovepipe. The rationale for this bold move resides in the fact that an officer, who is currently without one, needs a staff of 35 people to create a big splash before his promotion board, he writes.

Sellin probably feels alone. (Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment, he begins his therapeutic rant, by way of explanation.) But if he surreptitiously surveys his fellow officers, he may find a resistance taking shape.

H.R. McMaster, the one-star Army general who pacified the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, bashed PowerPoint to the New York Times earlier this year, saying its rinky-dink slideshow can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. James Mattis, a four-star Marine general, has said straight out that PowerPoint makes the military stupid. By reducing to the complexities of war to animated bullet points, PowerPoint actually deprives officers of information, instead of helping them, he argued. A healthy debate in the blogosphere briefly followed the revelation that Major General Michael Flynn, the military's top intelligence official in Afghanistan, is a PowerPoint hater.

McMaster is now a top planning officer in Afghanistan. Mattis leads U.S. Central Command. Is the momentum shifting?

Hard to say. The key persuadable figure is Petraeus himself, a thrall to the siren song of Microsoft's presentation program. As the head of U.S. Central Command, Petraeus brought his PPT slides to every public appearance he gave, describing as a general's First Amendment right. The battle against PowerPoint clearly runs through Petraeus's office. For the insurgency to succeed, it can't merely replace PPT with Keynote.

Credit: PA Consulting Group

See Also:

• Contest: PowerPoint Arsenal
• Paper Pushers & Powerpoint Rangers
• Paper Pushers & Powerpoint Rangers
• Air Force Enforces BlackBerry Crackdown

Shared by phillip
Autorun, best Microsoft idea ever?

WASHINGTON The Pentagon says a foreign spy agency pulled off the most serious breach of Defense Department computer networks ever by inserting a flash drive into a U.S. military laptop.

The previously classified incident took place in 2008 in the Middle East and was disclosed in a magazine article by Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn and released by the Pentagon Wednesday. The Pentagon did not say what nation's spy agency was involved.

He said a malicious code on the flash drive spread undetected on both classified and unclassified Pentagon systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, for stealing military secrets He did not say what, if any, information was taken.

For the past decade, the Marine Corps has been fighting in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. doesn't need a second land Army. The Marines must be able to get ashore quickly and tackle small guerrilla wars that will be common in the coming decades.

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I do not watch, read, follow, or care about the news. I'm talking general news. You know, stuff on CNN or KSL 5 (local NBC affiliate).* And I'm not exaggerating. I don't care about it. Not one little bit. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Extreme News Delay

I found out about the Haiti earthquake 2 days after it happened. The oil leak in the Gulf? Like over 3 days. Mosque new Ground Zero? Couple days delay. I asked Amy what other major news stories I might have missed, and she said like the kid that killed Natalie Holloway killed another girl in south america. I have no idea who Natalie Holloway is, or for that matter, that sadly, she is dead, or that she was murdered by someone doing more killing. Local things like flash floods in Draper, UT last week (just over the hill from me) or car accidents or this or that I find out the next day best case scenario, if ever. If I didn't follow twitter and friends on FaceBook, I'd probably never find out this stuff. And know what? I don't care. Maybe that sounds harsh. Let me explain.

News Junkie

I haven't always been this way. There was the time during the gulf war of 2003 when we bought a TV just for cable news coverage and put Iraq maps on the wall of Secure Offer (precursor to Doba) to track the invasion. Time when I got way caught up in the 2008 electionand actually closely followed/cared about politics for a bit (whole other series of posts, no, actually an entire book on that subject. Politics. Blah.) And the time that was the proverbial straw that broke my back when in September of 2008, the Hanks family embarked on our Great American Road trip to South Dakota and points in between.

The News is making me feel like I'm dying.

If you remember, that's when the economy was rocketing off a cliff and down to the depths. Bailouts, buyouts, massive failures of massive businesses. Work was stressful, road trip was stressful, and I was following all of this newsthis massive flood of negativity and drama and emotions and interruptions to my vacation, and to my life, and to what I saw as my world. One night I told Amy, I think I'm having a heart attack. I couldn't breath. I had pretty severe pain in my chest. It came and went a few times on that trip. Went to the Dr. after I got back, he said, you're having Panic Attacks. Put me on some meds (I took once or twice if I remember). And that's when it all hit me: The news is making me feel like I'm dying. WTF is up with that?! And it's all coming from things that I have no control over whatsoever. Could they affect me? Yes. Can I do anything about it? No. So then why care. Why put it in my head? Why let it impact at all? Until it does, if ever. So I decided to bail on the news.

Addicted to News?

It was really hard to disconnect from the news. Part of my daily routine was to check MSNBC.com several times a day for news, and I'd watch the nightly news a few times a week. I couldn't stop checking the MSNBC site. I finally edited my computer's host file, added in all the major news sites, and assigned them bogus IP address.

Safari can't connect to the server stopped the news dead in it's tracks, and I quickly broke my news habit.

Now I find that I shun it. Airport TV on CNN? I sit far away. People start talking about something in the news? I just disconnect from the conversation. People tweet too much about the news? Unfollow.

I Do Not Care

Here's the brutal, honest truth: While I can feel sad/sorry/empathy for the people in Haiti, I do not care about the earthquake. Nothing I can do about it (I did donate some $ to the cause). Natalie Holloway? Too bad, it really is. It's sad. But do I need the sadness of that in my life? All of these things don't impact me. 99.9% of the news DOES NOT IMPACT YOU. Unless you hear it, and put it into your mind, then it does impact you. Cause it's in your head, in your frame of mind, playing with your emotions. Why bother then? When I had a brush with death and a boulder hit my leg, that's news that matters to me. If your house burns down, you won't need KSL to tell you about it. You don't need CNN either, to debate and dispute and report and opine on a bunch of crap they drum up for ratings, TO SELL YOU ADVERTISING. All the rest of this stuff is smoke and mirrors and garbage drama that I do not have time in my life to bother myself with. Life is too short to be interrupted by all the things media companies choose to sensationalize, and I'd even say, traumatize you with.

So disconnect from the world of news. It's incredibly liberating. You'll have a lot more time and energy and cycles for what really matters.

* Technology news, ecommerce news, etc. I follow extremely closely as it matters intimately to my company, my job, and my career. More on where I get that targeted, filtered news in another post.

Shared by phillip
Nice.

A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site's icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its "www." counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons--those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach--are scaled to 16x16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

Find icon (enter site name)

(0,0,6)

+

Printed Poster

The graphic has been made into a 24x36 inch poster. Click to see a larger version.

We have only printed 15 posters (for Nmap developers) so far, but we're considering an offset print run if there is enough demand. If you might be interested in buying a physical copy of the poster, please fill out this short form:

For downloads of programs and data files, go to this page.

From Balloon Juice:

August.

Every August something happens that reminds me just how stupid America has become. This month is full of fresh reminders of our dwindling National intelligence.

It has traditionally become the month to celebrate how stupid America has become. It is the month when stupidity in America goes on full display with a vengence.

It is the month where we learned about shark attacks and Gary Condit while George Bush ignored a security warning titled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. It is the month where wingnutopia talking points for invading Iraq was manufactured and tested. It is the month that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began running ads about John Kerry while the rest of wingnutopia went crazy about the flip-flop meme. It was the month of Katrina. It was the month when Karl Rove convinced most of the media that he had the math. It was the month when the Palin traveling carnival of hucksters was introduced to America. It was the month of death panels. It was the month the Tea Party sprang forth from well fertilized astroturf. Now it is the month to worry about secret moooslims building things or terrorist cell groups of anchor babies. And always it is a month where the dumbest mother fuckers in America try to drive our National discourse with fear, ignorance and hatred.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skipped onto a stage yesterday, drew back a blue curtain, unveiled a shiny gold drone, and pronounced it an ambassador of death to Tehran's foes.

So does that mean Tel Aviv should be worried about Iranian robo-bombings? At the moment, probably not. Not only does the drone have an announced range of 600 or so miles short of the Israeli border. Here's a little secret, dear readers: Iran sometimes tries to bullshit the world about its arsenal. Shhh! Pass it on!

According to the official word from Tehran, the 13-foot Karrar ('striker) drone is capable of carrying four cruise missiles. That's really unlikely. Even smaller-sized cruise missiles, like the Russian Kh-135s, weigh a more than a thousand pounds and are about nine feet long; it's tough to imagine a relative pipsqueak like the Karrar lugging such a hefty package. [Update: As Pirouz notes in the comments, Iran calls its anti-ship missiles, like the Chinese C-701, "cruise missiles." Those are compact enough for drone duty.] State television later claimed that the Karrar could carry a pair of 250-pound bombs or a single 500-pounder. That's more believable (although the single bomb the drone is carrying in the video above looks more like a 250-pound model to me).

Iran has been making its own drones for a while; the U.S. even shot one down over Iraq last year. Since 2004, a small number of those unmanned aerial vehicles have made their way into Hezbollah's hands. This, however, would be Iran's first armed robo-plane. In so doing, state television crows, Iran broke the military advantage of America and prepped the country for the looming days of all-robot warfare. That should arrive around 2020, the Iranian Defense Ministry guesstimates.

Tehran's scientists went 500,000 hours without sleep and eating while designing the drone, according the state TV report. That figure sounds about as authentic as Iran's 2007 pronouncement that it had fired off a space-ready missile (which turned out to be nothing more than a modified Scud), or July 2008's picture of a missile barrage (most of which were Photoshopped dummies).

But even if this armed drone ain't all that, there's still some cause for concern. Iran is getting better at building its own weapons. Which makes the regime less susceptible to foreign sanctions.

Update 2: Via Ares, way more pics of the drone.

On target: DL, EL, SK

See Also:

• U.S. Jet Shoots Down Iranian Drone Over Iraq (Updated)
• Iran Ramps up Drone Production
• U.S. Military Confirms It Shot Down Iranian Drone
• Pentagon Scientists Target Iran's Nuclear Mole Men
• Attack of the Photoshopped Missiles (Updated)
• Iran Sat Launch: The Animated Edition

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skipped onto a stage yesterday, drew back a blue curtain, unveiled a shiny gold drone, and pronounced it an ambassador of death to Tehran's foes.

So does that mean Tel Aviv should be worried about Iranian robo-bombings? At the moment, probably not. Not only does the drone have an announced range of 600 or so miles short of the Israeli border. Here's a little secret, dear readers: Iran sometimes tries to bullshit the world about its arsenal. Shhh! Pass it on!

According to the official word from Tehran, the 13-foot Karrar ('striker) drone is capable of carrying four cruise missiles. That's really unlikely. Even smaller-sized cruise missiles, like the Russian Kh-135s, weigh a more than a thousand pounds and are about nine feet long; it's tough to imagine a relative pipsqueak like the Karrar lugging such a hefty package. State television later claimed that the Karrar could carry a pair of 250-pound bombs or a single 500-pounder. That's more believable (although the single bomb the drone is carrying in the video above looks more like a 250-pound model to me).

Iran has been making its own drones for a while; the U.S. even shot one down over Iraq last year. Since 2004, a small number of those unmanned aerial vehicles have made their way into Hezbollah's hands. This, however, would be Iran's first armed robo-plane. In so doing, state television crows, Iran broke the military advantage of America and prepped the country for the looming days of all-robot warfare. That should arrive around 2020, the Iranian Defense Ministry guesstimates.

Tehran's scientists went 500,000 hours without sleep and eating while designing the drone, according the state TV report. That figure sounds about as authentic as Iran's 2007 pronouncement that it had fired off a space-ready missile (which turned out to be nothing more than a modified Scud), or July 2008's picture of a missile barrage (most of which were Photoshopped dummies).

But even if this armed drone ain't all that, there's still some cause for concern. Iran is getting better at building its own weapons. Which makes the regime less susceptible to foreign sanctions.

On target: DL, EL, SK

See Also:

• U.S. Jet Shoots Down Iranian Drone Over Iraq (Updated)
• Iran Ramps up Drone Production
• U.S. Military Confirms It Shot Down Iranian Drone
• Pentagon Scientists Target Iran's Nuclear Mole Men
• Attack of the Photoshopped Missiles (Updated)
• Iran Sat Launch: The Animated Edition