From The Asia Times
By Pepe Escobar

As the US electoral college stands today, Barack Obama would win this presidential election, even according to the Macchiavelli from Texas himself, Karl Rove, Obama would win even across the Potomac, in northern Virginia, once a Republican stronghold, now “communist country”, according to John McCain’s brother Joe.

Red or blue, voters continued to flock to the Obama camp immediately after this Tuesday’s second presidential debate - a total cool, calm and collected Obama wipeout, with McCain relegated to the role of a bewildered reptile, at times neurotic, sycophantic, dismissively all-knowing or just plain mean (like referring to Obama as “that one”).

Voters also continue to flock to the Obama camp amidst the biggest state intervention in United States history. Biggest if we don’t count another monster state intervention - the soon-to-become trillionaire war in Iraq.

The Wall Street US$810 billion - and counting - bailout is being interpreted by millions of angry Americans as no less than a class struggle weapon of mass destruction. It may cost US taxpayers over $2 trillion after real interest payments are added. Yes, this bailout is a second Iraq war.

Even the initial Bush/Paulson numbers - everyone remembers those $700 billion - came out of nowhere. As a US Treasury spokesman told Forbes magazine, “It’s not based on any particular data point … We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Read more Wall Street

From The Black Agenda Report
By Margaret Kimberley

In the past two weeks the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House worked hand in hand with Republicans to dole out $700 billion to the financial services industry that has brought the United States and the world to ruin. The bailout of Wall Street has been on the tip of every tongue, the subject of numerous editorials and the issue by which the two major party presidential candidates are being judged. Almost nothing has been said about the bill signed by President Bush which authorizes $611 billion in military spending.

Without debate, or mention in the corporate media, congress passed a military spending authorization that is nearly as large as the much talked about financial services bail out bill. The defense bill is every bit as wasteful and just as much a harbinger of doom as the much discussed Wall Street bailout, but has elicited hardly any debate, even from progressives. The damage that military spending does both to the federal budget and to the overall economy is just as bad as that of the “cash for trash” scheme cooked up by Treasury Secretary Paulson.

The American military budget is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. That spending does nothing to improve this nation’s economy and in fact puts it firmly on the road to bankruptcy.

There is rarely any debate in either party regarding the need for additional bases overseas (there are currently 700), new weapons systems or plans for future wars. The public who rose up in righteous anger over efforts to privatize Social Security or to reward Paulson and friends say nothing about their tax dollars going down a black hole of spending for helicopters, aircraft carriers and new weapons systems that make them poorer and don’t keep them any safer.

Read more Bailout

From The Independent UK
By Robert Fisk

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki’s “democratic” government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein’s old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad’s “high-security detention facility” but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced “democracy” to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq’s death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

“Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another,” a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. “But hanging isn’t easy.” As always, the devil is in the detail.

Read more Secrets

From The Washington Post
By Jim Hoagland

Candidates Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin, take a bow. And you in the huge television audiences, bask in the reflected glory. You all have established in two national political debates that a lot is going right in America, despite our enormous problems.

The value of these debates comes not from any particular information they convey. Voters know they get spit-polished views confected by campaign consultants from polling data. So they greet Barack Obama’s endorsement of an immediate NATO membership plan for Ukraine, or Sarah Palin’s pledge to work on peace in the Middle East, with appropriate skepticism.

But these debates have become important conveyor belts of indelible attitude and character, of trend-sensing and zeitgeist, sliced into digestible 90-minute segments. Our most successful politicians reformat what we have told them about who we are and what we want, and they play it back to us in ways that reveal much about us and, at times, them.

And they do so under the pressure of television’s relentlessly clicking clock, the ultimate arbiter and mix-master of entertainment and political values. The unfulfilled opportunity that Palin would crash and burn — that is, show definitively that she is John McCain’s Achilles’ high heel — turned Thursday night’s clash with Joe Biden into “must-see television,” our society’s equivalent of a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Mecca.

Read more Albatross

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

The next President will inherit a daunting set of national security problems. Captivated at the start by an illusory belief that the United States could, and should, impose its will on the world’s bad actors by shock and awe, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld drove the world’s sole surviving superpower into a diplomatic, strategic, and fiscal ditch.

On the last lap of the Bush administration, there has been one tonic voice of reason, which the next administration would do well to heed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director and president of Texas A&M, has labored to undo the damage done by his predecessor.

Gates has been realistic about what military force can and cannot achieve. He has astonished jaded observers of bureacratic turf battles by calling for increased funding for the State Department, traditionally the funding rival of Defense. He did so because he grasps the interrelatedness of diplomacy and force.

He has called for regional cooperation to foster reconciliation and stability in Iraq. And he has argued in public, as in private, for diplomatic means of dissuading Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Above all, Gates has used his authority as defense secretary to change course at the Pentagon: to prepare for the missions the uniformed military is likely to confront in the future, rather than the conventional state-against-state conflicts that have for too long shaped the Pentagon’s procurement policies. This remedial aim was at the core of a sage and pointed speech he delivered Monday to military officers at the National Defense University in Washington.

Read more Lessons

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Back in March, The Politico published an article — reflecting conventional wisdom at the time (needless to say) — which declared that the Iraq War would be a winning issue for . . . John McCain and the Republicans. The article, by David Paul Kuhn, claimed that public support for the war was surging; that this “promises to reshape the political landscape”; that “Democrats’ resolute support for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces may soon position them at odds with independent voters, in particular, a constituency they need to retake the White House”; that “the steady upturn in the public mood [about the war] stands to alter the dynamics of races up and down the ballot”; and that “no candidate stands to gain more than McCain.”

The article quoted Michael O’Hanlon who, with characteristic insight and prescience, bolstered the storyline:

How could Democrats possibly hand McCain a better issue than to let him run on his record of advocating a robust U.S. presence in Iraq with all the positive battlefield news that is filtering out of that country? . . .Thinking about where we were at the time of the congressional elections, it’s ironic that the Iraq issue could actually be the one that most favors the Republican and most other issues — including most foreign policy issues — could most favor the Democrats

As I noted at the time, those claims had no basis in reality. After last week’s McCain-Obama debate and now last night’s Biden-Palin debate, one thing is now crystal clear: in proclaiming that Americans would once again Love the War and it would become a winning issue for McCain and the GOP, The Politico and O’Hanlon were as wrong as usual.

Read more GOP Tactics

From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one “someone” has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government.

The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion.

Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money?

There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can’t afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they’re sacred cows.

When you think about it, it’s sheer madness. The city marshal is at the door, brandishing a shotgun, ready to evict you and your family for nonpayment of rent. But while your kids are screaming in terror, you’re at the computer, wasting thousands on online gambling. You could pay off your landlord instead. You could make the marshal go away. All you have to do is stop. But you keep on keeping on. Click, click. More money squandered.

What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with us?

In 2007 the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the final cost of our biggest national compulsion, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, could total $2.4 trillion, or $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country. That’s twice as much as the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. It’s also two-thirds the cost of World War II. Yet no one–not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the media, not even the left–insists that we get out.

Read more Mad Money

From Salon
By Gary Kamiya

With Congress rejecting the $700 billion bailout package, the Dow falling 700 points and the U.S. economy on the edge of a cliff, no one is paying much attention to Iraq. Money talks, and incomprehensible and endless wars walk. From a purely financial perspective, that dismissive attitude makes no sense. The Iraq war has already cost almost $700 billion, and as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes have argued, its total cost, factoring in huge back-end costs like disability payments, could end up exceeding $3 trillion. As Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson point out on TomDispatch, the money we’ve poured and are continuing to pour down the bottomless pit of Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion a month, could have bailed us out many times over.

But of course, the Iraq war is about a lot more than money. It’s about the 146,000 U.S. troops still stationed there, and their families. It’s about the stability of the Middle East, and our vital national interest in ensuring that it does not explode. It’s about the overall direction of our foreign policy. It’s about how America is perceived throughout the world. And it’s about the fate of Iraq itself, a nation that our invasion devastated and that we owe our best efforts to rebuild.

Along with fixing our economy, then, what we should do about Iraq is the most important issue facing the country. And the choices offered by the two presidential candidates could not be more different. John McCain will continue the same policies as George W. Bush. He insists that Iraq remains “the central front in the war on terror,” claims that the surge was a decisive turning point and that we are now winning the war, and warns that if America elects Barack Obama, we will lose, with catastrophic consequences. Obama argues that the war was a mistake to begin with, that it led us to “take our eye off the ball” and allow Osama bin Laden to escape and al-Qaida to regroup, and that it has strengthened Iran. He says that if elected he will withdraw American troops in stages over a 16-month period.

Read more Iraq War

From Tom Dispatch
By Ira Chernus

In 1932, in the midst of a disastrous economic meltdown, Franklin D. Roosevelt made “the forgotten man” the centerpiece of his presidential election campaign. Far more than we suspect, this year’s election may turn not on a forgotten man, but on a forgotten war in a forgotten country.

Even before the present financial meltdown hit the news, the Iraq War had slipped out of the headlines and off the political stage. Now, as investment houses totter and bailout plans fill the headlines, it will be even harder for Iraq to get major media attention. Yet the war remains just beneath the surface of the presidential campaign, and so is sure to affect the outcome in ways too complicated to fully grasp.

Think of that war not as one, but two currents, affecting the coming election all the more powerfully because they are out of sight, out of mind, and — interacting in unpredictable ways — out of anyone’s control.

Obama’s War: The Realistic Disaster

The first current is that of realistic perception. Polls continue to show that at least 60% of prospective voters see the war for what it is: a disastrous mistake. Among Democrats, the percentage is far higher than among Republicans, which may be the main reason that Barack Obama is now the Party’s candidate for president.

As the only major candidate in the Democratic primaries who opposed the war from the beginning, his stance proved decisive. It remains a powerful factor in his favor as undecided voters make up their minds, even if they don’t fully realize it. Remember, most people’s electoral decision-making processes — like the war in American consciousness at this point — run largely below the surface.

Read more Iraq War

From TruthDig
By Robert Fisk

It was a weird week to be in the United States. On Tuesday, secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson told us that “this is all about the American taxpayer – that’s all we care about.” But when I flipped the page on my morning paper, I came across the latest gloomy statistic which Americans should care more about. “As of Wednesday evening, 4,162 U.S. service members and 11 Defence Department civilians had been identified as having died in the Iraq war.” By grotesque mischance, $700bn – the cost of George Bush’s Wall Street rescue cash – is about the same figure as the same President has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently “won” thanks to the “surge” – for which, read “escalation” – in Baghdad. The fact that the fall in casualties coincides with the near-completion of the Shia ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims is not part of the story.

Indeed, a strange narrative is now being built into the daily history of America. First we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the evil, terrorist-protecting misogynist Islamist crazies called the Taliban, setting up a democratic government under the exotically dressed Hamid Karzai. Then we rushed off to Iraq and overthrew the evil, terrorist-protecting, nuclear-weaponised, secular Baathist crazies under Saddam, setting up a democratic government under the pro-Iranian Shia Nouri al-Maliki. Mission accomplished. Then, after 250,000 Iraqi deaths – or half a million or a million, who cares? – we rushed back to Kabul and Kandahar to win the war all over again in Afghanistan. The conflict now embraces our old chums in Pakistan, the Saudi-financed, American-financed Interservices Intelligence Agency whose Taliban friends – now attacked by our brave troops inside Pakistani sovereign territory – again control half of Afghanistan.

We are, in fact, now fighting a war in what I call Irakistan. It’s hopeless; it’s a mess; it’s shameful; it’s unethical and it’s unwinnable and no wonder the Wall Street meltdown was greeted with such relief by Messrs Obama and McCain. They couldn’t suspend their campaigns to discuss the greatest military crisis in America’s history since Vietnam – but for Wall Street, no problem. The American taxpayer – “that’s all we care about”. Mercifully for the presidential candidates, they don’t have to debate the hell-disaster of Iraq any more, nor US-Israeli relations, nor Exxon or Chevron or BP-Mobil or Shell. George Bush’s titanic if mythical battle between good and evil has transmogrified into the conflict between good taxpayers and evil bankers. Phew! No entanglement in the lives and deaths of the people of the Middle East. Until the elections – barring another 9/11 – they are yesterday’s men and women.

Read more Bankers