Politics 101: Know the Difference between WE and THEY

WE didn't do this. THEY did this.

Apologies for writing something personal, but this is a special anniversary for me.

I was born in 1957, so I was six years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. At the time, I didn't even  know what the word "assassinated" meant, much less understand what it meant that this particular President had been assassinated. But I saw how the news affected my parents, and all the other adults, and I realized I needed to start paying attention to the news -- and especially to politics, which previously had seemed boring. 

In 1968, when Senator Kennedy was assassinated, I was only eleven, but I had been paying close attention for five years. I knew what "assassinated" meant, and I knew what it meant that this particular Senator had been assassinated. To the country, and to the world, it meant that we were destined for a long and horrible war. For me personally, it meant if I didn't get out of the United States in the next seven years, my life would be in danger. 

A Formula For Endless War: The Wounded Shark, The Quest For Victory, And The Illusion Of Success

Yesterday, Chris Floyd posted one of his best pieces ever. It's called "The Wounded Shark: 'Good War' Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On" and you must read the entire piece, if you haven't already done so. I can wait.

I respect and admire Chris Floyd's analysis -- especially in this case -- but I've also been having some mildly interesting thoughts of my own, about a few of the issues he touched on, and therefore I offer the following excerpts from his post, with extended comments.

I don't think I'm saying anything Chris hasn't already figured out. I think I'm saying things that he couldn't fit into his piece, which was already huge -- and brilliant! And therefore this commentary is not meant as a critique but rather as a companion piece to "The Wounded Shark", which starts this way:

Don't tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief -- the "good war" in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand -- is already lost.

This war was always lost; it was never even intended to be "won", in my opinion.

Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire -- not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan -- will only lead to disaster.

And this depends on what you mean by "disaster". We must always remember that the interests of the people running the war are not the same as, and in many ways are diametrically opposed to, the interests of the people who are being asked (or forced) to fight it.

In this case, the prognosis of "disaster" comes from

America's biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan -- Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan -- both said that the war was "unwinnable," and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy "doomed to fail."

The British seem shocked to discover all this, but it seems to me that the British were never meant to understand the point of this war, nor the reasons for it, nor the conditions under which it might be said to have been "won". And neither were any of our other "allies", and neither -- clearly -- were the American public.

As Reuters reports, the comments from the top figures in the British effort have already been derided as "defeatist" by Pentagon big dog Robert Gates, even though they were

echoed by the top United Nations official in Kabul, who said success was only possible through dialogue and other political efforts.

The basic disconnect here -- as elsewhere -- seems to be that nobody, from the top United Nations official in Kabul on down, has any idea what our Secretary of Defense means when he says:

"While we face significant challenges in Afghanistan, there certainly is no reason to be defeatist or to underestimate the opportunities to be successful in the long run."

Personally, I would want to know: How "long" is "the long run"? And just what do we mean by "successful"?

But simply posing such questions is akin to treason, apparently, because we never see them asked in the major media. So let's skip the questions and go straight to the undeniable facts of the matter.

Casting the outcome of this "mission" in terms of winning and losing, or success and failure, is a sham. It is every bit as false as casting any of our current wars -- or the entire GWOT -- in terms of "good" Christians against "evil" Muslims. And it is done for the same reason -- to obliterate the truth of the matter.

Chris Floyd rightly points out that the reasons given for the invasion of Afghanistan would make no sense, even if the official story of 9/11 were true, which it clearly isn't. But the falsity of the official 9/11 story is beside my point -- or beside this point: Afghanistan was bombed and invaded and remains occupied based on a tangled web of deliberate lies.

These lies obscure not only the causes of the war but also the intentions of the people running it.

Thus our British "allies" think the "mission" is doomed to fail because they're under the impression that the object of the exercise is to bring peace and democracy and progress to Afghanistan, by rooting out the terrorists of global reach who threaten the entire civilized world.

But that's not even close to the truth. We can see this in many different ways: sufficient for the purposes of this analysis is the fact that our tactics have no relation to our declared goals.

The reason for all this deception is simple: if the real aims, goals, and reasons for this war were laid bare, the United States would have no allies at all.

So instead, there's a veneer of lies over everything, including the "agreements" obtained under extreme duress from our so-called "allies". And this is why Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, wrote

"we must tell [the Americans] that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one.” The American strategy, he is quoted as saying, “is destined to fail.”

Destined to fail? Of course it is! It's designed to fail! Otherwise, the tactics -- and the result -- would have been quite different.

When President Kennedy took office in January of 1961, one of the first things he signed was the foreword for a new book, which had been commissioned under the Eisenhower administration, and was just about to be published. It was a study of counter-insurgency strategy, short enough and interesting enough that I wound up reading it several times in a row, nearly two decades ago.

(That book was part of the military history library of a software development firm for which I used to work; the firm no longer exists and I haven't been able to find the book anywhere else. But I spent quite a few lunch hours reading it and I still remember quite a bit of what I read.)

There were about a dozen chapters, each a case study illustrating a very successful (or very unsuccessful) counter-insurgency strategy as it had been played out in the decade and a half since the end of World War II.

It was good information -- solid lessons about what to do, and what not to do. Kennedy greeted it heartily and predicted that it would be extremely valuable in the guerrilla war which was then threatening to develop in Southeast Asia. But as things turned out, it wasn't.

I would never claim that JFK was assassinated because he said that book was the key to winning in Vietnam. But the facts remain that he was assassinated, and that the war was waged in utter disregard of every single hard-learned lesson embodied in that book.

We knew dropping napalm on civilians wasn't the way to win their hearts and minds. We knew kidnapping innocent people and throwing them out of moving helicopters was going to make their friends and families angry. We knew destroying a village in order to save it was not a reasonable or scalable approach. But we -- by which I mean the people who were running the war -- did all these things anyway, and more, over and over and over again.

In some important and overlooked ways, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the GWOT in general, and even the Wall Street "rescue" reflect the same tactics.

First they find an enemy which must be defeated, preferably at any cost. If no such enemy reports for duty, they'll create one. In some cases, the enemy can be embodied in a supremely evil villain, such as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. In other cases, such as the Vietnam War and the Wall Street "rescue", the "enemy" is merely a potential outcome which must be avoided at any cost, such as a global depression, or all of Southeast Asia becoming communist.

Next they provide an alternative -- the only alternative, as it always turns out: and it's always and obviously much better than the enemy, which must therefore be thoroughly defeated. Whether we're talking about ensuring economic stability, defeating terrorism, bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East, or saving the world from Communism, the stated goals are always infinitely more desirable than the outcomes that must be avoided, and therefore there can be no argument over the assertion that the ends justify the means.

In other words, we are always being told that what we are trying to do is so righteous -- and what we are trying to defeat (or avoid) is so terrible -- that all methods are acceptable, and nothing is "off the table". But then this "nothing-off-the-table" approach allows the use of tactics which preclude the ends we are allegedly trying to accomplish.

So we invade Iraq and continue to occupy it even though all our intelligence professionals tell us American troops in Iraq are contributing to a rise in terrorism.

We bomb civilian villages in Afghanistan even though we know it sets back the diplomatic "effort" at "reconciliation".

We throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the companies which caused the financial meltdown, while claiming that saving them is essential to preventing the continuation of the meltdown they have caused.

None of it makes any sense except in terms of secret agendas which are completely at odds with the public cover story.

In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the GWOT in general, our "finest" military minds are not only ignoring all the lessons of 20th century counter-insurgency warfare, but also the most time-honored knowledge about war itself, such as the bit of ancient Chinese wisdom that runs, "Know your enemy".

The ancients -- not just the Chinese but all of them -- knew that they could win their wars only by understanding their enemy, by gaining -- and using -- intimate knowledge of who they were fighting against, and what motivated these people to fight.

These days, we can't get a straight answer to any of it: You almost never see anyone mention that our enemies are people too. Nobody -- at least in the official national discourse -- can bear to admit that we're fighting against the best, the bravest, and the most resourceful citizens of the countries that we have invaded. Nor can anyone admit that they're fighting against us because we bombed and invaded and destroyed their countries, and stayed -- all on false pretenses.

It can be said -- and it often is said -- that the war is being run "inefficiently", or that the military has been "blundering", and so on; but when we systematically ignore some of the most valuable lessons of our history, and some of the oldest human knowledge pertaining to warfare, that's not a blunder. That's a telltale sign.

It points to the fact that what we're really doing -- and again by "we", I mean the people who are running the war -- is very different than what we say we're doing.

We're trying to conquer foreign countries, not to bring them democracy, but to bring them under our thumb. We want their natural resources. We want their territory -- and if we can't own it outright then we at least want to be able to move men and material freely and securely through it.

As even a brief study of our history will confirm, we do not now give and we never have given a damn about bringing democracy to any foreign country; in fact we have a tradition of overthrowing democratically elected governments if they don't do what we demand of them. But none of this can possibly be spoken in "polite" society (by which I mean not only television, radio and the mainstream newspapers, but also a disturbingly large number of allegedly dissident websites), where the only permissible talk seems to be about winning and losing.

If the opinion-makers can convince the chumps that the question is one of winning or losing, and that winning is the only acceptable outcome, then the war can go on forever -- especially if all methods are acceptable, including those which are actually intended to prolong the war.

Anti-war types who argue about winning and losing are doomed to fail, because they're playing into the hands of war supporters, who have obvious answers available for either eventuality: if we're winning, then we must be doing something right, and therefore we should do more of it; if we're losing, then we must not be trying hard enough, and therefore we should try harder. Either way, if winning the war is the outcome we seek, we must wage more war.

Furthermore, if we reduce a war of choice to the level of a game, we minimize all the things that matter most about the war: all the suffering we've inflicted becomes "collateral damage", and it doesn't even show up on the "scoreboard". Meanwhile, the false reasons that "justified" the war don't matter anymore, and we're free to proceed as if we hadn't done anything wrong, as if we're only in this "game" because we were "scheduled" to "play" it.

But war is nothing like a game. And the wars we are currently waging -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere in the GWOT -- were all "justified" based on transparent lies. Therefore they are also war crimes, and crimes against all of humanity: these are huge, unforgivable crimes, and we are the guilty parties. And here, when I say "we", I mean not only the people who are running the war, but also the people who are fighting it, and the people who support them -- no matter what form that support may take.

If you voted for George Bush, or for a Congressman or Senator who voted to fund this war; if you "support the troops" in any fashion, even by simply saying you do; if you pay taxes to Uncle Sam; if you believe that we should or must win any or all of our wars, in the sense that the administration and its supporters use the term; then you're part of the problem. And that makes just about all of us. I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but would you rather have me lie to you?

You can get plenty of comforting lies elsewhere -- almost anywhere else, sadly. And perhaps the worst lies of all are the ones that say, "We can win!"

The idea that we can "win" is a sham and its job is to cover up an enormous crime. Winning is impossible, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq and in the GWOT in general; and in every one of these cases, the impossibility of winning is a deliberate feature of the grand deception.

For example: the US would consider that it had won the war in Iraq, if Iraq somehow became a peaceful, stable nation with a legitimate, democratically elected government, as long as that government was friendly to "US interests".

But that's not a possible result. That was never a possible result.

Even before "Shock and Awe", even before the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, even before the "liberation" overstayed its welcome and showed itself to be an occupation, even before the gradual, unsurprising, "revelations" that all of this hostility was based on deliberately crafted lies ... even before any of this, no legitimate, democratically elected government in Iraq could possibly have been friendly to "US interests", especially when the main US interests are (or are seen to be) building American bases on Iraqi soil and regaining American-multinational control of all that Iraqi oil.

In this sense we cannot possibly "win" in Iraq. But we are constantly told that we mustn't lose. And this means we can never surrender. So therefore the war will go on and on forever -- or until we stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

The same is true in Afghanistan, at least in general form, although in this case the particulars are different. We cannot win because the war is based on lies; and because the desired outcome is impossible; and because the tactics used to "approach" our goal only serve to move it farther away, thus prolonging the war.

Again the actual goals are hidden, and again they are very different than what we are told: At the heart of the war in Afghanistan lie vast opium fortunes, strategic bases, and the free passage through foreign territory of valuable resources owned by American-multinational corporations, not necessarily in that order.

Of course, there's also the "intimidation factor".

Every other country in the world must measure each action, plan, or strategic idea according to a number of factors, including whether they think the Americans will stand for it.

The bombing, invasion, destruction and subsequent occupation of Iraq -- based on no credible evidence to support any of the claims which supposedly made this course of action necessary, says to every other nation on the planet:

"Who wants to be next?"

As Jonah Goldberg explained in National Review in 2002:

I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago...

It's noy just Ledeen and Goldberg, of course. A huge segment of the bipartisan policy-making establishment (though they may not say it) act as if they believed the very same thing. So when the US talks about a "rogue state" or a "bully in the schoolyard", the rest of the world rolls its eyes.

In addition there's a common thread running through all our wars: every piece of equipment ruined must be replaced. Every bomb used, every bullet fired, every meal eaten must be supplied by somebody who is making money on the deal.

The longer the war goes on, the better it is for the weapons manufacturers, the defense contractors, and their financiers. These are the people who want the chumps thinking about winning and losing -- and now I mean the chumps in the corridors of power as well as the chumps in the streets.

Chris Floyd quotes an excellent piece from Pankaj Mishra which quotes George Bush telling his commanders in Iraq:

Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!

Chris notes:

Anyone who has read Hitler's "table talk" will feel a shiver of familiarity -- and revulsion -- when reading Bush's words.

And I agree completely with that, but not with this:

This is the voice of our mud-brain thrashing its way through broken fragments of higher-order thought. This is the voice of an imperial elite -- of our imperial elite.

In my opinion, this is merely the voice of an imperial chump, a "mud-brain", channeling the nonsense he's been fed by the "imperial elite".

In the same way, Adolph Hitler proved to be just another imperial chump in the end, firing a bullet into his head to avoid being hanged for his crimes ... while his financiers skedaddled with the loot, and set up shop ... um ... elsewhere!

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The Coverup Continues: 'JFK Was A Hawk' And Other Stories

My recent post about the JFK assassination, "Two Conspiracies, No Theories", made distinctions between the plot to kill the President and the plot to hide the crime, and it drew a further distinction between the plot to hide the crime and the coverup itself.

The coverup, I argued, was (is!) much bigger than the plot to hide the crime. I used Walter Cronkite as an example; as I understand it, he wasn't "in on" the plot to hide the crime; he was simply part of the coverup: getting bad information and passing it on.

Many others assisted the coverup without being part of any conspiracy. Lies were fed into the echo chamber, so to speak, and when they came out the other end they were absorbed by millions, who passed them on, and continue to do so.

As if to prove my point, a seemingly well-meaning commenter on that thread provided the official cover story, or one version of it anyway -- as if it were fact.

I think most here recognize that the POTUS is a stick figure manipulated upon the stage. That the "government" is nothing more than a siphon for tax money to be transferred to the real corporate masters of events.

The motive for JFK being killed has always eluded me, he was a member of the elite, he was a hawk, he contemplated invading Cuba, the fairy tale of his wanting to pull out of Viet Nam has little substance.

All I can come up with are these- the mob was pissed because he betrayed them after his election, when they were instrumental in his election, and, his threat to bring the CIA under control.

Perhaps LBJ made a better deal with the corporations about the war in Asia.

Most of the people that might answer these questions are dead now, so we will have to put it together as best we can.

Please note that I take issue with the comment rather than the reader who posted it. He came here via Chris Floyd's excellent site and shows no sign of being a troll. That an intelligent and well-meaning reader should post such a comment is a testament to the power of propaganda.

Let's take a look at it, one phrase at a time...

The motive for JFK being killed has always eluded me

That's no surprise, nor is it any cause for shame. It's a very complicated question.

The mob was pissed because he betrayed them after his election, when they were instrumental in his election

With his brother as Attorney General, JFK shifted (or tried to shift) the focus of American law-enforcement away from the communist threat (which was highly exaggerated) toward mafia-style organized crime (which the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been inclined to ignore).

The mob was further ticked because JFK wouldn't support a war to "retake" Cuba, where they once ran resorts and casinos under Fulgencio Batista, one of the most corrupt dictators ever. Fidel Castro's revolution took their island playground away, and they wanted it back.

The gamblers eventually relocated to Las Vegas, but it's quite true that some mobsters had seen enough of the brothers Kennedy. On the other hand, there were aspects of the assassination that the mob couldn't have controlled.

his threat to bring the CIA under control

This threat sprang directly from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an assault-by-proxy to try to "retake" Cuba, staged by the CIA without the assistance of the American military. And I use the word "staged" advisedly.

The "Cuban exiles" who were used (as mercenaries) in the invasion were meant to be pinned down at the very least, most likely captured. There's no other excuse for having them storm the beaches from ships in which their ammunition was packed at the bottom.

The CIA had sent not a fighting force but a sacrificial gambit, assuming that the President would chip in with some air support at the last moment and get the country involved in a full-scale war ... or maybe not "assuming" as much as trying to force him to do so against his will.

Perhaps the CIA planners had a point: they were assigned the task of "retaking" Cuba during the Eisenhower / Nixon administration and might not have been expecting the next President to have a will of his own. Certainly they would have had no such trouble had Nixon won the 1960 election.

JFK took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but he also fired the CIA officers most responsible for it, including Allen Dulles, who was later appointed to the Warren Commission, which allegedly investigated JFK's death.

he was a member of the elite,

This gets tricky. Kennedy was of the elite but he was not for the elite.

He worked against poverty and for civil rights. He took on the big steel companies over their collusion in price-fixing. It was obvious; it was illegal; and he made no bones about it. They didn't expect that. And they didn't like it, either.

He took on the big oil companies over the oil depletion allowance. This was a tax credit that compensated oilfield owners for the reduction in value of their real estate due to the removal of the oil. The fact that they had sold the oil -- often at a huge profit -- wasn't supposed to matter; their remaining assets were worth less and "therefore" the owners were being "compensated" for this "loss" by the taxpayer.

Kennedy wanted to get rid of the oil depletion allowance. Oilmen hated him, and they were especially thick, and rich, and powerful, in Texas.

he was a hawk,

No he wasn't. He was a reality-based policy-maker, the last of his kind in the White House. Firm in defense, (in Berlin, for example) he drew the line against unprovoked attack.

he contemplated invading Cuba,

But he never invaded Cuba. In fact he stood against the CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and he refused to become entangled there militarily then or later.

Not much later, he managed to avoid a global nuclear catastrophe (which seemed quite likely) during the Cuban missile crisis.

the fairy tale of his wanting to pull out of Viet Nam has little substance.

Au contraire! This is the most completely wrong charge of all, and one of the most often-repeated. I used to wonder about it myself, since I heard it so often, until I read John M. Newman's "JFK and Vietnam".

This is not a book for novices; it's very dry reading indeed. Newman documents his tale with extensive quotes from National Security Action Memoranda (NASMs) and Special National Intelligence Estimates (SNIEs).

Newman presents the SNIEs and NASMs pertaining to Kennedy's approach to Vietnam, and writes about the context in which these documents were written. The results are compelling to say the least.

Newman's book shows not only that JFK wanted to get out of Vietnam, but also that he was the only one who did. All his advisers wanted wider war. Kennedy resisted them, ignored them, moved them around to prevent anyone gaining too much influence, shifted those whose views became too hawkish.

But he never really had any allies in this endeavor, except for his pesky little brother the Attorney General, who cut a great deal of ice in domestic circles but none among the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In October of 1963, JFK signed National Security Action Memorandum #63, which called for the withdrawal of a thousand Americans from Vietnam by Christmas, and withdrawal of all Americans by the end of 1965. The following month he was dead.

Four days after the assassination, the day after Kennedy's funeral, president Lyndon Baines Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum #73, which reversed the "findings" of NASM #63 and led directly to more than a decade of much wider war.

We were told at the time that no national policies would change as a result of the assassination. Over the years, gatekeepers such as Noam Chomsky have argued that no significant foreign policy changed with the death of the 35th President.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Kennedy had "crossed swords" with the Military Industrial Complex several times before October of 1963, all the way back to the beginning of his administration, in fact. He had campaigned as a hawk against Richard Nixon, urging a rapid buildup of American nuclear missiles to close the so-called "Missile Gap" -- the Russian advantage over the US in long-range nuclear missiles.

The "Missile Gap" was Pentagon propaganda, designed to keep the money flowing and the fear palpable. The USA had hundreds of missiles. The Soviets were portrayed as having many more than we did. Kennedy used that "fact" to batter Nixon during the campaign. But after he was sworn in, he learned the truth: the Soviets only had four nuclear missiles. The entire "Missile Gap" was fiction; and Nixon couldn't say so on the stump because it was classified.

When Kennedy found out the real story behind the "Missile Gap", he was stunned, and ticked. Then he felt that he personally, and the entire country, had been betrayed. It was this, more than any ideological predisposition, which seemed to turn him in favor of "peaceful coexistence" with the Soviet Union, rather than the isolation, containment, or mutual assured destruction favored by his opponents -- and even his advisers.

The world could have -- would have -- been much different if the remarkable young President had been allowed to live.

But then no such President could have been allowed to live for very long. So maybe there was no hope ever of escaping the clutches of the Military Industrial Complex.

This was the very monster Eisenhower warned us about -- but by that point he had spent twenty years feeding it, and being fed by it.

Funny how that works, is it not?

No. It's not.

We haven't even mentioned the Secret Service. All the fabricated evidence in this case came via the President's supposed protectors.

Funny how that works, too, isn't it?

No. But that's a story for another day.

VIDEO : Mike Gravel Explains The Similarities Between Iraq And Vietnam

Remember when George Bush used to say Iraq and Vietnam had nothing in common?

Do you also remember when George Bush used Vietnam as a parallel to "justify" staying in Iraq?

Mike Gravel remembers Vietnam, too. But he remembers it the way it was, not the way the president would like it to have been.

Watch. Listen. Learn.

I Like Mike!

Sink Or Swim With The Invisible Surge

An "invisible surge" is flowing in the Homeland -- a substantial increase in the quantity and quality of the pro-war propaganda. I first noticed it a couple of weeks ago; now I think it probably started a week earlier.

Regardless of when it started, the manure has been flowing faster and more furious than ever, and it's been moving mountains. Here's one example among many:

On Monday it seemed amazing that a prominent Democratic Senator would call for the removal of the famously democratically-elected government of Iraq. But within the past few days we have seen similar calls (or warnings) from a wide variety of sources.

By Wednesday the mainstream press had turned fully against Nuri al-Maliki and he seemed to know it; I couldn't help thinking "Sink or Swim with Ngo Dinh Diem", recalling the famously democratically-elected President of South Vietnam, who held the position for eight years before being kidnapped and eventually assassinated in what would be the first of many coups d'etat in the ill-fated South Vietnamese "republic".

President Bush's inept conflation of Vietnam and Iraq certainly hasn't helped me to sweep the inane slogan from my mind, nor have I managed to forget that Diem's assassination preceded that of JFK by less than three weeks.

None of this would have any bearing of course on rumors of an impending coup d'etat coming from the Iraqi exile community, via Professor Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment.

Military Coup Planned for Iraq?

A rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels seems highly likely.

"There is serious talk of a military commission (majlis `askari) to take over the government. The parties would be banned from holding positions, and all the ministers would be technocrats, so to speak... [The writer indicates that attempts have been made to recruit cabinet members from the ranks of expatriate technocrats.]

The six-member board or commission would be composed on non-political former military personnel who are presently not part of the government OR the military establishment, such as it is in Iraq at the moment. It is said that the Americans are supporting this behind the scenes.

The plan includes a two-year period during which political parties would not be permitted to be part of the government, but instead would prepare and strengthen the parties for an election which would not have lists, but real people running for real seats. The two year period would be designed to take control of security and restore infrastructure.

...[I]t is another [desperate plan], but one which many many Iraqis will support, since they are sick of their country being pulled apart by the "imports" - Maliki, Allawi, Jaafari et al. The military group is composed of internals, people who have the goal of securing the country even at the risk of no democracy, so they say."

I can't help but wonder what they mean when they say "securing the country even at the risk of no democracy". Do they mean to sign the damned Oil Law no matter how anti-democratic it may be, in the hope that the Americans will then try to provide security rather than fomenting further "sectarian violence"?

And if not, what else could they be talking about? Could they be so disconnected from reality that they fail to see the American occupation as an oil heist? And does it even matter? If, as they say, "the Americans are supporting this behind the scenes", then the question is moot, is it not?

Bush and the bipartisan foreign policy consensus have made it very clear that they are not interested in any Iraqi government that doesn't give them what they want: a stable puppet government, long-term access to huge military bases, and of course the oil. (In America, this is called "meeting benchmarks".)

Is it possible that the "plotters in exile", if that's what they are, are contemplating taking power in Iraq and then defying the Americans? Who would be so mad? Why not live a life of relative luxury in exile?

All in all, strikes me as quite likely that a coup is being planned, and that the pronouncements of Senator Levin and others may be intended to prepare the American public not so much for the event but for the rest of the spin which will precede and follow it.

As for the whispers in the Iraqi exile community, I find them most intriguing and I imagine we'll be learning much more about them very shortly. Keeping an eye on Professor Cole's blog seems like a good idea -- even better than usual.

Decades of sleuthing by generations of scholars has failed to give a definitive answer to the question of whether the US was behind the Diem coup. It appears that JFK knew nothing of it, and certainly didn't approve it; but it's not impossible for events to take place without the knowledge and consent of the president.

Certainly, if there is a coup in Iraq and if it is perpetrated by Americans, they won't leave much evidence behind.

Part of covering their tracks would involve establishing what they call "plausible deniability". Creating "plausible deniability" would entail the creation of "patsies", bogus suspects on whom the coup could be blamed. Where would you find such bogus suspects? In the Iraqi exile community? Hmmm.

Am I accusing Professor Cole of anything untoward? Certainly not. He appears to be honestly reporting what he learns. What more can anyone ask?

Is it possible that he and his sources are being used in some way? In other words, are his sources being lied to? ... Well, of course it is, but that's all entirely speculative, and based on nothing.

On the other hand, I know for a fact that when the surge becomes a flood, it's gonna come in the front door and the back door at the same time.