Courage? Change? New Drapes.

Alexander Cockburn reminds us of the wisdom of Chairman Townshend ("Meet the new boss, same as the old boss").

From Counterpunch 11/18:

Let's go first to that moment of good cheer on the morning after. Horrible senators like Allen and Burns lost narrow races. The Republicans got a pasting. A man who called Alan Greenspan "a political hack" and George Bush "a liar" will be Senate majority leader. A woman elected to Congress with the help of thousands of San Franciscan homosexuals, some of them married by Mayor Gavin Newsom, would be Speaker. Who wouldn't want Harry Reid instead of Bill Frist, or Nancy Pelosi instead of fatty Hastert?

It's also the role of elections in properly run western democracies to remind people that things won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done. Nowhere was\ there an item on the Democrats' "must do" list saying "Reverse plunge towards fascism. Rescind Patriot Act. Dump the Military Commissions Act. Restore habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights." Pelosi made haste to say: impeachment is off the table.

"Bold new vision" these days means Pelosi pledging a drive to notch up the minimum wage. I don't know about the vineyard, hotel and restaurant that Pelosi co-owns, but the effective minimum wage here in Humboldt country, northern California, is about $10 an hour, which is what you have to promise a young person to mow the yard. The pay-out rises rapidly to $13 an hour if you want to buy the tyke's loyalty for return visits. Maybe on some slave plantation in southern Florida attainment of the federal minimum wage is part of the American Dream , but elsewhere we have to talk about a Living Wage, which is something altogether different.

... Optimists somehow imagine the Baker Report will explode excitingly under the war's partisans and blow them sky-high. It'll do nothing of the sort. There'll be paragraphs of soggy language about the promise of democratic governance and the rule of law in Iraq, raised fingers of warning about the perils of failure, acres of statesmanspeak about the need for multilateral involvement. Probably, Baker andCo think the US should quit Iraq, but can't think of a way of accomplishing this without jump-starting charges across the next two years that America is cutting and runnng and is this any way to run an Empire? McCain's saying that already.

... the stakes are very high, and the party of permanent war ­ represented at its purest distillation in the form of senators like Joe Biden and congressmen like Rahm Emanuel are regrouping for a counter-attack, their numbers refreshed by a phalanx of incoming blue dogs, ranged against the 60-80 "out now" Democrats. You think pro-war Tom Lantos ­ one of the most rabid Zionists in Congress -- will be an improvement on antiwar Jim Leach as chair of the House International Relations Committee? The Democratic foreign policy establishment cannot and will not tolerate the notion of Cut and Run in Iraq.

Expect the Israel lobby to say, post November 7, "We're back, stronger than ever!" Expect reassertions of the essential nobility of the attack that ousted Saddam Hussein, a deprecation of the destruction of Iraq as a society, a minimization of the outrages committed by US forces. Expect a fierce campaign ­ spearheaded by the Democrats and the surviving neocons, to wage a "better" war, evocations of the bloodbath that would accompany "over-hasty" us withdrawal (weird: your 2003 attack triggers the killing of maybe half a million and you claim anti-bloodbath credentials?)

Expect a presidential campaign waged among warmongers, from Clinton through to McCain by way of Giuliani. The voters spoke up, but that's the last chance they'll get, at least at the ballot box, for another two years. Top Democrats to voters: Okay. Enough already. Now shut up! In a few weeks we could be looking at Lieberman, Obama and Clinton holding a joint press conference and saying that no military option should be left off the table when it comes to Iran. They have said it often enough already. Ranged against them will be the peaceniks like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft and maybe Robert Gates, though that man is as slippery as an eel.
Hagel-Edwards in 2008! (Liz Edwards of course.)

And from Counterpunch today:

Imagine a steer in the stockyards hollering to his fellows, "We need a phased withdrawal from the slaughterhouse, starting in four to six months. The timetable should not be overly rigid. But there should be no more equivocation." Back and forth among the steers the debate meanders on. Some say, "To withdraw now" would be to "display weakness". Others talk about a carrot and stick approach. Then the men come out with electric prods and shock them up the chute.

The way you end a slaughter is by no longer feeding it. Every general, either American or British, with the guts to speak honestly over the past couple of years has said the same thing: the foreign occupation of Iraq by American and British troops is feeding the violence.

Iraq is not on the "edge of civil war". It is in the midst of it. There is no Iraqi government. There are Sunni militias and Shia militias inflicting savagery on each other in the awful spiral of reprisal killings familiar from Northern Ireland and Lebanon in the 1970s. Iraq has become Chechnya, headed into that abyss from the day the US invaded in 2003. It's been a steep price to inflict on the Iraqi people for the pleasure of seeing Saddam Hussein die abruptly at the end of a rope.

... Democrats, put in charge of Congress next January by voters who turned against the war, are now split on what to do. The 80 or so members of the House who favor swift withdrawal got a swift rebuff when Steny Hoyer won the House Majority leader position at a canter from Jack Murtha, humiliating House majority whip Nancy Pelosi in the process. But there are still maneuvers to have Murtha capture a significant role in brokering the rapid exit strategy he stunned Washington by advocating a year ago.

Next came Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who never opens his mouth without testing the wind with a supersensitive finger to test the tolerance levels of respectable opinion. In Chicago on Monday he said there are no good options left in Iraq, but that it "remains possible to salvage an acceptable outcome to this long and misguided war."

This time Obama plumped for the "four to six months" option for "phased redeployment", though the schedule should not be "overly rigid", to give--so the senator said -- commanders on the ground flexibility to protect the troops or adapt to changing political arrangements in the Iraqi government. Then there followed the familiar agenda for America as stern, disinterested broker: "economic pressure" should be applied to make Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds sit down and forge a lasting peace. "No more coddling, no more equivocation."It sounds great as a clip on the Evening News, provoking another freshet of talk about Obama as presidential candidate. Substantively it means absolutely nothing. What "economic pressure" is he talking about, what "coddling", in ruined, looted Iraq? It's all the language of fantasy.

The only time reality enters into Obama's and Democrats' foreign policy advisories is when the subject of Israel comes up. Then there's no lofty talk about "No more coddling", but the utterly predictable green light for Israel to do exactly what it wants--which is at present to reduce Gaza to sub-Chechnyian levels and murder families in Beit Hanoun: this is a Darfur America really could stop but instead is sponsoring and cheering on, to its eternal shame.

The Palestinians are effectively defenseless, even as the US Congress cheers Israel on. What political Washington cannot yet quite comprehend is that Iraq is not Palestine; cannot be lectured and given schedules. America is not controlling events in Iraq. If the Shia choose to cut supply lines from Kuwait up to the northern part of the country, the US forces would be in deep, deep trouble. When the Democrats take over Congress in January, they should vote to end funding for anything in Iraq except withdrawing US forces immediately. If they don't, there's nothing but downsides, including without doubt a Third Party peace candidacy that could well cost them the White House in 2008, or--who knows--the return of Al Gore as the peace candidate, now that Russ Feingold has quit the field. Perhaps that's what Obama was trying to head off.