Most in U.S. back use of force against Iran

WASHINGTON, June 24 — Most Americans would back U.S. military action against Iran to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons but concern was growing over U.S. troop casualties in Iraq, said an opinion poll released on Tuesday.

The Washington Post/ABC poll found 56 percent of respondents endorsed the use of the U.S. military to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons while 38 percent opposed it.

The United States has accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, supporting ''terrorist'' organizations and of meddling in the affairs of neighboring Iraq where U.S. troops toppled the government of Saddam Hussein in April.

The poll found growing concern over the number of casualties among U.S. forces in Iraq. Since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 46 U.S. troops have been killed in hostile circumstances there. Since President George W. Bush declared major combat over on May 1, the death toll stands at 19 killed in combat.

About half of the 1,024 people surveyed said the current level of U.S. forces killed was ''acceptable,'' down from two-thirds with the same view in early April.

Overall support for the war in Iraq was still strong but the Post said it might be ebbing slightly. Two in three people said they approved of the way Bush was dealing with Iraq but this was down from 75 percent in late April.

About 64 percent said the benefits of the war outweighed its cost, a drop from 70 percent in a survey late April.

The poll found seven in 10 people were concerned the United States would become involved in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq.

In addition, about one in four respondents incorrectly believed Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces during the conflict.

More than six in 10 people said the decision to go to war in Iraq was justified even if the United States did not find weapons of mass destruction, the reason cited by the Bush administration for going to war in the first place.

The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points for the poll and interviews were conducted June 18-22.

There were really two WMD debates. One was about chemical and low-end biological weapons. The other was about smallpox, nukes, al Qaeda and pretty much everything else under the sun.

On the former, the White House didn’t hoodwink anyone, since virtually everyone in the foreign policy mainstream figured that Iraq at least maintained a chemical and biological weapons capacity. I certainly thought so.

At a minimum, there was solid circumstantial evidence to believe that they did. Frankly, there still is.

The Iraqis stubbornly resisted and stymied the U.N. inspectors until the old inspections regime collapsed in 1998 — and at a very high cost. Back then the inspectors still believed that vast stocks of chemical and biological agents remained unaccounted for. It made no sense to believe that with the inspectors gone the Iraqis would not only shutter their weapons program but ditch the goods they’d expended so much effort to conceal.

Debate No. 2 was an entirely different story. Here, the administration was clearly in kitchen-sink territory. The Iraqis were close to getting a nuke. (Remember Condi’s line — “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” — and Dick Cheney’s wild-eyed predictions.) They were tight with al Qaeda. They were developing horrible and unimaginable new bacteriological agents. They might be doing this; they might be doing that. Might, might, might!

It’s not so much that the administration was lying — as in saying things it knew to be false — as it was happy to pass along or credit almost anything anybody said no matter how speculative the theory or how flimsy the evidence: uncorroborated tales from defectors, crackpot theories from think-tank denizens, worst-case-scenario speculations, anything.

Despite the left’s creation of a myth to defeat legitimate charges of treason, McCarthy had so badly stigmatized Communism, his victory survived him. In his brief fiery ride across the landscape, Joe McCarthy bought America another thirty years. For this, he sacrificed his life, his reputation, his name. The left cut down a brave man, but not before the American people heard the truth.

June 19

Suzanne Fields: Something that's really annoying about TownHall - they don't link to anything that's not entirely conservative, even when someone's directly quoting an article from a newspaper or a study. Maureen Dowd, the "liberal" pundit so influential that 9 out of 10 liberals have no idea what her last column was about, offends Fields' conception of the New Mom, who's brilliant and tough unless she's a single mom, in which case she need to find a man to throw herself on.

Wingnut Index: [4 out of 5]

June 18

Kathleen Parker: "Conversation" with Jessica Lynch, from the perspective of an elitist, out of touch conservative woman. Must-read, if you feel like hitting yourself in the head with a proverbial hammer. And she asks if Ja Rule and Ashanti are "people". A complete waste of time.

Wingnut Index: [5 out of 5]

June 17

Joe Scarborough: Did I mention there was a dead woman found in his office? Just in case you didn't know. The standard dumbassery. Sexuality of any sort will lead to Fred Durst boffing a goat at the MTV Music Video Awards 2008.

Wingnut Index: [5 out of 5].

In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque. Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind -- and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world. Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe. Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.

"That fucking Texas Geezer"

Jan O. Karlsson, the Swedish Minister for Migration, has got himself into trouble after calling the American President "that fucking Texas geezer".

The rather impolite description of George W. Bush was presented by the Swedish minister during a meeting with the press this week. According to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Mr. Karlsson called Mr. Bush "that fucking Texas geezer".

News bureau TT asked Mr. Karlsson if these were in fact his words, and the minister responded: "Well, I have read in the newspaper that I have said something like that, but I can not remember exactly which words I used".

The Swedish Prime Minister, Gran Persson, is not happy about his Minister’s language and told Aftonbladet that he takes the incident seriously and wants a word with the Minister.

The Prime Minister thinks the Jan O. Karlsson can continue as a member of the Swedish government, but reportedly only if the Mr. Karlsson “sorts this out”.

Jan O. Karlsson said he used the coarse description of the President in connection with criticising US politics on AIDS and abortions and criticising the fact that that the US has withheld financial means from the UN.

Mr, Karlsson said he had repeated the criticism to the American Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson:

"I repeated my criticism in the same severe manner. I even told him about the commotion in connection with the words I reportedly used to describe the President".

Asked what the American Secretary thought about the description "that fucking Texas geezer", Mr. Karlsson said:

"He did not comment on that in particular, but after I had finished my criticism, he did say 'You are quite a sincere one, aren’t you?'".

BUDGET TIMELINE: THE ABBREIVATED VERSION

May 2000: President Clinton makes a $216 billion payment on the national debt (the principal, that is).

President Bush, March 2001: 'Even if the slowdown were to turn into a recession similar to that of 1990 and '91, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the 10-year surplus would shrink by only 2 percent, from a little more than $5.6 trillion to a little less than $5.5 trillion.' As for that pesky debt, he comments here: 'And we can also pay down debt. I know a lot of folks around America are worried about national debt, as am I. We pay down $2 trillion of debt over the next 10 years.'

November 2001: After OMB Director Mitch Daniels says 'whoops, I mean deficits until 2005', Ari Fleischer explains that all we really need to do is pass the stimulus package.

July 2002: Oh, I'm sorry. It's up to $165 billion now. I'm pretty sure we can pin this on the vaunted trifecta, maybe throw in a "DAMN YOUR EYES" for Kenneth Lay.

March 2003: OK, we can't officially blame the costs associated with the Iraq War yet. However, the deficit will be $287 billion for 2003 and $338 billion for 2004. And as for paying down $2 trillion in debt over the next 10 years, we meant ADD $2 trillion. Your White House transcripts will be thusly altered.

May 31, 2003: Democratic budget analysis (backed up by a former Bush Administration economist, of all people) predicts further doom-- $416 billion deficit for 2003, $489 billion for 2004. Fucking awesome! That is bold beyond bold, a sort of daring boldness only detectible in the ultraviolet spectrum!

To give you an idea of the Bush Administration's brief and lamentable history in balancing the nation's checkbook, that's a bottom-line swing of $9,000,000,000,000 in accumulated debt over a 10-year period. Divided by 290 million people in America, every man, woman and child is looking at financing a debt of approximately $32,000 with no hope of currently paying down the principal. Can somebody please invent a curse word for me to use here?

Superconducting Super Collider Site Eyed for Counter-Terror Training Camp

A cavernous building where workers once constructed the world's most powerful magnets now stores thousands of Styrofoam cups. Miles of tunnels that were designed to contain one of the loftiest missions in science lie forgotten and filled with gravel.

But, if two former Marines have their way, the sprawling site of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Waxahachie, Texas, will soon become home to a large, privately-run counter-terrorism training camp.
"It's an extremely flexible site with great training opportunities. Everything on the site is big and sturdy," said Ron Reid, vice president of the Allen, Texas-based firearms training company, ProTac Global, Inc.

[. . . .]
In the largest building on the site, the magnet development lab, Reid wants to use a crane that once transported heavy magnets to move various training sets in and out of the building.

"We could literally have people training on a set of a small building, like a bank, in the morning and then during lunch break we could lift the building out and move in the fuselage of an aircraft for the afternoon," he said.

Another building would be used as a "killhouse" — a place for shooting practice. Reid adds that by shooting indoors, they won't need to worry about littering the environment with lead bullets.

Once the tunnels are excavated, Reid says they would make ideal models for soldiers training for battle in cave networks. They could also be used for training police and fire officials who might need to practice maneuvers inside situations like sewer systems or subway tunnels.

"There's a site where officers now practice rescuing hostages from a subway car, but it's parked in a parking lot," said Reid. "We could put a car in a tunnel and that would force them to practice in more realistic circumstances."

Any training inside the buildings or tunnels would carry the added benefit of being shielded from spy satellites — a criterion the Department of Defense has emphasized as critical.

Amazingly, scientists are becoming increasingly confident that they will be able to create black holes on demand, in quantity, using the new atom-smashers due to come online in the next five years. Some estimates suggest that the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN -the acronym is in French) will be able to create an average of one black hole each second. LHC will bombard protons and antiprotons together with such a force that the collision will create temperatures and energy densities not seen since the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. This should be enough to pop off numerous tiny black holes, with masses of just a few hundred protons. Black holes of this size will evaporate almost instantly, their existence detectable only by dying bursts of Hawking radiation.

What exactly are scientist looking for in the Hawking radiation? For one thing, it's a big mystery whether Hawking radiation contains any information about the particles that formed the black hole in the first place, or fell in later. Those particles had charge, spin, and other fundamental characteristics that may not have been erased by the black hole. Also, the exact manner in which a black hole dies may give us a view into higher dimensions in space. The most recent theories about the Big Bang and the earliest moments of our universe suggest that there were more than the four (three of space, one of time) we normally experience.

For some reason, the other dimensions didn't expand with our four, and remained "rolled up" at very small scales. These extra dimensions might still be important, and directly felt, in regions right around the central singularity of a black hole. In fact, these higher dimensions might solve the mystery of what a singularity really is. Instead of truly being an infinitively small and dense point, there might suddenly be a whole lot more room provided by extra dimensions that only act on tiny scales.

Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.

Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.

U.S. has gained little if Bush lied about reason for war
By Mark Bowden
For The Inquirer

It has been two months since the United States and Britain went to war against Saddam Hussein, and coalition forces have yet to discover convincing evidence of the weapons programs that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair said were its primary cause.

Some of those who supported the war beforehand did so solely on the basis of ending tyranny. The mass graves found throughout Iraq, and widespread stories of torture and atrocity, come as no surprise to those who had studied or endured the Baathist dictator's regime. Those who opposed the war for any reason ought to be doing some soul-searching about the kind of horrors they were prepared to leave in place.

But it is true that Hussein represented only one of many thuggish regimes, and that the United States is not about to go to war against them all. I supported this war because I believed Bush and Blair when they said Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that shared Hussein's hostile designs made such a threat a defense priority - or so the argument went.

Early this month, the U.S. military announced that it had found three mobile laboratories that were most likely designed to manufacture chemical or biological weapons, the types of labs that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to in making his argument for war before the U.N. Security Council. The discoveries were suggestive but hardly convincing evidence of the specific, tangible threat repeatedly outlined by the President. With the authors of Iraq's illicit-weapons program now in custody, we should expect to see soon, or to have seen already, the facilities and stockpiles we and most of the rest of the world believed Hussein possessed.

They may yet be found, but it is beginning to look as though the skeptics in this case were right. If so, I was taken in by this administration, and America and Great Britain were led to war under false pretenses.

Events have moved so swiftly, and Hussein's toppling has posed so many new pressing problems, that it would be easy to lose sight of this issue, but it is critically important. I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war. A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make.

Truth in public life has always been a slippery commodity. We expect campaigning politicians or debating journalists to pitch and spin. Facts are marshaled to support arguments and causes; convenient ones are trumpeted and inconvenient ones played down or ignored. This is the political game.

But when the President of the United States addresses the nation and the world, I expect the spinning to stop. He represents not just a party or a cause, but the American people. When President Bush argued that Hussein possessed stockpiles of illicit and deadly poisons, he was presumably doing so on the basis of intelligence briefings and evidence that the public could not see. He was asking us to trust him, to trust his office, to trust that he was acting legitimately in our self-defense. That's something very different from engaging in a bold policy of attempting to remake the Middle East, or undertaking a humanitarian mission to end oppression. Neither of these two justifications would have been likely to garner widespread public support. But national defense? That's an argument the President can always win.

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn't. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.

When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.