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Under the guise of preserving the security of the state, secret agencies monitor its citizens’ telephone communications without reference to a court or any meaningful legislative oversight; massive amounts of information are gathered and analysed from banks, libraries and other institutions used by the country’s citizens; enemies of the state are held in secret prisons overseas, hidden from the Red Cross or any independent monitoring, and subjected to interrogation using abusive techniques that might very well rise to the level of torture; after holding these enemies indefinitely without trial for years, the state brings these enemies before a kangaroo court that will be able to convict on the basis of coerced testimony, and evidence which has not been presented to the defendant for rebuttal.

Growing up during the Cold War in England, I would have had no trouble identifying the countries whose governments resorted to these tactics. It could only have been the Soviet Union or any one of its subjugated allies in the Warsaw Pact; or the People’s Republic of China, perhaps; certainly North Korea. The contrast between us and them was very clear back then, even in the face of a threat from what seemed a monolithic enemy. But alas we are not talking about the old USSR. No, we are, in fact, talking about the United States of America in 2006, unbelievable as that may be.

Authority to do some of these things has already been handed to the Bush administration by a compliant and frightened Congress under the USA Patriot Act. The rest, including unfettered electronic surveillance and the issues surrounding the detention, treatment, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists, Bush now seeks from Congress in the run-up to a fall election whereby opponents, which he had hoped would only be Democrats, can be portrayed as unpatriotic and soft on terrorists.

Bush’s plan has been upset by the staunch opposition of some GOP heavyweights in the Senate, notably John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who simply cannot stomach America’s moral stature being further diminished by an administration that has done so much to reduce it already in the eyes of the world.

Of course Bush only seeks congressional consent because the U.S. Supreme Court is not yet sufficiently packed with ideological soul mates willing to demolish the principle of separation of powers (give it time, though, and Bush may have that problem licked too if another justice retires). A Supreme Court ruling earlier in the year forced the Bush administration to come to Congress on the detainee issues; the fact that it would likely do the same regarding Bush’s surveillance programme which bypasses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has prompted the administration to launch a pre-emptive effort to obtain Congress’ stamp of approval to its unfettered power to monitor our communications.

The Bush administration and its defenders, mostly on the right, say that we are at war with a deadly and ruthless enemy that dealt the United States a catastrophic blow on September 11^th, 2001. To successfully combat this enemy, they say, we must adopt tough and intrusive measures. They cite precedents for restricting civil liberties such as the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II (a shameful act), or the suspension of habeas corpus by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, to justify these governmental intrusions which, they say would be temporary anyway.

Al-Qaida and its affiliated organizations represent a dangerous enemy to be sure. But let’s be realistic: they lack the capability to conquer any Middle East nation let alone confront the U.S. at home. What they can try to do is mount another 9/11-type operation. Even the characterization of the struggle as a “war” is misleading and serves mainly to boost both the terrorists and Bush himself.

Bush’s overwrought rhetoric on these issues has served to further diminish his credibility. When he suggests that if we don’t prevail in Iraq, the terrorists will follow us home (well, presumably they’d have to get a visa first) or that the safety of this country is at stake in the war in Iraq, it simply reinforces the perception that this floundering president will say anything to stoke the fires of fear in America.

We must certainly be vigilant; we must have strong security measures at our ports, and on our borders. Our law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to be alert and must talk to one another. The fact that we have not been attacked a second time since 9/11 suggests that our domestic agencies have taken the lessons of that event to heart. However, the idea that we cannot adequately defend ourselves without giving unfettered power to the executive branch to electronically monitor our communications, or that we must abuse captured suspected terrorists or try them in a court of law with Soviet-style rules of evidence is dangerous nonsense. In short, the notion that we cannot simultaneously remain free and still fight the terrorists is just plain wrong and if the Bush administration doesn’t think it’s possible, then the sooner we replace it the better. And that goes, also, for the Republican majority in Congress.

For me, the biggest surprise in this struggle for the soul of America is the Republican right. This is the party of small government, perennially sceptical of government intrusion in our lives, proud of Ronald Reagan’s role in the downfall of the Soviet Union, forever waxing lyrical about America’s freedoms. Yet in the last five years they have given unswerving support and applause to a secretive and authoritarian administration that has sought to expand executive power at the expense of the other branches, infringe on traditional civil liberties and intimidate both the media and the political opposition by questioning their patriotism and commitment to the struggle against America’s enemies.

If it’s okay for the right to question the patriotism of more liberal, progressive and even politically moderate Americans, then perhaps it’s time to question the commitment of conservatives (minus the libertarian element) to our democracy. The most interesting argument I’ve seen advanced by the right, and one I’ve seen frequently in the opinion pages of the daily newspaper, is that restricting our civil liberties is a necessary price to pay for preserving our freedom from the terrorists – who want to destroy it. Huh? So we’ll beat them to it by surrendering our own freedoms to our government before the terrorists take them from us? Yeah, that makes sense. And then there’s the caveat often advanced by the administration that these restrictions are “temporary” just as they were in World War II or in the Civil War. The trouble with that argument is that the struggle against Islamic terrorists is likely to be interminable – particularly if we keep electing dunderheads like Bush and the Republicans in Congress who seem intent on making decisions, such as invading Iraq, that aid rather than hurt the enemy.

Although I don’t agree with them on much else, I admire and respect Senators McCain, Warner, Graham and others in the GOP such as former secretary of state Colin Powell, who, together with the almost unanimous support of Senate Democrats, are willing to stand up for our country’s fundamental democratic principles – the very things that make it worth fighting for in the first place. It is shameful, however, that the foe these Republicans battle so valiantly is their own party and president.

Karma does in fact have a strange way of working itself out.

This example comes in the form of last weekend’s Quadrangle Festival in Texarkana Texas where dying pigeons fell from the sky, dampening the mood at the festival.

According to news reports, the pigeons were poisoned by the downtown branch of Capital One in an attempt at nuissance control. So, when the birds began to fall from the sky at this Capital One sponsored event, Capital One found itself with some explaining to do.

Of course, Capital One didn’t do this on their own, they hired out the dirty work to a pest control company. In response to questions about the poisioning, Jarrod Horton, president of Anti-Pest Co. stated that “…unfortunately sometimes the side effects are the birds might have convulsions or the birds might die…”.

Really, you think so?!?

Here are some fetival patron quotes from the Texarkana Gazette article:

“What is this telling our kids? If we killed them (animals), we would get a ticket or a fine. We raise our kids to protect these animals and they come and poison them,” said Martin. “What other animals could they kill in the process of doing this?”

“I saw the pigeon nose dive the concrete,” Flanagan said. “It just kind of hobbled over and around and sat there and twitched.”

Another man at the festival, who declined to give his name, said, “They threw a dead one over there in the bushes (along the wall across from the front of the Perot). They’re just flying around here and falling out of the sky.”

I am shocked that such little value is placed on life, but am encouraged by the fact that these innocent little guys used their last breath to rain on Capital One’s ‘parade’.

I encourage you to let Capital One know how you feel about animal cruelty and the poisoning of pigeons.

Their information is:

Capital One
Downtown – Texarkana
100 West Broad Street
Texarkana, TX 75501
(903) 838-2000

There is a familiar litany of reasons for the growing opposition in this country to our involvement in Iraq. The fact that it is not going well is certainly a key one, along with the terrible human cost. The war is a financial drain and, even more critically, a burden on our armed forces, the Army and Marine Corps in particular, that makes it difficult to meet our other commitments. The wear and tear on equipment will require huge expenditures down the road as will the care of thousands of badly injured troops with permanent physical and other disabilities. Standards for this volunteer Army have been lowered in order to meet recruiting needs. In short, our armed forces are under terrific strain. And to cap it off, for all the sacrifice and effort in Iraq, we may actually have done much more harm than good in the overall struggle against Islamic terrorists by stimulating recruiting to organizations such as al-Qaida, providing a first rate training ground for them and further alienating the Muslim world.

However, another price paid for the Bush administration’s not so excellent Iraq misadventure is that our preoccupation with that unfortunate country has allowed the Taliban a new lease on life in Afghanistan and they are taking full advantage.

You remember Afghanistan, right? That’s the landlocked, mountainous country in South-central Asia whose former rulers, the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, had harboured the murderous Osama bin Ladin and al-Qaida thugs who attacked us on September 11^th, 2001. With the almost unanimous support of the American people, the United States engineered the defeat of the Taliban. However, in the first of a series of military missteps, we failed to deal either al-Qaida or the Taliban the crushing defeat we should have in the mountains of Tora Bora – and Osama bin Ladin escaped.

Instead of continuing to focus attention on Afghanistan, the Bush administration seized the opportunity offered by the horror of 9/11 to invent a largely non-existent threat in Iraq, cherry-picked the intelligence regarding possible (but as we now know, non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, lied about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qaida, whipped up public fear, intimidated the media and the political opposition and – well the rest, as they say, is history. We invaded Iraq for no good reason and now we’re stuck there with no decent way out. On the fateful day of that unprovoked invasion, Osama must have thought his birthday had come early; it is hard to imagine an action better designed to burnish his own image in the Muslim world whilst tarnishing that of the United States.

In Afghanistan meanwhile, the effort to bring security and stability to that impoverished land faltered. In truth this nation presented a prickly dilemma for the U.S. The tough mountain tribesmen had defeated the British in the 19^th century and fought the Soviet invaders to a standstill in the 1980’s. It was essential that the footprint of U.S. and allied military forces remain as light as possible so as not to turn the people of Afghanistan against the “foreign invader”. Sensitivity to this issue was at least part of the reason for the disastrous decision to rely on friendly Afghan tribal forces at Tora Bora rather than to deploy U.S. forces against the still-powerful remnants of al-Qaida. The result was that bin Ladin and most of his force escaped. With the Taliban expelled the administration foolishly and prematurely turned its attention to Iraq before the job of establishing a safe and secure environment for reconstruction was anywhere close to a reality.

Military assets such as soldiers of the 5^th Special Forces Group with their specialist knowledge of the Middle East and similarly qualified CIA operatives were shifted from Afghanistan in preparation for the Iraq invasion and occupation. The hunt for Osama bin Ladin became a lesser priority and the trail went cold. The Taliban were able to regroup in the border areas of Pakistan.

The people of Afghanistan, particularly in the south and east of the country, have too often felt the brunt of American over-reliance on airpower to hunt for Taliban elements, but all too little of the economic benefits of investment and reconstruction. Gradually the Taliban has started to reassert influence if not outright control in areas where the Afghan government and U.S. forces were largely absent.

The result is that the last year has seen the fiercest fighting between U.S. and now NATO forces and the Taliban since Operation Anaconda in March 2002. A steady trickle of American and allied, primarily British and Canadian soldiers, have been killed or wounded in the fighting in the east and south, near Kandahar. The Taliban have fought in strength and, at times, from fortified positions in areas where they have established control.

The Taliban have also adopted the tactics and methods of the insurgents in Iraq such as in the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide attacks, which are now common-place. In short, neither Afghanistan nor the U.S. assisted government in Kabul led by Hamid Karzai is secure. Large areas of the country remain unsafe and efforts at reconstruction have proceeded slowly if at all. Fewer Afghans believe that the Americans care about helping their country. If they cease to believe that their well-being is facilitated by the foreign presence, the U.S. and NATO forces could find themselves in even bigger trouble.

Had the U.S. focused on getting it right the first time we could have avoided the problems we now face. This administration has developed an alarming propensity for fumbling its attempts at military intervention.

Yet Afghanistan is a country we cannot afford to lose. Nor must we confuse the misguided strategic blunder of invading Iraq with the justifiable attack on al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here we struck back at those who attacked us on 9/11. We cannot allow the country to slide back into the hands of a fundamentalist Islamic regime that makes Iran’s appear ultra-liberal in comparison. We owe it to the people of Afghanistan to make their country safe and whole. Unlike in Iraq, we still have a decent chance to get it right in Afghanistan. Despite the best efforts of the incomparably incompetent Bush administration to mess this one up as well, we must prevail.

On Monday The New York Times reported this:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity – the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards – has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

…

For most of the last century, wages and productivity – the key measure of the economy’s efficiency – have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.

But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase.

“If I had to sum it up,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the institute, “it comes down to bargaining power and the lack of ability of many in the work force to claim their fair share of growth.”

…

In 2004, the top 1 percent of earners – a group that includes many chief executives – received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago, according to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who analyzed the tax data.

And on Wednesday, The New York Times reports:

The nation’s median household income rose slightly faster than inflation last year for the first time in six years, the Census Bureau reported yesterday.

The rise, however, had little to do with bigger paychecks – in fact, both men and women earned less in 2005 than 2004. Rather, census officials said, more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages.

…

The small uptick in median household income reported yesterday, 1.1 percent, was not enough to offset a longer-term drop in median household income – the annual income at which half of the country’s households make more and half make less.

That figure fell 5.9 percent between the 2000 census and 2005, to $46,242 from $49,133, according to an analysis of the data conducted for The New York Times by the sociology department of Queens College. The difference was so sharp, in part, because the 2000 census measured 1999 income, which was at the height of the dot-com bubble.

…

The new data also showed continuing erosion in the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance. In 2005, an estimated 46.6 million people had no coverage, up 1.3 million since 2004 and increasing the percentage of Americans without health coverage from 15.6 percent of the population to 15.9 percent.

After recent decreases in the numbers of children without health insurance, this year’s data found that their numbers grew between 2004 and 2005, rising from 10.8 percent of those under 18 to 11.2 percent.

Republicans were very pleased with these numbers.  Why?  Because their plan is working.  The figures cited in these two articles show that they have successfully shifted much of the nation’s income from the lower and middle classes to the upper classes.

Corporate profits are up!  Taxes on dividends and capital gains are down!  Hooray for the super rich!  They can hire the proletariat to cater to their wants and desires.   And that’s good, because those extra jobs increases household income by getting more people in each household to work for less money.

There’s a name for this type of government:  Fascism. 

The working class fought against fascism during the Roosevelt years and made solid gains.  Now it seems that we must fight the same battles all over again.

Last Sunday night (August 27, 2006) at approximately 11pm I experienced my first UFO sighting.

My girlfriend and I were driving back to Seattle from Portland and somewhere outside of Federal Way (around mile marker 149) we saw something falling from the sky leaving a long brilliant green trail behind it that light up the sky to the north/northwest.

At first we thought it was a meteor / shooting star. But it appeared to be dropping straight out of the sky and not shooting across the sky as the meteors and shooting stars I have seen. (I don’t know what they look like or how they appear to travel right before impact…)

I got out my digital crayons today and made a quick sketch to illustrate what we saw.

The green trail on the left shows how the object fell off in the distance. We did not see any impact, etc. Perhaps it fell into Puget Sound.

As we were near the airport, there is the possibility that we saw something related to an aircraft, but it sure didn’t look like it, or appear to be that close.

If you saw this or any other unidentified flying object, I would love to hear about it. So would the National UFO Reporting Center based out of a former ICBM missile base in eastern Washington.

Shortly after winning the 2004 presidential election, George W Bush boasted that he had saved political capital and that he intended to spend it. And in talking of the growing mess in Iraq, and the culpability of his administration, he said this: “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections”, his meaning being, he made clear, that the American people had demonstrated their satisfaction with his performance by returning him to office.

Well as we all know, what little capital he had left after squandering much of it on a failed effort to privatise Social Security went floating away in the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina or went up in smoke in the increasing chaos that is Iraq. Combined, these disasters have become a metaphor for the utter fecklessness of the Bush administration. To this point, however, he has escaped genuine accountability for the mess he and his Republican Party enablers in Congress have made of governing this country. It is way overdue.

Certainly many of us hoped and believed that the 2004 election would be the time when he was held accountable for his ignorance, his hubris, his unsurpassed incompetence and his intellectual laziness. Well, unfortunately, the disgusting Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Veterans for…what was it? – Oh yeah – Truth, ensured that enough of the electorate saw John Kerry as an unacceptable alternative to give us four more years of Bush. The GOP even managed to retain their hold on both houses in Congress.

Well, as they say, what goes around comes around. The 2006 congressional elections will give us a second chance to get it right and things currently appear bleak for the Republicans. If the elections were held tomorrow the Democrats would almost certainly win the House of Representatives and make serious inroads on the GOP majority in the Senate. Unfortunately, they are not until November, which gives the GOP plenty of time to fund and mount the inevitable campaign to depict Democrats as weak on national defence, cut and run light-weights, defeatist beatniks – well, you get the picture.

The Democrats’ failure in 2004 stems in part from their failure to make it a referendum on Bush and the GOP congressional majority on their myriad failures of leadership governance. The mess in Iraq was already becoming obvious to anyone who was paying attention. Yet Rove and the GOP were able to frame the issue as one in which it would be risky and foolish to change horses in mid-stream in the war on terrorism. Instead of: “how the heck did we get in this mess and who put us here?” it was: “okay this is bad but who is best able to lead us from this point”? Well nobody can accuse the GOP of not being very savvy politically. Not to put too fine a point on it, the American people got it wrong as subsequent events have proved beyond any doubt.

Now we have another chance and we must not muff this one. We hear all the time about the choice we have between withdrawing from Iraq with the attendant risk that it will be torn apart by civil war and possibly become an Islamic fundamentalist republic or, worse, a terrorist haven; and the alternative which is to hang in there indefinitely in the hope that it will emerge one day as a stable and hopefully democratic nation. This last option will inevitably entail the United States continuing to pay a high price in blood and treasure, and to suffer the consequences of a huge commitment of and concomitant wear-and tear on the Army and Marine Corps. It is a monstrous national dilemma, and one that is entirely of this administration’s making. Either option has the very real potential to do enormous harm to our national interest.

This is not the only box into which this administration and the slavishly obedient Republican Congress have placed the country; witness the complete failure to restrain spending whilst affording the richest Americans a succession of tax breaks with the result that the national debt has grown alarmingly in the last six years. With obligations to Medicare and Social Security looming we face a future in which we must enact massive spending cuts or enormous tax increases – or risk long term and harmful damage to our economy if foreigners decide to stop financing our debt binge.

No matter how angry liberals and progressives are with the likes of Senator Maria Cantwell or Joe Lieberman – well okay he’s a special case – we must not lose sight of who is responsible for the depressing domestic and foreign policy outlooks. We invaded Iraq not because of the vote of Maria Cantwell or any Democrat, but because George W Bush decided that it would be so. He was aided and abetted by a GOP that happily painted Democratic opponents as unpatriotic and soft on terrorism. The invasion of Iraq, of course, was a diversion from the struggle against Islamic terrorists not an attack upon it. And as we now know the threat of weapons of mass destruction was an illusion fed by cherry-picked intelligence titbits, distortions and misinformation; which, in any case, ignored the fact that Iraq was already being held in check.

This level of ignorance, stupidity, arrogance and dishonesty cannot again be allowed to pass without the American people making their voices heard. May it be loud and clear come November.

My cousin emailed this photo to me along with some information about the author.  He is a registered Republican and retired military.  He had to get a county permit for the sign and does not get any local press.  The only people that seem to get upset are some of the neighbors, so he decided to give it a rest for the summer. 

Who needs local press when you can be on the worldwide internet?

We’ll be looking forward to some more photos to post here after summer break.

Republican Senator George Voinovich was the sole GOP member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to balk at President Bush’s nomination of John Bolton to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. His opposition, along with that of every Democratic member of the committee was based on well founded fears that Bolton’s abrasive, even obnoxious demeanour, his confrontational style, arrogance and bluster, would detract from our efforts to effect management reform at the U.N and would not be in the country’s best interests. There were, in short, many better choices available. The Senate failed to pass the nomination out of committee and Bush responded, as he usually does, by thumbing his nose at the committee and making Bolton a recess appointment.

Bolton’s appointment expires in January and must be confirmed by the Foreign Relations Committee and after that by the full Senate for him to continue to serve as U.N. Ambassador. In the many months since his recess appointment, Mr Bolton has, in practice, fully vindicated Senator Voinovich’s worst fears; however, the senator has changed his mind and now expresses his intention to vote to approve Bolton’s nomination when it comes up again. Such is the manner in which those who perform this Administration’s heavy lifting end up sounding either utterly foolish or incoherent – or both.

Voinovich states that he is impressed with Bolton’s forceful advocacy of America’s positions at the U.N. Lack of forcefulness, of course, was never one of Bolton’s identifiable flaws. A glaring deficiency in the diplomatic art was much more of a concern and, here, Bolton has not disappointed, as a recent article in the New York Times makes clear.

A key objective of the U.S. and a priority for Bolton is to effect much needed management efficiencies at the U.N. However, even representatives from countries friendly to the U.S. and sympathetic with its aims in this regard voiced strong off-the-record misgivings and frustration at Bolton’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach which has succeeded in alienating those whose support he needs to bring the reforms to fruition. The result is failure. Somewhere along the line this guy’s mother forgot to tell him about honey being better than (or at least needs to be employed along with) vinegar to get what you want – a fatal flaw in an ambassador, surely.

In the end of course it doesn’t much matter who is U.N. Ambassador. The U.S. is still the lone superpower, the Bush Administration’s daily efforts to diminish it notwithstanding. Countries will listen to the Ambassador from this country because they cannot afford not to. In that sense the U.S. could put a trained monkey in the position and we would still have enormous influence to get want we want on the Security Council, where it really counts. Where we will lose out are on those issues involving reform at the U.N. itself and of the machinery that makes it tick. Here, Bolton’s appointment will cost us much.

On the other hand, Bolton really is a perfect metaphor for the incompetence and hubris of the Bush Administration. Loud, ruthless, clueless and ultimately ineffective, Bolton may be a disgrace as a key ambassadorial representative of our nation, but as the face of the Bush Administration, a better choice is hard to imagine.

Even for those of us who have always believed that the Bush administration’s foreign policies were simplistic, naïve, misguided and ultimately doomed to failure, the present foreign policy shambles is shocking to behold. The litany is depressing.

The hole we have dug for ourselves in Iraq just gets deeper as the chaos there continues unabated. Not coincidentally Iran, emboldened by the fact that it has little to fear from the threat of an American army bogged down in the Iraq morass, pursues its quest to become a nuclear power whilst flexing its muscles as a significant (and now, thanks to us, strengthened) regional player, as we see in both Lebanon and Iraq. North Korea, for some of the same reasons as Iran, has continued to press ahead with its nuclear aspirations and efforts to develop an intercontinental range missile. A resurgent Taliban along with an increasingly disillusioned populace now threatens the stability of the government of Afghanistan, particularly in the south of that unhappy country. And now we have the threat of a new Middle-East conflict, or at least the possibility of the toppling of a democratically elected government in Lebanon, as Israel squares off against Hamas and Hezbollah over the capture of a handful of Israeli soldiers. The administration’s unconditional support for Israel and its unwillingness to become seriously engaged in the peace process in the region leaves it with little influence on unfolding events there.

If it were not so tragic, it would be almost laughable to recall the mellifluent assurances from Dick Cheney that the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Suddam Hussein would usher in a period of comparative tranquillity in the Mid-East as moderates and the forces of peace and democracy were emboldened and extremists retreated or quaked in their boots. Removing Hussein, showing American military might and resolve, combined with the adoption of the doctrine of pre-emptive strike against perceived threats, we were told, would serve notice on the other members of the “axis of evil” that we would not tolerate their nuclear aspirations. Sure.

The reality is that the other charter members of the AOE took to heart the opposite lesson; that to be weak, as Iraq was, invited attack, whilst becoming a power to be reckoned with, preferably nuclear, would deter American aggression. The logic of their position is inescapable, as subsequent events have proved.

The policy of pre-emption has been shown to be a sham. It was simply a subterfuge for the invasion of Iraq. If it had been a genuine doctrine, and if the administration had felt it had to invade somebody it would have attacked North Korea before Iraq, since the former was a more bellicose regime, much further along the path in its nuclear aspirations and possessed a developing missile technology that could potentially threaten its regional neighbours. There was never any question of attacking North Korea, however. Militarily it was a much tougher nut to crack even without nuclear weapons. Not to mention that its neighbour, China, might not welcome a second Korean War on its doorstep. So we invaded Iraq which, to the Bush administration and its neo-conservative cheerleaders, appeared to be much easier pickings – a massive miscalculation for which we will be paying in blood and treasure for many years to come.

Invading and occupying Iraq has had adverse consequences beyond the death and destruction that country suffers every day. Afghanistan had been the one genuine foreign policy triumph of the Bush administration. In shifting key military assets to Iraq before we had properly defeated the Taliban we have almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The amount of reconstruction aid and investment has been wholly insufficient to meet the tremendous needs of the Afghan people – another consequence of the Iraq imbroglio. More and more Afghans question whether NATO and the allied coalition are there to help them build a more civil society or just to fight the Taliban. If the people turn against us, things could get much uglier in Afghanistan.

The greatest irony of all is that had the administration stopped its military interventionism at Afghanistan, the United States may well have enjoyed unparalleled influence in the world. We had used a fraction of our might to overthrow a cruel Islamist regime which harboured and actively supported al-Qaeda. Had we spoken softly and carried but not waived our big stick, engaged with our allies, used diplomacy to achieve our foreign policy objectives, there is no telling what could have been achieved. By invading Iraq, however, we have lain bare the limitations of American military power. The Army and Marine Corps are stretched thin; troops are on third, even fourth tours of duty in Iraq. Iran, Syria and North Korea are bold because they know they have little to fear from an America bogged down in Iraq and tired of it.

Bush’s polices have been either ineffective in heading off the series of crises that have erupted in the Middle-East and the Korean peninsular, or they have actually exacerbated them. For a president whose strong suit was considered to be foreign policy and who must now be turning his attention to the legacy he will leave behind, there is precious little to cheer about.

Just when many of us were beginning to wonder if our constitutional system of divided government, with its inherent checks and balances, was a long cherished myth which had been effectively demolished by the power-hungry Bush Administration, the United States Supreme Court, on Thursday, reminded us that it is alive and well – at least for now. The action came in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in a decision drafted by Justice John Paul Stevens, with a critical concurrence by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the most conservative of the five Justices in the majority.

In striking down the legality of the military tribunals established by the Administration for detainees at Guantanamo, the Court in its sweeping decision not only struck a blow for the rule of law and American values, but reminded Bush that neither his inherent authority as president nor the Authorization to Use Military Force passed by Congress in the wake of 9/11, gives him unfettered power in the struggle against Islamist terrorists that is, to all intents and purposes, without end. Whilst the Court’s rebuke on the limitation of presidential authority referred specifically to the Administration’s violation of both U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions regarding the military commissions (and implicitly to the treatment of detainees in general), it seems clear that the Court, as presently constituted, would be highly sceptical of similar broad claims to presidential authority on issues such as the electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without judicial or Congressional oversight.

There is no question that this action by the Supreme Court should be cheered by all of us who have watched this Administration run amok for more than five years and viewed with increasing dismay the abdication by Congress of its oversight role. Even the courts have frequently appeared unwilling or unable, up to this point, to rein in the Administration’s power grab.

Before we pop the champagne corks, however, there is a sobering thought to ponder. Although for many of us the Court’s decision should have been a no-brainer, incredibly (or maybe not), the three most conservative Justices voted to give the Administration the unfettered power it claimed. Chief Justice John Roberts would have joined the minority had he not been obliged to recuse himself; as a member of the panel for the U.S. Appellate Court in the District of Columbia he had ruled against Hamdan in the opinion that the Supreme Court decision last Thursday forcefully overturned. Boy how much that must have stung!

The problem is that the four right-wingers on the Court are just one vote short of the majority they need to give the Administration what it wants – on an issue connected to separation of powers, such as this one for example, or on the environment (a recent decision on wetlands protections in which the right-wingers sought to gut the Clean Water Act was a close-run thing) and on a host of other matters on which the country is sharply divided. The really bad news here is that the right-wing-four are all in their fifties, and considerably younger than their liberal and moderate peers on the Court.

A letter published in the Saturday New York Times put it this way: “Hamdan v. Rumsfeld represents not so much a “victory” for the rule of law as a reprieve”. Exactly right. And if the country wants to preserve the best of our American democracy, we had better start electing more Democrats to the Senate and, in 2008, getting one into the White House.