Is the SCLM finally starting to waken at its periphery? Here's a column from the Chicago Trib (login: gorevidal/gorevidal) that actually raises the bullshit flag on the 1600 Crews policy in Iraq, and names names, Douglas Feith you recalcitrant neocon warmonger you, hanging with Manucher Ghorbanifar of Iran-Contra fame...

First, it is generally accepted (except by the war's avid authorities) that the reasons for invading Iraq were false. Second, the war party around the White House and the Pentagon are responding to their incredible failures of judgment not by modifying their policies in the Middle East, but by doing more and still more of the same.
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The joke around town is that the Bush zealots had all along been scheming to attack Iraq to get all the terrorists in the world to pour in there--to get them all in one place.

Meanwhile, the administration is unwilling to take actions that could ameliorate the situation--such as putting forth a UN resolution that would share the military and reconstruction burdens in Iraq. Part of the reason is their zealotry, carefully clothed in the fancy dress of "democratization"--and part of it is that neither they nor their friends or children are actually fighting or suffering in this war.
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Officials from the civilian Pentagon offices of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the man most responsible for the failures of reconstruction in Iraq, recently met surreptitiously with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in U.S. arms-for-hostage trades to Iran in the mid-1980s, in Europe. The reappearance of the discredited Iranian arms dealer clearly indicates how conspiratorial the Iraqi war is becoming.
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Perhaps the only hope lies in the story going around town that President Bush has told the Pentagon he wants "no more American dead" after next March. By then, the electoral campaign will be well under way, and perhaps zealotry will give way to reality--or at least to a change in administration.