From the BBC

Battle rages in Shia Iraqi town

US and Iraqi troops have [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4801705.stm|killed 20 suspected] Shia militants during heavy clashes in the southern Iraqi city of Diwanieh, the US military has said.
The American troops were in the Shia city to carry out "combat operations". The fresh violence came as police in the capital, Baghdad, said they had found the bodies of 51 people who had been abducted, tortured and murdered. Meanwhile, a 36-hour curfew was lifted in the northern city of Kirkuk following a huge security operation.
Thousands of Iraqi army and police force personnel backed by US-led coalition troops combed Kirkuk for insurgents, while US troops lent helicopter support. Police said about 180 people were detained and large quantities of arms and ammunition seized. The BBC's Jim Muir in Iraq says tensions have been rising in Kirkuk, which is home to Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens who claim ownership of the city and the oil-rich lands around it.
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Gus: I had a dream... But then I woke up and the reality stood up in front of my face like a derailed train at full speed: there is no way, but for a miracle larger than any biblical proportion ever, that the US can win the war in Iraq... With the Shia they are "culling", with the disaffected Sunnis who have lost power, with the Kurds who want independence, with the Christians being persecuted until totally ousted, with not a single proof of the claims about Iran supplying weapons, with 75 per cent of the Iraqi population resenting the US presence, with the other Arab States being anxious about what the US are doing... , there is no way the US can win this developing quagmire... There is no way that the situation is going to improve considering all the facts, including the Iraqi police losing so many of its officers daily, etc., Donald ducky Rumy-folly in his pentagonal bunker can fiddle all he likes, the little bushit-narrow-eyed-midjet in the white house can be as hypocritical as he wishes, the US ambassador to Australia can smoke his own rolled-shit, the US cannot win the war unless they kill everyone in Iraq... And I am sure they know that... so they're only interested in containment, making as much money out of the oil as possible, and praise with profound hollowness the soldiers who die for whatever... Who knows... they might sell us the eradication of the Iraqi people as a proposition at some stage, when the petrol reserves are so essential that any "excuse" would do...
And what does 180 arrested people means when about one million people are ready to shoot you between the eye, and 15 million would be happy about it...

From the New York Times

Baker Sees Iraq Panel Departing From Bush Strategy

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 8, 2006
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — James A. Baker III , the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan commission assessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said today that he expected the group to depart from Mr. Bush’s call to “stay the course.”In an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Baker said, “I think it’s fair to say our commission believes that [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/washington/09bakercnd.html?hp&ex=1160366400&en=d190e97c69c4cae0&ei=5094&partner=homepage|there are alternatives between the stated alternatives], the ones that are out there in the political debate, of ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’ ”
Mr. Baker, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state and White House chief of staff, did explicitly reject a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, which he said would only invite Iran, Syria and “even our friends in the gulf” to fill the power vacuum
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Gus: 2031: James Baker the XXII mentions that the US cannot "cut and run" from Iraq... etc... and that a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, which he said would only invite Iran, Syria and “even our friends in the gulf” to fill the power vacuum... tadablahblah...

From Paul Krugman's latest, in The Paranoid Style:

Does Mr. Hastert really believe that George Soros and his operatives, conspiring with the evil news media, are responsible for the Foley scandal? Yes, he probably does. For one thing, demonization of Mr. Soros is widespread in right-wing circles. One can only imagine what people like Mr. Hastert or Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times, who once described Mr. Soros as “a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust,” say behind closed doors.

The entire article will become available soon. Ah, here it is -

>>>
October 9, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist The Paranoid Style By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last week Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, explained the real cause of the Foley scandal. “The people who want to see this thing blow up,” he said, “are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros.”

Most news reports, to the extent they mentioned Mr. Hastert’s claim at all, seemed to treat it as a momentary aberration. But it wasn’t his first outburst along these lines. Back in 2004, Mr. Hastert said: “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.”

Does Mr. Hastert really believe that George Soros and his operatives, conspiring with the evil news media, are responsible for the Foley scandal? Yes, he probably does. For one thing, demonization of Mr. Soros is widespread in right-wing circles. One can only imagine what people like Mr. Hastert or Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times, who once described Mr. Soros as “a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust,” say behind closed doors.

More generally, Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and the White House.

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

The “paranoid spokesman,” wrote Hofstadter, sees things “in apocalyptic terms. ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Sure enough, Dick Cheney says that “the war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization.”

According to Hofstadter, for the paranoids, “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” and because “the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.” Three days after 9/11, President Bush promised to “rid the world of evil.”

The paranoid “demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals” — instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, we’ll try to remake the Middle East and eliminate a vast “axis of evil” — “and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” Iraq, anyone?

The current right-wing explanation for what went wrong in Iraq closely echoes Joseph McCarthy’s explanation for the Communist victory in China, which he said was “the product of a great conspiracy” at home. According to the right, things didn’t go wrong because the invasion was a mistake, or because Donald Rumsfeld didn’t send enough troops, or because the occupation was riddled with cronyism and corruption. No, it’s all because the good guys were stabbed in the back. Democrats, who undermined morale with their negative talk, and the liberal media, which refused to report the good news from Iraq, are responsible for the quagmire.

You might think it would be harder to claim that traitors are aiding our foreign enemies today than it was during the McCarthy era, when domestic liberals and Communist regimes could be portrayed as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. What does the domestic enemy, which Bill O’Reilly identifies as the “secular-progressive movement,” have to do with the religious fanatics who attacked America five years ago?

But that’s easy: according to Mr. O’Reilly, “Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have got to be cheering on the S-P movement,” because “both outfits believe that the United States of America is fundamentally a bad place.”

Which brings us back to the Foley affair. The immediate response by nearly everyone in the Republican establishment — wild claims, without a shred of evidence behind them, that the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy — may sound crazy. But that response is completely in character for a movement that from the beginning has been dominated by the paranoid style. And here’s the scary part: that movement runs our government.

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Five years after 9/11, “only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.”

Meanwhile, for the first time, more Americans (36 percent) believe the terrorists are winning the "war on terror" than think the United States and its allies are winning (31 percent). Twenty-two percent (22%) say neither side is winning.