u.s. policy is the occupation of the ME. leaving Iraq would be a tremendous setback for this policy. this is the core reason behind the continued murdering of Iraqis.

'One must ask, how can a panel of "experts" include anyone on the AEI payroll? How "expert" can someone who calls for the continued occupation of Iraq possibly be? Shouldn't being so wrong in endorsing what has been called the biggest foreign-policy mistake in U.S. history earn an automatic ejection from the New York Times Op-Ed desk's Rolodex?'

For answers to these questions and more, one need only get a copy of Christopher Cerf & Victor Navasky's The Experts Speak : The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation. The two authors--who have invested $39 in setting up their "Institute of Expertology"--were on the last edition of Bill Moyers Journal. Very entertaining.

I don't even trust fish that have been wrapped in the New York Times.

Yawn--This is "news" that isn't. From the partisan ideologue David Brooks to the contemptable MIchael Gordon the NYT has been pro-war since before it happened.

The NYT's hired William Kristol a few months ago. The blood-drenched filth.

But what is a better generally available Newspaper in the US?

The Christian Science Monitor was, but has been gutted....

A better paper? Not everyone is online or will be....

I am starting the question common dreams with more and more stories that are not in the normal party line. They censor stories that tell the truth as we have seen before. Is CD just a gathering site for serveilance. I feel it is time to start testing CD with stories to see what is censored what isn't. The NEO can say what they want with their pro ++++++ stance?

, "it would certainly be a great idea for the Times in next Sunday's edition to turn over the same back page of the Week in Review section for a sampling of nine Op-Eds from nine Iraq war opponents." Right on! William-Street!

Why is the attitude of the New York Times such a surprise? It is neocon through and through, from the ownership (Sulzberger) on down. Does anybody still remember Judith Miller, the reporter whose deceptive front-page articles did so much to sucker the U.S. into invading Iraq? Suzberger defended her for years, even as the evidence became overwhelming that her articles were lies. And now one of the top neocons, William Kristol, has become a columnist for the paper. There can be no doubt that the New York Times has been debased into a propaganda organ, the American version of the Soviet Pravda or the Chinese Xinhua, and is no longer trustworthy.

The motivation of the Times should be clear if you notice that the ownership is Jewish. The invasion of Iraq has been a huge boon to the Jews: the U.S. has destroyed a major enemy of Israel, at absolutely no cost to Israel. We have done the bleeding and dying, and the financial cost is ruining us -- and Israelis are delighted that the cost to them has been zero. We have also lost all moral leverage over Israel, because the cruelties of the war have lowered us to their level. These are two reasons why the Jews everywhere, including most emphatically the ownership of the New York Times, are so happy about the invasion of Iraq.

Of course, the U.S. had other reasons for the invasion. The control of oil, for example, was undoubtedly a major factor. But for Jews, the prime motive was the obliteration of a major enemy of Israel.

And they want to sucker us into doing it again, this time to Iran.

Published on 6 October 1944 by "Wahrheit Grabung"

Mission Impossible
by Johann Cheney-Lippold

Sunday's Völkischer Beobachter had a series of articles marking the fifth anniversary of Chancellor Hitler's "Mission Accomplished" victory speech on the aircraft carrier Otto Von Bismarck. The title of the collection, "How to See This Mission Accomplished," seems fit more for a motivational-speaking seminar than a critical intervention in the discourse of war. It gestures to the inadequacies that riddle the völkisch media's analysis of the war in Poland.

And then you begin to read the articles.

The Beobachter asked nine "experts" on military affairs to each write a short blurb on the "significant challenges facing the German and Polish leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge."

Of the nine:

Three currently hold positions with the deliriously hawkish German Enterprise Institute (GEI).

Seven supported and/or participated in the war from its infancy.

Four currently support the German occupation of Poland without any mention of a troop reduction.

Winning in Poland, or meeting some ambiguous and movable notion of success, is the key objective for six of the nine authors. Anne-Marie Slaughter (the only woman deemed expert enough to write on the topic), Marine officer Nathaniel Fick and retired Army Gen. Paul Eaton were the notable exceptions. Yet past this glaring division, the mere questioning of Germany's five-year-old rhetoric was apparently too much for the panel, which readily latches onto a binary opposition for the war in Poland: success or failure, with failure slyly positioned as moral defeat and thus surrender to terrorism and the Jews.

One must ask, how can a panel of "experts" include anyone on the GEI payroll? How "expert" can someone who calls for the continued occupation of Poland possibly be? Shouldn't being so wrong in endorsing what has been called the biggest foreign-policy mistake in German history earn an automatic ejection from the Völkischer Beobachter Op-Ed desk's Rolodex? And how can "experts" so sheepishly accept the premise of the Beobachter 's question without even once engaging the word imperialism? (The hilarious "anti-imperialist" Frederick Kagan, resident scholar at the GEI, did cryptically refer to the use of Polish agricultural revenue to repay German expenses as having "a tinge of imperialism"– as if the war itself wasn't already fully saturated with the stench of empire.)

These sages of geopolitical militarism are endowed not just with space in the nation's "paper of record," but a badge of expertise that further confuses the actual debate about the war. Whether we succeed or fail is of little importance to the Poles themselves. Both formulations are rhetorical turns that refer not to the goodness of the war effort but to the various stages of obfuscation used by the Hitler administration to show Polish "progress" (the purple-thumbs imagery from the country's 1941 election being the media's visually darling example).

The framing of solutions to the war through the lens of "success" intentionally ignores the important questions that really get under the skin of seven of the panelists who saber-rattled their way into the role of expert as crowned by the Beobachter and too many others. If we care at all about the Polish people, the group that should be at the heart of any analysis about the war and how to end it, we need to turn away from those German interests that pushed Germany to war in the first place and disregard the silliness of any question about the "challenges" Germany faces in Poland — as if challenges to imperialism were ever a bad thing.

What does success in the Völkischer Beobachter framework really mean if not maintenance of the German imperial occupation in Poland? If we believe that invading Poland was wrong from the beginning, an opinion this panel's majority clearly does not hold, "winning" this imperial war must be held problematic. But if the seven panel members who at least tacitly argued for the invasion of Poland, some of them vehemently so before the terrorist attack at Gleiwitz, believe the war to be good and worth fighting, success is then just another way of retooling imperial activities to better respond to the challenges that a strong indigenous insurgency poses to the occupying coalition forces.

The critiques against those who led Germany to war and have kept Germany there for the past five years are largely dull stabs against the procedures of how war in general is fought. Underlying but instrumental questions around illegality, empire and German hegemony are not just ignored by the media but also chastised as marginal, allowing the administration to continue an unpopular, expensive and disastrous war without serious resistance from all sectors of the population. Ending war is not done through progressive adjustments to the challenges of imperial strategy, but instead through a resounding denial of any justification for our presence in the region and an immediate withdrawal of coalition forces. … Yet that seems to not be "news that's fit to print."

Why are you reading The New York Times??

The first , the best and the only question to be asked of over half the reading-population of America . For the price of the NYC or , better put , the withhold of those coins and a flick of the off-button on the tv , Americans could shut down MSM , Congress , Pentagon and white House in one-fell swoop.

Answer that I will hearing for many years to come È Donèt ask me to give up my creature comforts like tv and MSM newspapersÈ

How many more pieces will we have to endure before we all just accept the glaringly obvious truth:

The NYT is an fully integrated cog in the Military-Industrial-Media-Corporate mafia currently holding all the reigns - and toys - of power.

Period.

We know it, you know it, they know it. Yet, everyday, we get at least two "I'm shocked - shocked I tells ya" rants about the NYT's Fed boot-licking. Yesterday, it was GG who was just soooo appalled that "reporter" Gordon was touting the Cheneybush "Iran is evil and they must die" lies, tomorrow it'll be someone else bitchin about some other NYTer's "Bush is God" article.

Enough whining about them already. We're the choir, we f**king got it - the NYT sucks and should never, ever be trusted. Moving on...

If you have income below the taxable threshold, one of three things hold. You are rich. possibly a CEO, and employ an accountant and use all the loopholes for rich, or you are a corporation, probably involved in labor exploitation in SE Asia or feeding from the public war trough, or you are one of the US surplus of unwanted millions of jobless, living from the contents of trash bins. Not to worry. When labor costs in the US finally match that of SE Asia, due to great readjustments of the world currencies and US dollar, the sweatshops will come back to the US. The problem is, does income only necessary to buy food just to live to the next day, still keep below the taxable threshold?
The masters of the Universe on Wall Street have a natural policy to keep themselves in accustomed wealth and power while making sure the great majority live in squalor and penury. By The only path to wealth is taking a little bit from everyone. Maybe the social imbalance will grow until total world consumption falls, meaning the end of car ownership, house ownership, and paying the electricity bill and the human problem will still not go away until all the masses of starving poor are simultaneously hit by catastrophes that push them over the survivability threshold.

The wealthy always cluster around the ownership and exploitation of the remaining natural resources, with the rest fighting for the crumbs. The process will continue till extinction by climate and habitat destruction, unless culture acquires the wisdom of population control and best social and environment relations. But we cannot do that while all human powers and wealth squabble to the death like bad relatives, while Gaia is still dying. Everyone for themselves while we feed like buzzards off the dying carcass.

That analysis only reinforces our suspicions. By now our understanding is stronger than depleted uranium. The Pentagon currently grabs over half of the federal budget and will increase that grab to 2/3 in the next few years. The Demok prez candidates are not even pledging to balance the budget or reverse the growth in the Pentagon's share. The national debt is exploding, and middle class individuals are paying the bulk of federal taxes, and these figures are BOTH slated to increase during the next couple of election cycles.

All of this is leading to a situation 8 to 12 years from now when Americans will pay 25% of their pre-tax income without consent to the Pentagon for past, current and future gargantuan imperial failures. This amounts to enslavement on a scale unprecedented in world history, not to mention the tens of millions of innocent victims killed, maimed, poisoned, shocked and ruined in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, the collapse of the rule of domestic and international laws, treaties and institutions, the collapse of human and civil rights, loss of privacy and security for Americans and people across the entire world.

The progressive plan includes getting Americans out of paying federal taxes. We can reduce our income to below the taxable threshold. It's time to get smart. This has to be a grass-roots thing - individuals taking individual action to do their civic duty. There is nothing an American can do that is more beneficial to humanity than to reduce one's taxable income to zero and cut consumption accordingly.

Were any of these "military analysts" among those that the Times exposed as Pentagon propagandists only a few weeks ago? Apparently the Times has yet to learn its lesson. Then again, maybe this article is their way of making amends for exposing the generals behind the curtain.

As a regular Sunday Times reader, I too was disappointed that the "spectrum" of Op-Ed contributors asked to give their revised advice with five years' hindsight were all drawn from the hawkish red zone end of the real world's political spectrum.

Kagan's piece in particular was absurd. With no tongue in cheek, he argued that some (predominantly Democratic) Washington politicos should stop openly advocating for the Maliki regime spend some of its billions in collected, banked oil profits upon Iraqi infrastructure reconstruction, because such American urging might be "misinterpreted" as evidentiary proof that the US occupation has something to do with that country's petroleum reserves. Heaven forbid!

Yet let's give credit where it is due.

None other than arch war monger Richard Perle gave everybody a stern, grandfatherly lecture about learning to respect Iraqi sovereignty. He wrote that it's past time for the Bush administration to stop meddling in internal post-Saddam politics, and instead let the democratically elected sectarian factions over there thrash it out among themselves.

For perhaps the first time in the last twenty years, Richard Perle was actually right about something. Don't hold your breath for this advise to be heeded, now that proconsul Petraeus has tilted temporarily towards the awakened Sunnis and is busily killing Shiites opposed to the Badr faction.

In the interest of fair and balanced reporting, it would certainly be a great idea for the Times in next Sunday's edition to turn over the same back page of the Week in Review section for a sampling of nine Op-Eds from nine Iraq war opponents, asking them each the same questions that were posed to the pro-war experts.

Bill from Saginaw

There is a fourth option; Americans must get out and vote for anyone as long as the candidate is not a Democrat or Republican. Somehow a massive campaign (via the internet?) must be launched in which as many Americans as possible are enlightened to the truth of the war... a government that has been hijacked by corporate America that seeks world domination in the name of the bottom line paid for by the average American taxpayer.

It seems there are only 3 plausible scenarios for an American exit from Iraq:

1) Reinstitution of conscription. Probably won't happen but this so-called government is so stupid, who knows. McCain might do it.

2) The Iraqis finally kick us out. No chance. Any politically powerful Iraqi (who is not an American boot licker) suggesting such a thing will be quickly murdered by the military or intelligence operatives.

3) The insurgency mounts something akin to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1969. The U.S. takes enormous casualties and the current version of Walter Cronkite (whoever that is) says "enough".

Outside of those, we're there forever.

I also find that the vast majority of "critical assessments" of the Iraq war focus on the "incompetence" of the occupation planning rather than the justification of the war itself. I recently watched a documentary called "No End in Sight" and the whole movie was based on the premise that there was nothing wrong with the war itself, just the lack of planning and incompetence of the Bush Administration. No question that the war was the 'right thing' to do... just was poorly executed.

Ah, any so-called "expert" you find in the MSM is 99 times out of a hundred, a bought and paid for stooge for the establishment. They're trotted out time and time again to give a veneer of legitimacy to the crimes of the government.

it's not an american war. it's a war of the transnationals, for which the american people have been suckered into paying the bill.

Looks probable that the only way out of Iraq is for the USA to crash & burn ......... the real mission is accomplished.

There is no plan to withdraw from Iraq.

There never was.

Iraq is now a COLONY of oil company backed imperialism.

Iran is next.

It's about the OIl.

IT HAS ONLY EVER BEEN ABOUT THE OIL!!

Modern Western Civilization is the product of 150 years of cheap, easy to extract oil. That time is over.

The scramble to seize the remaining oil supplies is on. China will not sit idly by as the US steals the oil it so desperately needs for it's export based economy out from under it's nose. India will not sit idly by either.

The crash is coming.

We have the choice whether to buckle up and try to slow this out of control vehicle, or ignore the problem, and crash headlong into a wall at 90 miles per hour...

Why are you reading The New York Times??

The NYT article referred to is actually a reprint of Op-ed 1st published on 5th anniversary of Iraq invasion.

Might be interesting to see if any changes have been made.