yep, you got it right Billmon and so many got it wrong. a lot of us did some fierce hand wringing. I even tried to share my views with as many as I could sucker into having a discussion with me.
did it make any difference? it is hard to tell though I really doubt any of us have significantly changed history. the people who have really put a stick in the spokes of the cheney admin are some very hard and cold killers in Iraq who have brought more terror than any of us can imagine to that country and we can take absolutely no credit for that.
I feel like that old Indian with a tear in his eye from that anti-litter commercial

Posted by: dan of steele | Dec 21 2006 20:54 utc | 4

The Whiskey Bar and dKos were beacons of sanity at the time of a crazy invasion of Iraq. A retrospective is apt. The Sunni insurgeny has defeated American in Al Anbar province. A Sunni Shiite civil war has broken out. The US is about to attack the largest Shiite militia.
Insane.
All the while the White House refuses to talk to neighboring countries about possible Iraq political settlements.

Posted by: Jim S | Dec 21 2006 21:16 utc | 6

I’m a huge Billmon fan and it is interesting to reach back and read some of these posts…. I’m sure that Billmon helped shape some of my thoughts during that time frame.
I also recall Juan Cole missing the mark on many occasions, and in fact Billmon was light years off target concerning Yellow Cake, Cheney, Fitzgerald (sp?), Libby, Rove, and an assortment of other topics.
All I’m saying is that I read Billmon whenever he posts and he is my favorite blog contributor (bar none), BUT lets not get carried away! These things are just too complex for even the most prescient!
Peace! lol

Posted by: SoandSo | Dec 21 2006 21:31 utc | 8

“what, if any of it, is worth keeping and what could just as well be consigned to the electronic garbage can”
Somewhat of a side note but this is a worrying thought. I am starting to think we need a serious preservation & archiving initiative for blogs such as billmon’s. The short retrospective he provides gives us just a taste of what would be lost if this blog or portions of this blog were to be deleted. These entries are a perfect record of our moment and they need and others like them need to be preserved for the historians of the future.

Posted by: Nora | Dec 21 2006 22:24 utc | 10

nora, i had just copied that exact quote. my sentiments w/regard to a worrying thought. i have mined the archives 100’s of times over the last few years. save it all. take ross k’s advice billmon and write the damn book.
browsing the comment section i ran into another early call.

Maybe it’s still the least worst option, but it reminds me of what a Russian economist said about trying to turn a centrally planned economy into a free market one:
“It’s easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup; much harder to turn fish soup back into an aquarium.”
Viceroy Bremmer is being puffed in the recent Newsweek as a possible SecState in the Bush second term.
I wouldn’t be surprised. The guy may not be able to manage his way through a garden gate, but he has some incredible bureaucratic and media schmoozing skills — which is all that seems to count in government any more. See my profile of Bremer’s career, here.
proposals to augment state-trained troops with paramilitary forces affiliated with Kurdish and Shia political parties are only beginning to be studied, according to members of Iraq’s governing council and Dan Senor, a senior adviser to L. Paul Bremer III, the chief administrator of Iraq.
Well, when Bremer and his top people say something it may not always be a lie, but that’s the smart way to bet. Sounds to me like it’s probably a done deal — or close to it.

Posted by: annie | Dec 21 2006 23:09 utc | 12

Billmon,
I have read almost everything ever put up on billmon.org. What you have noticed about the accuracy of the analysis in your blog and the others you mentioned I have long since taken for granted. Your writing has shown up the MSM for what it is, for so long, that I can barely read MSM anymore. Its like reading HELLO! magazine with politicians taking the place of celebrities. Or perhaps like reading advertising. I no longer have the time or inclination to read spin written by a journalist on behalf of his or her source. I want analysis and genuine information, not people watching and the sale of column inches for political access. Your blog is one of the few places I can get it. Your output has been overwhelming at times. I happily remember days where posts popped up faster than I could read them. Thank you!
Since the Iraq war has started I have bought a home, changed jobs and gotten married. Its a long time to be focused on one issue. We know the story well now, and even though it has not ended yet I think we can all see where it is going. 2 out of 3 posts on one issue sounds like too much for anyone.
I have always found the economic posts to be the most interesting. It was on billmon.org that I first learnt of the massive US deficits and China’s appetite for treasury bills, among many other interesting things. I am sure many of your readers remember very interesting posts on topics of similar distance from Iraq. Perhaps for the sake of your own interest in blogging it might be time to find room for other foci?

Posted by: still working it out | Dec 21 2006 23:24 utc | 14

It has to be little comfort for people like Billmon to look back at their prescient remarks other than to receive approbation from those few who agreed with him at the time. I do hope he saves all his material and some day publishes it. I learned of his blog a couple of years and have been a religious follower ever since. And now I am glad he has returned.
FWIW, I had this op-ed published in our local newspaper on 8/25/02:
“We read almost daily of a continuing U.S. military buildup in the Middle East with plans to attack Iraq and “take out” Saddam Hussein. This is despite repeated assertions by our president that no decision has been made about all this. To me it seems there are two common denominators behind all these preparations: oil and Israel.
As the wishful thinking goes, if only Saddam were removed, the threats to these two entities would go away. Lurking most prominently is the fear of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, which is to say our fear that he will get nuclear weapons.
The problem is there are more than 1 billion Muslims in the world. And they resent us. Why? While there are many factors, I believe a big part of it is our one-sided support of Israel in its 50-year conflict with the Palestinians. This has become a unifying symbol in the Muslim world that says the United States can never be an honest broker in this conflict. The other problem is our insatiable thirst for oil to support our wasteful fossil-fuel driven economy, and the fact we are willing to support tyrannical Arab regimes to keep the pipelines open. I believe these two are major factors that have radicalized much of the Muslim world. Unfortunately, these two problems won’t be solved by eliminating the hostile regime in Iraq.
While acknowledging it as a despotic regime, that country has done nothing to us to provide moral justification for starting a war now, one that would likely kill thousands of innocents. Nor does world opinion support our plans. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and plenty of radicals eager to get control of this technology and share it with other Islamic groups.
And the hatred of Israel is wide-spread throughout the Arab world. It will only be a matter of time before the “Islamic nuclear bomb” technology gets disseminated to other hostile states once we eliminate Iraq. Are we next going to preemptively invade Iran, or Syria, or Sudan, or Pakistan? Will we go into Saudi Arabia to “safeguard” the oil fields there? Such actions virtually guarantee the creation of more and more terrorists, sooner or later armed with a nuclear weapon, bent on inflicting horror on our country.
It seems to me we need a new type of thinking about all this. When the twin towers in New York fell many reacted with surprise—why do they hate us? While I agree we need to go after the terrorists behind this attack, I think we need some soul searching and to confront legitimate complaints against us. When President Bush says there is an axis of evil it implies a certain arrogance, a certain blindness to our own shortcomings and an assumption that we in the United States are always the virtuous ones in the world.
We need to honestly look at the way Israel has exploited the Palestinians and lean on them to give up their settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and get rid of the refugee camps, and back this up with strings attached to the billions in military aid we supply to them every year. These suggestions are not intended to be anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, for the long-term security of Israel can only be achieved if they can find a way to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors and the surrounding Arab states.
And we should make elimination of oil dependency the highest priority for our future national security. I don’t see this happening under the Bush administration.
A victorious war against Iraq may create an illusion of security but I fear it will only add fuel to a potential holocaust in the future, a real war between civilizations. It is time to start thinking long-term about real security for all of us.”

Posted by: Richard Hodgman | Dec 21 2006 23:54 utc | 16

HIJACKING PUBLIC MEDIA
Journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman unpack the politics of public broadcasting.
By Amy Goodman and David Goodman
In public broadcasting we need to get back to the revolutionary spirit of dissent and courage that brought us into existence in the first place, and this country does, too.
—Bill Moyers

There is a war on, but it’s not just in Iraq. The Bush administration has launched a full-scale assault on independent journalism. This regime has bribed journalists, manufactured news, blocked reporters’ access to battlefronts and disasters, punished reporters who ask uncomfortable questions, helped ever bigger corporations consolidate control over the airwaves, and been complicit in the killings of more reporters in Iraq than have died in any other U.S. conflict.
In this global attack, one area has come under especially heavy fire: public broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which disburses about $400 million per year for public television and public radio networks such as National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), was established in 1967. “In authorizing CPB, Congress clearly intended that non-commercial television and radio in America, even though supported by federal funds, must be absolutely free from any federal government interference beyond mandates in the legislation,” according to the CPB inspector general.
CPB is often described as the “heat shield” designed to insulate public broadcasting from political interference. This posed a problem for the Bush administration, which wanted to turn up the heat on public broadcasting. Instead of a shield, they installed a right-wing blowtorch to run the CPB: Kenneth Tomlinson. His mission as CPB chairman, until he was forced to resign in scandal in November 2005, was to transform public broadcasting into an extension of the White House propaganda machine. What Fox News is to TV and the Washington Times is to newspapers, the Bush regime has hoped to make of public broadcasting: just another outlet for government spin.

Oh, and it hasn’t stopped, out of sheer happenstance the other day I turned to NPR in the car having left my music at home, and I listened to a report that became quite clear to me that it was one long drawn out but,– oh, so subtle– commercial. I was disgusted. As mighty and lucid as billmon’s voice is, we need an army of billmon’s to balance the overwhelming, concentrated onslaught on public discourse and their ideological initiative.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 22 2006 6:24 utc | 18

A paragraph from Mark Danners “Iraq, The War Of The Imagination”. A long slog of a read:
Kennan’s problem of knowing “where you are going to end” begins, as he knew well, on the ground; but it does not end there. Information obtained by dedicated but deeply fallible humans travels from places like Fallujah by cable and e-mail and word of mouth into the vast four-mile-square bunker of the Green Zone, with its half-dozen concentric layers of concrete blast walls and sandbags and barbed wire, and from there to the great sprawling labyrinth of the Washington national security bureaucracy, up through the thousands of competing staffers in the layers of bureaus and agencies and eventually to the highly driven people at the tops of the organizational pyramids: the people who, it is said, “make the decisions.” In the best managed of administrations there exists, between those on the ground who listen and learn and those in the offices who debate and decide, a great deal of bureaucratic “noise.” And this, alas, as so many accounts of decision-making on the war make all too clear, was not the best managed of administrations. Indeed, its top officials, talented and experienced as many of them were, seem to have willingly collaborated, for reasons of ego or ambition or ideological hubris, in making themselves collectively blind.

Posted by: anna missed | Dec 22 2006 10:31 utc | 20

I’ve been a regular at the Bar during these years, and have looked forwards to Billmon’s cogent reports.
One item is worth consideration, though. Bush, Blair and Cheney were never in a second’s doubt as to what they were up to. And in Wolfowitz’ words, the reasons stated were the expedient ones, from a near bureaucratic POV.
This is why Bush and Cheney keep referring to the “long historical perspective” – and why a man as “reasonable” as Blair came along for the ride, lending legitimacy to apparent lunacy:
They were out to secure a vital, and soon essential, resource for the West.
All the stated reasons we find illogical and senseless are simply maneuvers, not intended to be supported by reason. They are manners in which the MSM can be exploited, because of its insistence on “hearing both sides, and not having an opinion.”
This is why the blogs became valuable – but are they decisive? I think not. We are still in Iraq, there is talk of double-down (is Iraq a casino?) and it’s going to get relentlessly worse.
You see – they knew they were lying at the UN, when they got the inspectors thrown out. They kept lying – not because they were oblivious of the truth or had no clear mission. But because the mission was so unapologetically colonial and racist as to not stand the light of day: to assume control of the Middle East’s oil.
And their “game” isn’t over yet. They are willing to go the distance, and have played us for fools. How else could a president so completely ignore the popular will? A “wise” council? And his own military chiefs?
They are getting ready for Iran. They are willing to go ballistic in Iraq. They are – in fact – willing to do whatever is required, down to actually denying this resource to anyone else, should they fail to secure it for themselves.
And they have been willing to do this from day one.
Will they succeed?
The sheer lunacy is dawning on more and more observers – unfortunately, they are also seeing the deep seated rationale at the center of the lunacy: oil will become central to the survival of civilization, and we cannot let it fall into the hands of radical Muslims (or other enemies of …)
Horrendous and calamitous all-encompassing wars have been fought for much less.

Posted by: SteinL | Dec 22 2006 12:23 utc | 22

Within each of us dwells a residual sense that heirarchies, and increasingly complex ones to boot, are not in our best survival interests. Billmon would have been that Noah who perceived that his survival was imperiled by depending on the priests and military classes who coerced the peasantry into building and maintaining the early hydraulic (irrigated) civilizations. Although prescient, there is a fundamental tribal intellect at work here for Billmon to understand what we were getting into in Iraq. Some of us shared that basic mode of thought, that precivil mode that resisted the blind groupthink that binds us to the seductive, technologically maladaptive organism we call globalization. In this sense, Iraq is but a microcosm of the much greater quagmire that binds us to an unsustainable future. The forces that got us into Iraq would label this kind of thinking dangerous or evil. In their view, anything that resists the centripetal pull toward the unifying grasp of globalization is evil. But some of us just want to float our own boats and seek alternative futures. There are many courses to follow down the white water. The best route may be the sneak in the calmer water, but if you have the big boat it is tempting to take the most treacherous route even when the captain is blinded by the glory he anticipates at the finish line.

Posted by: lou | Dec 22 2006 13:02 utc | 24

SteinL:

…unfortunately, they are also seeing the deep seated rationale at the center of the lunacy: oil will become central to the survival of civilization, and we cannot let it fall into the hands of radical Muslims (or other enemies of …)

You don’t believe this stuff do you?
Is oil something you fill your swimming pool with, and dive into and swim in, like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin?
No. It is not.
It is black, stinking stuff you covert to cash as soon as possible.
And you don’t care to whom you sell it as long as their euros are… whatever color euros are.
“Oil will become the center of civilization…” and when it runs out we’ll all become extinct? Come oooon!
A rational nation, such as a nation which once marshalled its resources, put one foot in front of the other for nearly a decade before it finally set foot on the sweet, pale moon herself would not even be considering this moronic approach. Warfare… hah!
Such a nation would be busy halving its consumption of the smelly black stuff, would be surveying a path that skirted the tar pits and the doomed dinosaurs therein, that led to a way of life free of the paralysing fear that immobilizes those with such little backbone or ability that they would send thousands of others to their deaths, destroying a whole civilization to protect a doomed status quo.
No… it is sheer lunacy. If it is allowed to go forward it will be the end of the world as we knew it… and for no reason at all.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Dec 22 2006 13:12 utc | 26

Oh and one more thing about #27: I would bet almost anything that we could have fully liberated ourselves from dependence on oil for far far less money than we have spent to date on this lunatic war.

Posted by: Bea | Dec 22 2006 13:41 utc | 28

Not to diminish Billmon’s analyses, but lets not forget the millions of people who demonstrated against the Iraq invasion. They, too, knew it would be some kind of disaster.
Stein L wrote:
…They are willing to go ballistic in Iraq. They are – in fact – willing to do whatever is required, down to actually denying this resource to anyone else, should they fail to secure it for themselves.
And they have been willing to do this from day one.
That is about it.
Bea, I agree that people will rally and the US could have accomplished a tremendous amount in the energy field with the energy/money/labor invested in overseas invasions/control, and that it should have been tried. However, many would have perceived the crucial importance of oil and might not have agreed. This, I feel, is part of the reason for the success of the transparent USuk lies, the shifting hypocritical excuses, blatant in their absurdity and falseness. Many preferred to pretend to believe these, as facing saving devices. And as we saw, they could be debunked, argued about, or changed, and with time one has a fait accompli, and new strategies and actions have to be implemented. Lastly, refraining from military action in the early 2000’s would have signaled that the booty (oil, to make it short and crude, its control, etc.) would remain in the hands of those whose butts are parked on top of it, and that outcome was, and remains, unacceptable to the PTB.

Posted by: Noirette | Dec 22 2006 14:48 utc | 30

Think about the vicious circle we are trapped in. CO2 levels in the atmosphere are statistically far above the variable norm of the past 300,000 years. The primary source of this CO2 is the burning of petroleum products. In addition to the contributions of our military and energy industries we now have emerging data on the contribution of jet exhausts all over the globe in filtering out sunlight. I live in Michigan where today the temperature at the moment is 54 degrees — on the 22nd. of December! No ice on any of the lakes. Pretty soon we will have a generation of people who have no memory of what normal winter once was and consider today’s weather quite normal. The thing that astonishes me is how rapidly this change has occurred.

Posted by: RWH | Dec 22 2006 20:48 utc | 32

it’s time to graduate from The Graduate. The future now is…hemp.
via YouTube: Ford’s 1941 Hemp Car, made of hemp fibers…watch them take a hammer to the car to show its strength.
Hemp “plastic” is lighter than steel yet can withstand 10 times the impact without denting. There is no reason hemp cannot replace many many petroleum products, as well as forestry products.
I think the figure is that 37% of European car bodies are now made of
hemp?
the many uses of hemp (via google video)
edible seeds, oil, fiber for all sorts of manufacturing, the medicinal value, rigging, masts, housing materials, paper, fuel, and who knows what else if some people were not so bassackward (or, rather, beholden to industries that would suffer if hemp could be easily grown.) I think the figure is 25,000 uses.
getting over stupidity about hemp could give American farmers a new cash crop that is very hardy and that can replace many petroleum products. It is also a good feed for animals like milk cows or goats, or for birdseed.
again via YouTube, a good WWII-era documentary that tried to encourage farmers to grow “hemp for victory.”
The best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 23 2006 3:18 utc | 34