REPUBLICANS AFTER BUSH'S JOB PLEDGE TO CONTINUE HIS HORRIFIC POLICIES (GUEST COLUMNIST)

May 18, 2007
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

Now, Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have done a few things other Republicans wouldn’t. Their initial domestic surveillance program was apparently so lawless and unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft, approached on his sickbed, refused to go along. For the most part, however, Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects.

There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume of Fox News confronted the contenders with a hypothetical “24”-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.

Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen in real life, that the U.S. military has asked the producers of “24” to cut down on the torture scenes. Last week Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or “other expedient methods to obtain information” is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the “moral high ground.”

But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause.

And torture isn’t the only Bush legacy that seems destined to continue if a Republican becomes the next president. Mr. Bush got us into the Iraq quagmire by conflating Saddam with Al Qaeda, treating two mutually hostile groups as if they constituted a single enemy. Well, Mr. Romney offers more of that. “There is a global jihadist effort,” he warned in the second debate. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda with that intent.” Aren’t Sunnis and Shiites killing each other, not coming together? Nevermind.

What about the administration’s state of denial over Iraq, its unwillingness to face up to reality? None of the leading G.O.P. presidential contenders seem any different — certainly not Mr. McCain, who strolled through a Baghdad marketplace wearing a bulletproof vest, accompanied by more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees while attack helicopters flew overhead, then declared that his experience proved there are parts of Baghdad where you can “walk freely.”

Finally, what about the Bush administration’s trademark incompetence? In appointing unqualified loyalists to key positions, Mr. Bush was just following the advice of the Heritage Foundation, which urged him back in 2001 to “make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.” And the base doesn’t mind: the Bernie Kerik affair — Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to get his corrupt, possibly mob-connected business partner appointed to head the department of homeland security — hasn’t kept Mr. Giuliani from becoming the apparent front-runner for the Republican nomination.

What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

HALLIBURTON FLYING OFF WITH $20 BILLION IN IRAQ BLOOD MONEY & STILL COUNTING (GUEST COLUMNIST)

Giles Whittell of The Times of London is curioius why Cheney’s beloved Halliburton finds it so necessary to transplant its headquarters to Dubai. Are congressional investigators getting too close?

May 17, 2007

Moving house is said to be the most stressful experience in life after divorce and bereavement, and I would not wish to add to anyone’s stress in the middle of such a move. This is offered more in a spirit of reassurance.
The packers have already arrived at the comfortable Houston home of David Lesar. They may even have come and gone: Mr Lesar said after a golf tournament last week that there was little left to do but board a plane with his family and leave.
The Lesars will be going to Dubai, for good. The golf there is outstanding, and if they feel homesick for Texas they could always buy an artificial island in the shape of their home state, recently completed in the opalescent waters of the Gulf.
By way of background, Mr Lesar is the much-admired chief executive of Halliburton, the world’s second-largest oilfield services provider. Its former subsidiary, Kellogg Brown Root, specialises in providing meals, accommodation and laundrettes for the US Army. Together, Halliburton and KBR have earned approximately $20 billion in Iraq since 2003.
In the teeth of wearisome howling from conspiracy theorists, Mr Lesar announced in March that after 90 years based in Oklahoma and Texas his company was moving its world headquarters to Dubai to position it better for the growing volume of business it expects to win in the “Eastern hemisphere”.
As it happens, even after half a century of intense Western interest in the Eastern hemisphere, and in particular in Middle Eastern oil, 60 per cent of Halliburton’s revenues still come from North America – but Mr Lesar is the expert. We assume his projections are accurate.
It also happens that the month before the move was announced, the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee in Washington disclosed that $2.7 billion of Halliburton’s earnings in Iraq are regarded by the US Government’s Defence Contract Audit Agency as the proceeds of “suspect billing”, or overpricing.
And it transpires, finally, that the same vexatious muckrakers who have allowed themselves to become so exercised about Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former role as Halliburton’s chairman are now attacking the group for a new deal signed by an Iranian subsidiary to develop Tehran’s natural gasfields.
There is, of course, no suggestion of wrongdoing by Mr Lesar or Halliburton, which, in any case, formally separated from Kellogg Brown Root last month. But given the vengeful obsessions of Mr Lesar’s enemies in Washington it must be comforting to know that Dubai has no extradition treaty with the US; and that he is moving to a place of unfettered economic dynamism with a supportive commentariat. When Mr Cheney visited nearby Abu Dhabi last week, the political editor of the local newspaper covered the entire visit in a Halliburton baseball cap.