What if we're pacifying Iraq the permanent way – getting rid of insurgency problems by getting rid of the insurgents causing the problems.

In his book “The War Within”, Bob Woodward credited “classified” operations with tamping Iraq violence, rather than the wildly over-rated troop surge. He repeated that view on Friday’s Bill Maher show on HBO. As noted by AlterNet:

“…This was really interesting ... Woodward didn't get specific, but it basically sounded like a targeted assassinations program.”

Targeted assassinations aren’t anything new in the region. Israel’s covert operatives have practically written the book on this grim procedure by routinely eliminating that nation’s enemies - and inspiring, in one case at least, a Steven Spielberg movie.

But there are indications some of these Mesopotamian “liquidations” may not be proceeding in “real time” - that, in some cases, prisoners apprehended either procedurally or under the aegis of secret “extraordinary rendition” may be shoved into their eternal rewards while imprisoned behind bars.

This beyond-grim possibility would indicate the U.S., and our Iraqi allies, are operating facilities very much like death camps.

The UK Independent’s Robert Fisk provides a chilling glimpse at such summary executions carried out in a Baghdad compound:

 “There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy" to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives….”

Fisk details a horrific twilight world, and describes the bungled hanging – or lynching? – of one suspect:

"They started digging into the floor beneath the bench so that the guy would drop far enough to snap his neck," the official said. "They dug up the tiles and the cement underneath. But that didn't work. He could still stand up when they pushed him off the bench. So they just took him to a corner of the cell and shot him in the head."

In the chronicle of this war, there is no end of surprises; not shocks – such atrocity is no longer capable of producing reactions containing the necessary measure of astonishment. Not from us. Not now.

And it’s sobering to reflect that the ongoing question in this war may not be when it will end… but how far our humanity has regressed since it began.

Get ready to hand him a Michelin Guide to China: John McCain is in a hole, he's digging hard... and he just won't stop.

While many of the punditry last night fretted over the important issues in his debate with Barack Obama - like which man was showing more pocket hankie, etc. - a couple of devastating blows hammered the aging jet wrangler.

...And he delivered them himself!

McCain has, in the course of his campaign and these latest debates, fully affixed himself to the unending nightmare of Iraq. He vows no peace 'til victory. Nobody seems to know what Iraq War victory would look like, or how long it will take. But that doesn't matter to the doddering Casey Jones of the Straight Talk Express: We stay until we win.

That's becoming a more troublesome strategic goal, since intel indicates a new wave of violence may check waxy dreams of a pacified Fertile Crescent.

But that's chickenfeed compared to the untold hurt McCain bought himself with this one:

"My friends, we are not going to be able to provide the same benefit for present-day workers that we are going -- that present-day retirees have today."

My friend, you've just committed political suicide. Why do you think you were told, from day-one of arriving in Washington these long 26 years ago, that you never, ever touch Social Security and Medicare? Simple: Old people VOTE. They get up early in the morning on election day, take their medication, jump on their Revo scooters, and haul ass down to the polling place early. They stagger in on walkers and canes, they hitch a ride on Meals on Wheels vans, dammit, they CRAWL... but they get there.

You even smell like you might mess with Social Security and Medicare... and you're political career is burnt corndog.

This is the same "straight talk" McCain burbled in Michigan earlier this year, when he told a crowd good jobs that had gone were not coming back. His clue that morsel wasn't the smartest of sound bites came last week - when his campaign was forced to abandon Michigan. Packed up, pulled out.

Republicans have been sniffing around, waiting to pounce on these entitlements since Social Security was established by the Roosevelt Administration in the mid-1930s. Retirees and near-retirees expecting their tax-funded care package to be there waiting when they leave the workday world behind don't want to hear that benefits aren't trendy anymore. After 75 years of wars, crises and countless recessions, the idea doesn't make sense to almost four generations of Americans.

The last GOP foray was in early 2005, when George Bush discovered his "political capital" wouldn't buy a cup o' Sanka when it came to shilling a plan that would turn retirement benefits over to the private sector. Downwind of that failed crusade, it's chilling to consider the plight of the elderly had their fixed incomes been thrown to the Wall Street wolves; this recession crisis might have left them abandoned in the streets.

Public entitlements have been an almost-obsessive bane of free-market hacks. Back in 1982, Ronald Reagan warned that Social Security was all but bankrupt. Over the next 15 years, the "bust date" jumped from 2029 to 2042. A couple of years ago, the Congressional Budget Office moved up the date to 2052. No doubt, a few years down the line, the deadline year will surge upwards again.

Also, doomsday predictions are based on stack-the-deck assumptions like "boomers will demand increased benefits". Added to the turmoil is the routine pillaging of Social Security funds to cover budgetary hemorrhaging in other outlays.

The surpluses of the Clinton years allowed the Social Security fund to be restored to the tune of $400 billion. The fund won't become insolvent if it's administered correctly, by people who want it to continue. For the past eight years, we've been beseiged by a party seeking nothing less than to destroy the system and replace it with a pasted-up, chicken-wire privatized system. And that dream just won't die.

People want a President who'll work hard to restore and preserve the components of America important to them. McCain is all too willing to write off as unsalvageable anything that doesn't meet his criteria for "worthwhile".

Even retirees in Florida and Arizona, on the mid-Atlantic coast and in Southern California - long the reliable base of the GOP - may be realizing McCain's standards are too high, and designed to benefit a rarified social stata that would sneeze at "handouts".

But if I've paid all my working life for this "handout" how is it charity?

How successfully can the "bailout" alleviate our debt-soaked markets while the outrageously expensive Iraq War continues to blast holes in our leaky economic boat?

In a near-classic soul-baring moment, none other than ex-House Majority Leader Tom Delay - denying high-class tax cuts were the cause of America’s burdensome, growing deficit - confessed last week to MSNBC’s David Gregory that the war… uh… is a factor:

“…(Trickle-down sparked) revenues to the government increased by huge amounts.  What happened was we went to war.  And we‘re paying for that war.  That‘s the biggest part of the deficit.  And I can get into the weeds on it, but we‘re paying for this war and it‘s not even part of the budget.  So it all goes to deficit.  And people don‘t realize that.”

Oh, we realize it, Tom. Too bad you didn’t in time. On the eve of the 2003 invasion, Delay was one of the hawk prophets droning that the tab for our candy-and-flowers victory would be covered by Iraqi oil revenues. You know: The ones locked away in numbered accounts while overburdened American taxpayers fund chronic pipeline repairs and hulking bodyguards for political princelings.

When he wasn’t levering the tax burden off the rich and onto the middle and working classes, Delay functioned as the Bush Administration’s Capitol Hill golem, breathed to life by the New Imperium project and wreaking vengeance on Congressional representatives unwilling to tow the line. His deep, abiding partnerships with greasy lobbyists like Jack Abramoff finally brought him down.

All that gas revenue would be something of windfall, now that the price per barrel has gone from $25 before the war to averaging over $100 now. That hefty gas-pump chunk torn out any given day for any given American is one of the prices we all pay for this seemingly endless war.

The current financial instability of the country is another costly demerit against our grand Mideastern crusade. The credit crunch and Wall Street slide are the end-results of ingrown financial corruption and our GOP-touted cult of deregulation – make no mistake about that. But ask yourself: Would a bailout to provide painful-but-necessary relief cost us as dearly if we didn’t have the fat, screeching gorilla of the Iraq War on our backs?

In "The Three Trillion Dollar War", economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes tote up the cost of our Iraq folly. That’s right… three trillion dollars is their projected cost. And this is all outlay; we are profiting from the apparently endless conflict not one iota:

“No, the money is not recirculated into the economy. It mostly goes to pay Filipino and Nepali contractors in Iraq to do laundry, cook meals, drive trucks and buses, clean dormitories, repair the 42,000 light vehicles stationed there and of course to pay world oil prices for fuel to keep our vehicles, tanks, humvees, MRAPs, helicopters and aircraft fueled. The US is a wealthy country, but even we cannot afford to squander $3 trillion into a war that has very little benefit for the US economy. If we were spending that money in the US - building our infrastructure, for example, then it would have a net positive multiplier for the US.”

Frequently, we are told that our financial crisis is a national security issue – that our economic vulnerability leaves us unable to prepare for possible strategic crises – and that the money crunch makes us beholden to foreign creditors holding the IOUs for our expensive follies. But the Iraq War is itself linked to our monetary instability; its excessive, pointless costs have left our reserves used up, our resources barren.

The GOP’s address to the war is limited to endless yap about the Surge, as if this expensive, overextended operation can be transformed through rhetorical alchemy into our strategic touchstone – a resounding denunciation of prickly questions about the wisdom of launching the war in the first place, a dim outline of what “victory” in Iraq may look like.

Hogwash.

The surge was nothing more than a phony feint, a deliberate scheme to give the GOP a talking point in this election year. As such, it is the ultimate designator of the Bush Administration: ugly, degraded and manipulative.

It’s time to pack in our expensive, foolish crusade in the Middle East. Iraq has nothing to do with the terrorists that do threaten us. And our other “causes” in the region can look out for themselves.