More War

(Click on image to enlarge, and then please return.)

David Horsey has written a column sympathetic to President Obama's predicament with respect to Syria.  Clearly the president doesn't want to just rush in, no matter how much the congressional hawks are urging him to do so.  And, Horsey says, with good reason.

The president insists that there is a "game-changing" red line the Syrian government will have crossed if it is found to have used chemical weapons against its people, but he has bent the red line so far, the hawks say, that not only the Syrians, but the Iranians and North Koreans will conclude Obama is a man with a marshmallow spine whose warnings can be flouted with impunity.

The president has, indeed, added more caveats to his tough talk. In his news conference on Tuesday, the president said if rock-solid proof is found that a gas attack has taken place he would "rethink" what to do next, choosing from an unspecified range of punitive options that might not include military action.

His line got more elastic after last week's ominous but rubbery announcement that U.S. intelligence agencies have found evidence of a possible use of the nerve gas sarin -- somewhere, sometime, against somebody in Syria, "with some degree of varying confidence" (in the words of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel).

Though equivocal, that finding is evidence enough for the hawks who long for a much more resolute president in the mold of George W. Bush. Bush, under the sway of his very hawkish, neoconservative advisors, seized on a bushel of bad intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. ...

"If we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, then we may find ourselves in the position where we can't mobilize the international community to support what we do," Obama told reporters.

Even if such evidence can be provided, there is still the hard question of what to do in response. Having spent a decade fighting two wars in the Middle East with dubious results, there are not many Americans beyond Senate hawks such as Lindsey Graham, Saxby Chambliss and John McCain who are itching to jump into one more tangled, vicious conflict in yet another Muslim country.   [Emphasis added]

It would indeed be difficult to get other nations and the UN to back the US in any "boots on the ground" scenario.  I suspect it would also be hard to get such approval for even non-troop involvement. The rest of the world (including many Zionists) are fully aware of how the Middle East balance, tenuous enough at that time, was fully upset by the NeoCons and remains a problem.

There is also the fact that woven into the fabric of the Syrian uprising is a religious issue, something Bush ignored in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  Muslims of different strains are fighting each other:  Assad is an Alowite; the rebels are Sunni and Shia.    This is as much a religious war as it is revolution against a tyrant.

In this matter, I agree with the president.  This is no time to rush in.

Things That Make You Go Wow!

The people of a district in Illinois have elected a real hero, a profile in courage, if you will, to be their congresswoman:  Tammy Duckworth.  She beat the incumbent like a drum even though he whined incessantly that she kept referring to her military service.  It would be pretty hard to ignore her service, what with having her legs blown off after which she managed to land the helicopter she was piloting in Iraq.

And then, after a long stint of rehabilitation for her injuries, she entered politics, first as a gadfly and then as a successful candidate.  She's made it clear that her new job doesn't intimidate her (via):

When Tammy Duckworth steps into Congress this January for her first term, she’ll be carried by two prosthetic legs – and the potent notion that if she can survive a grenade blast while piloting a chopper, she surely can endure any political flak on Capitol Hill.

“The worst day for me in Washington on the floor of the House is never going to be as bad as me getting blown up. So bring it,” said Duckworth, a Democrat who represents Illinois’ 8th Congressional District, the suburbs north of Chicago.

One of the first women to fly combat missions in Iraq, Duckworth’s Black Hawk was hit by enemy fire in November 2004 as the aircraft skimmed tree tops at about 135 miles per hour. The explosion vaporized her right leg, smashed her left leg into the instrument panel, sheering it off, and tore away most of her right arm. Before losing consciousness, she used her remaining arm to try to land the sputtering chopper. On Nov. 6, she won election to the U.S. House.

“There’s nothing anyone can say to me or do to me — short of actually pointing a gun and shooting at me — that’s going to be as bad as it was in Iraq and that year I spent recovering. So it’s really freeing,” Duckworth told NBC News. “Had you talked to me 10 years ago, before I served and got hurt in combat, I would not have the courage to do what I’m doing now.”   [Emphasis added]

And if you want to see the picture of self-confidence, click on either of the links above:  it's a photo of Congresswoman Duckworth in a skirt and shoes which almost highlight those remarkable metal prosthetic legs which enable her to walk into her new duties.  The smile on her face should warm even the hardest of hearts.  And it also should scare the crap out of her foes.

You go, girl!

Forward!

Retired South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote a stunning op-ed piece this weekend. In it he explains why he cancelled an appearance at an international conference. He wouldn't be attending because former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be there. Before you decide that is awfully petty on the part of the Archbishop, read what he has to say about Blair and former US President George W. Bush.

The immorality of the United States and Great Britain's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.

Instead of recognising that the world we lived in, with increasingly sophisticated communications, transportations and weapons systems necessitated sophisticated leadership that would bring the global family together, the then-leaders of the US and UK fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us. ...

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague. [Emphasis added]

Of course, they won't. The US refused to sign on to the treaty creating the International Criminal Court. I suspect the UK did also. Both countries' leaders felt that would be transgressing on national sovereignty. That excuse might fly if either country seriously examined the behavior of their leaders and of the people carrying out the war and prosecuted them in a court of law, but neither country has done so. Instead, we in the US have been urged to "look forward, not backward." As a result, neither leader has faced the consequences of their actions. There has been no justice. And the wounds continue to fester.

At this point I should disclose that I consider Desmond Tutu a hero, a saint, if you will. I have heard him speak. I have dined with him and spoken with him, one-on-one. I love and respect this man and his wife deeply. Archbishop Tutu, unlike Barack Obama earned his Nobel Peace Prize by his actions in apartheid South Africa. He never gave up, he was relentless against the white regime which so horribly oppressed the black majority. But he also never changed his message. Victory would not come through violence, but through the non-violence espoused by Gandhi and by Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, he was right. I think Nelson Mandela, the other hero of South Africa would agree.

When the change came, the horrors the white regime visited on black citizens were not swept under the carpet, nor were there mass beheadings. Instead, the architects and their underlings were given a chance to go through a process known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There were consequences, yes. But there was also healing. Something we have been denied.

So, Archbishop Tutu, I commend your latest non-violent stance. We still have a lot to learn from you.

A War Criminal Is Convicted And Sentenced

Last month Charles Taylor was convicted on war crime charges by an international court sitting in Sierra Leone. His sentence was handed down by that court on Wednesday:

Judges at an international war crimes court have sentenced former Liberian President Charles Taylor to 50 years in prison following his landmark conviction for supporting rebels in Sierra Leone who murdered and mutilated thousands during their country's brutal civil war in return for blood diamonds.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone found Taylor guilty last month on 11 charges of aiding and abetting the rebels who went on a bloody rampage during the decade-long war that ended in 2002 with more than 50,000 dead.

In effect, the court has given the 64-year-old Taylor a life sentence. The Los Angeles Times had an article last month which details some of those charges and the effects of Taylor's complicity.

Taylor armed and supported militias, traded arms for "blood diamonds" in Sierra Leone, and allegedly used child soldiers in the 1989-96 Liberian civil war, which killed some 200,000 people. ...

Taylor, in exchange for diamonds, facilitated huge arms shipments to the rebels and offered financial support, training and a base in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

Imagine that: a guy is tried and convicted of war crimes for facilitating a war in another country in which hundreds of thousands are killed, maimed, raped for personal aggrandizement and increased wealth. And he will actually go to prison.

Of course, none of this has any relevance to our country. I mean, oil and rare earth minerals are different than diamonds, and crazy militias are different than mercenaries and private contractors with connections to the White House. Water boarding and forcing prisoners to stand naked for hours are totally unlike rape and the terrorizing of innocents. Furthermore, our new high tech weaponry is surgically precise, not like lopping off limbs indiscriminately, which is just savagery.

Most importantly, we are not Africans. We are Americans, the beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.

Excuse me while I weep.

Perpetual War

This "hopey-changey" thing really hasn't worked out very well for the progressives who worked hard to get Barack Obama elected. Oh, there have been some positive changes on his watch: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been rolled back; the US and Russia have "reset" their relations after eight years of back and forth threats between the Putin and Bush administrations; embryonic stem cell research is back on line. All of these are good things and I was delighted to see them. But, let's face it, it ain't much, especially given what we were promised.

What is especially grating is that Mr. Nobel Peace Prize has got us hunkered down even more deeply in Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of his assertions. We are still at war in both countries. We still have troops in both countries and will continue to have troops in both for years to come.


Mehdi Hasan, in a recent "Comment Is Free" column, noted the ongoing blood-letting going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests that it will continue unless and until the US really and truly leaves both countries.

A decade on from 9/11, bloodshed and chaos continue to plague Afghanistan and Iraq. A US state department report published on Thursday revealed that the number of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan had jumped by 55% last year; in Iraq, attacks were up 9%. The US-led invasions and occupations of both countries have been a dismal failure – thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars squandered. The presence of western troops in Muslim lands has provoked more terrorism than it has prevented. ...

Putting more boots on the ground was a gross misjudgment. More US troops have died fighting in Afghanistan during Obama's two and a half years in the White House than in Bush's two terms in office – and, despite the recent decision to start bringing troops home, there will be more US military personnel fighting the Taliban at the end of Obama's first term in office than at the start.

Iraq, meanwhile, has become the forgotten war – yet an astonishing 47,000 US troops remain stationed there. Earlier this month, Obama told a group of supporters: "If somebody asks about the war [in Iraq] … you have a pretty simple answer, which is all our folks are going to be out of there by the end of the year."

Not quite. US military leaders expect to keep up to 10,000 "folks" in Iraq beyond the 31 December 2011 deadline, agreed by the Bush administration, for a full US withdrawal. ...

Nope, no change here.

We have always been at war with East Asia

Cutting Costs

The State of the Union speech is coming up, and it will be interesting to hear just what President Obama has to say with respect to deficit reduction, which apparently concerns him more than any other issue. One area that I doubt will get much attention in the speech will be the billions we are spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After all, most of the money being spent on the wars continue to be off-budget, thanks to an overly compliant Congress.

Well, I think we should keep in mind just how much of our national treasure is going to those two wars, and not just in dollars.

In its second-largest deployment since World War II, the Minnesota National Guard will send more than 2,400 troops to Iraq and Kuwait later this year. Members of the First Brigade Combat Team will provide base and convoy security as the United States begins its drawdown of troops in Iraq. ...

This will be the first deployment for about 60 percent of the soldiers, the second deployment for 23 percent and the third deployment for 12 percent. The soldiers come from 29 units in 27 Minnesota communities. The brigade will replace another Guard unit and be responsible for base security and camps in Kuwait. In addition, it will provide protection for daily convoys transporting equipment and troops out of Iraq as well as supplies into Iraq. [Emphasis added]

Yes, we are drawing down the troops in Iraq, or at least beginning to, which may come as a surprise to many. We still have a sizable contingent in Iraq, and will continue to do so for years, according to the plans currently in place. We continue to rotate troops in and out of Iraq, much the way we rotate troops in and out of Afghanistan, even though the American public is sick to death of both misbegotten wars.

General Petraeus, the wunderkind of surges, is still the boss, and he sees no reason to pull out because ... well, I guess because he believes we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel and we still have some hearts and minds to win from those who survive the precision drone strikes.

So, while the Pentagon has been threatened with budget cuts even from the Tea Partiers, the wars will go on, and the soldiers will have to be housed, fed, supplied with weaponry, and treated for horrific injuries. And the money pipelines to Iraq and Afghanistan will stay wide open.

It really is a mad world.

Everything Old Is New Again

Happy Fucking New Year!

Traditionally, New Year's Day is a time of looking forward, a time when we can start fresh. That, of course, is actually unrealistic because the past continues to inform the present and almost inevitably shapes it.

Here's a good example of what I mean: Afghanistan

U.S. and NATO officials have sought to put a positive face on the last 12 months of fighting here, citing significant military gains in the Taliban's southern heartland, a concerted campaign of strikes targeting the insurgents' midlevel field command and the growth of the NATO force to levels at last deemed adequate for the task at hand.

The war in Afghanistan, which should never have been started, is now nearly nine years old. For many of those years, the US pretty much ignored the war because of the war in Iraq, which really should never have been started. Our neglect helped prolong things. As a candidate, Barack Obama made it clear from the get-go that the war in Afghanistan would get placed back on the front burner, and that was one promise he kept.

And the result? Well, the article looks back over the past year and what it finds is really disheartening:

The Taliban made deep inroads in swaths of the country previously regarded as relatively safe — the north, northwest and center — eroding confidence in the West's ability to protect the Afghan populace and hampering aid and reconstruction efforts. Parliamentary elections in September intended as a democratic showpiece devolved into fraud and chaos. Corruption tightened its grip on the government of President Hamid Karzai.

By midsummer, combat casualties among U.S. troops and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force as a whole had already reached their highest annual levels of the war. On Friday, the American military toll stood just short of a grim milestone: 498 deaths, according to the independent website icasualties.org, more than in the previous two years put together.

Altogether, Western troops suffered more than 700 fatalities in 2010, heightening unease on the part of European governments keenly aware of the war's unpopularity at home. While the NATO allies presented a united front at a conference in November, the Americans — whose troops make up two-thirds of the 150,000-member Western force — privately fretted about the likelihood of the United States shouldering an even larger share of the military burden in coming years.

As violence burgeoned, civilian casualties did too, jumping by 20% in the first 10 months of 2010 compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the United Nations. Most of the 2,412 noncombatant deaths in that period were attributed to the Taliban. But many Afghans, to the frustration of Western military officials, tend to place the overall blame on Western forces, seeing their presence as a magnet for insurgent attacks that kill and injure civilians.

But...but...but...

We'll be drawing down some troops this year, just like we promised. The surge worked just as well as it did in Iraq (where we still have troops who are still getting maimed and killed, just as Iraqi are still getting maimed and killed).

And...and...and...

By 2014, the Afghan security forces will be able to take over and finish the job. We're paying off the war lords to make certain that happens.

Like I said: Happy Fucking New Year

Crickets

In an article entitled "The war an election forgot", the Los Angeles Times uses the story of 1st Sgt. Patrick Olechny and his wife Veda as the backdrop to examine the unusual situation in which the nation is at war and that war was not mentioned at all during any campaigns at any level. It's as if the 150,000 troops and their families didn't exist, as if a war a half a world away wasn't happening, as if the extraordinary amount of American treasure in lives and dollars wasn't being drained away.

...In this turbulent election season — amid the talk of "tea parties" and the economy and President Obama's approval rating and the fight to control Congress and bailouts and deficits and fear and anger — there is little mention of Afghanistan or Iraq. ...

The United States is now in the ninth year of the longest conflict in its history, fought by 150,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost of more than $1 trillion. That is considerably more than the ultimate price of the much-debated Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out automakers, banks and a handful of insurers.

Yet neither party has much incentive to discuss the fighting half a world away.

Democrats are pleased with the winding down of U.S. involvement in Iraq, but divided over Obama's decision to escalate efforts in Afghanistan; they don't want to pile onto a president already in political trouble.

Republicans, unhappy with Obama's opposition to the Iraq war when he ran for president, tend to agree with his approach in Afghanistan; but they aren't about to praise the Democratic commander in chief in the middle of the midterm campaign.

I suppose the candidates and the parties they represent have somewhat of an excuse for being silent on the war. After all, there's an election to be won. And the press is finally reporting on the tribulations facing troops in Afghanistan, so it's not as if our news media doesn't know there's a war going on.

This particular article, linking those directly and deeply involved in the Afghanistan War with the election of those officials who will control their fate, is obviously somewhat timely: it is, after all, election day. Why, however, wasn't that kind of link made earlier, say, when it might have made a difference? Why weren't candidates for the House and Senate questioned about that trillion dollar price tag for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the issue of budget deficits was being discussed? Is war so much a part of our national psyche that it has become a given, one that must never be questioned?

I guess it's another case of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Yet Another Fine Mess

Get our your checkbook, folks. A report by a Special Inspector General indicates that billions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenue has been "lost" by the Pentagon, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Defense Department is unable to properly account for $8.7 billion out of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil revenue entrusted to it between 2004 and 2007, according to a newly released audit that underscores a pattern of poor record-keeping during the war.

Of that amount, the military failed to provide any records at all for $2.6 billion in purported reconstruction expenditure, says the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is responsible for monitoring U.S. spending in Iraq. The rest of the money was not properly deposited in special accounts as required under Treasury Department rules, making it difficult to trace how it was spent.

The US justified taking the money from the Iraqi oil revenue during a period when the Iraqi government was too weak and ineffectual to run a reasonable reconstruction program after we bombed the infrastructure for delivering such necessities as water and electricity into the dust, thereby making the Iraqi government weak and ineffectual. When investigators uncovered fraud and mismanagement of those funds by the Pentagon back in 2003, a new system was put in place to avoid any further problems. Apparently the Pentagon simply ignored the new requirements.

Keep in mind that this wasn't the US taxpayers' money that was pissed away, it was money that belonged to the Iraqi people. They're going to want it back, as well they should. At that point it's going to become US taxpayers' money.

I say we cut the Pentagon's budget by exactly that much. Let them run a bake sale to fund the next weapons system.

Another Fine Mess

So, what does an army do when it exits another country after pounding it into the dirt? Just go, leaving all the destruction and the base garbage for the conquered nation to deal with?

Oh, no, no, NO! We are being reassured by the military that the troops are busy cleaning up all the hazardous waste it can find in Iraq, labeling it properly, and shipping it out.

Where it's being shipped to exactly is not made clear in this McClatchy DC article (originally written for the Christian Science Monitor with whom McClatchy has an agreement), but what is clear is that the Pentagon got riled by some articles in the world press alleging the US was ignoring the mess it had made, some of it containing hazardous chemicals and materials. So it invited folks from the press and the appropriate agencies of the Iraqi government to tour one of its state of the art disposal facilities in Tikrit.

American commanders in Iraq are working to demonstrate that they are clearing the country of tens of millions of pounds of U.S.-made hazardous waste in an effort to rebut claims that U.S. troops are leaving behind a toxic legacy as they withdraw.

Hundreds of barrels of all types and all colors — filled with everything from discarded lithium batteries and oil filters to powerful chemicals such as hydrochloric acid — are stacked in a dusty compound on a U.S. base at Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

This and a sister facility on another base have so far processed 32 million pounds of "regulated" waste — more than half of it soil contaminated with petroleum products. The material has been decontaminated, crushed or shredded, and then sold as scrap in Iraq, or recycled and shipped abroad. [Emphasis added]

I have to admit that's a pretty impressive undertaking, and I also have to admit that I am glad to see it. What I don't see in the article is the reprocessing of dirt loaded with lead from bullets and shells from their practice ranges or battle sites, but then the military hasn't been real good about voluntarily cleaning the lead out of US bases that were closed, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Nor was their any mention of removing unexploded ordinance (such as cluster bomblets) or nuclear tipped ordinance from the fields of Iraq. Properly disposing of unused paint and paint thinner is nice, but in the long run Iraqi kids are going to lose more limbs from our left behind shells.

But here's the fun part: our military admits that some of the problems are caused by their civilian pals, the contractors. Check out this admission from an officer charged to clean up the mess:

Reports of "regulated waste being left all over the countryside" also prompted the U.S. military to investigate — and then to counter the claims, said Army Brig. Gen. Kendall Cox, the U.S. commander in charge of engineering in Iraq.

"The intent was to insure, through the media ... there's a clear understanding that we are taking every measure possible ... to protect the environment and treat all regulated waste and materials appropriately," he said.

"We have a very systematic process in place to receive materials, treat them and dispose of them properly," he added. "We haven't identified any problems with our processes. What we did identify is potentially there are contractors who aren't dealing with their regulated waste properly." [Emphasis added]

What a surprise, eh?

So, the war is winding down, another 20,000 US troops are scheduled to leave in the reasonably near future (leaving around 50,000 others), and the US is scurrying to clean up one inevitable part of war: the environmental disaster.

Well, sorta. Kinda.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight

The opinion piece written by Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen and published in today's Los Angeles Times confirms what a lot of people have long suspected: wars are actually fought by the economically disadvantaged, and the casualty rate reflects that. Using the data and conclusions from their recently published book, Casualty Gap, the authors point out the inequalities in the way the US wages war and what it means.

Over the last six years, we have studied this inequality by collecting and analyzing data on the hometowns of more than 400,000 members of the armed forces who died in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. By integrating these records with census data, we demonstrate unambiguously that, beginning with the Korean War, disadvantaged communities have suffered a disproportionate share of the nation's wartime casualties, while richer communities have been more insulated from the costs of war. Furthermore, the data suggest that this "casualty gap" between rich and poor communities has reached its widest proportions in the ongoing conflict in Iraq. ...

Nationally, in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars, communities in the lowest three income deciles suffered 35%, 36% and 38% of the casualties, respectively. Yet communities in the top three income deciles sustained significantly fewer casualties — 25%, 26% and 23% of the casualties, respectively.

More advanced statistical analyses, which account for a variety of other important factors, also offer strong evidence of casualty gaps between communities with different levels of income and education. In Los Angeles, for example, citywide almost 27% of residents hold a college degree. By contrast in the specific L.A. neighborhoods that have lost a young man or woman in Iraq, less than 12% of residents graduated from college. Similarly, in New York City, the citywide average median family income is nearly $42,000, while the average in neighborhoods that have experienced an Iraq war casualty is $34,000, 19% lower.

The authors point out that the military has always depended on the poor to fight wars, and the military has made certain that it has a steady stream of willing fighters by offering some pretty attractive incentives: a job during a time of a high jobless rate, a shot at a decent education via the G.I. Bill, even a fast track towards citizenship for those born elsewhere. Essentially, serving in the military becomes a shot at upward mobility for young men and women who see no other way. The price for the ticket into our society, however, can be extremely steep, as the families of the 6,000 men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan will attest this Memorial Day.

In the mean time, however, the US has a standing army, one ready to be shipped to wherever the politicians/corporatists want to meddle next. And we allow them to do so, often unquestioningly. It is at this point that Kriner and Shen surprised me by pointing out that it doesn't have to remain this way.

What would happen if the nation openly acknowledged the casualty gap? Would citizens rethink questions of war and peace? To find out, we conducted a series of original public opinion survey experiments with nationally representative samples of Americans. We found that citizens informed about the existence of a casualty gap were significantly more likely to oppose ongoing military operations and less willing to support future ones than were their peers who were not informed about casualty inequalities. For example, in evaluating a hypothetical military mission to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program, respondents told about casualty inequalities in the Iraq war said they would tolerate 40% fewer casualties to achieve the mission's goals than would their peers who were not given this information.

These experimental results suggest that if Americans were to learn of wartime inequalities, the public would become more circumspect about future military action. However, the casualty gap is not part of our national dialogue. The reason is clear: Casualty inequalities challenge our fundamental American values. Bringing a frank and honest discussion of the casualty gap into the public sphere could significantly alter the tenor of political discourse in Washington. [Emphasis added]

While the syntax in the quoted section gets downright murky, the point is that knowing that the poor are disproportionately represented in the casualty numbers would cause most Americans to be less likely to support the kind of war-making our nation has engaged in, especially in the last 50 years. If that is true, and I have enough optimism left in the sense of fairness most Americans have to believe that it is true, then the fact that the casualty gap is not part of our national discourse is shameful.

The authors have given us the ammunition to force the discussion. It's time we used that ammunition. We've kept our powder dry for just about 50 years too long.

Old News

It isn't exactly a startling revelation that the Bush administration was busy planning a war in Iraq a full year before the invasion. What is interesting is the confirmation that then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in on the plan for at least that long.

Tony Blair promised George Bush that Britain would support military action by the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein in a series of secret notes written a year before the invasion of Iraq.

The content of the notes was revealed yesterday by Mr Blair’s former spokesman, Alastair Campbell.

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war was electrified by the appearance of Mr Campbell, who disclosed details of the highly sensitive correspondence in a defiant defence of his former boss.

What is also interesting is that the British have an official inquiry into the Iraq War and that Tony Blair will also be appearing before the inquiry in the coming months.

Of course, the US has no such inquiry. That would be looking backward at a plot that robbed our treasury of $1 trillion, caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and left our military in a disastrously weakened state. I guess it just wouldn't be prudent to look carefully at one of the foulest moments in our history so that we can at least try to make certain it never happens again.

It just wouldn't be prudent.

Iraq 1, Exxon 0

Yes, I really am a vindictive bitch. I thoroughly enjoyed this NY Times article, in which we learn that Iraq out-maneuvered the American oil mega-corps.

More than six and a half years after the United States-led invasion here that many believed was about oil, the major oil companies are finally gaining access to Iraq’s petroleum reserves. But they are doing so at far less advantageous terms than they once envisioned.

The companies seem to have calculated that it is worth their while to accept deals with limited profit opportunities now, in order to cash in on more lucrative development deals in the future, oil industry analysts say. ...

Iraq’s first stab at opening its oil industry to foreign investment ended in disappointment at an auction in June in which most companies declined to bid. But last month many of those same companies — including Exxon Mobil and Occidental Petroleum, the first American companies to reach production agreements with Baghdad since the 2003 invasion — signed deals at much the same terms they rejected over the summer. [Emphasis added]

What happened?

A couple of other nations' oil companies cut deals after the auction with the same limitations demanded at the auction the American companies balked at. Fearful at being completely shut out, the Exxon Brigade caved. Those limitations, by the way, are very significant and the Iraqi leaders showed some wisdom and some, well, leadership in demanding them.

In the recent deals, the major oil companies have agreed to accept service contracts, in which they earn a fee for each barrel of oil produced. Yet they vastly prefer production-sharing agreements, in which they gain an equity stake in the oil itself. Such deals are far more lucrative to oil companies, but for Iraqis they are reminiscent of the colonial era, when foreign companies controlled the country’s oil wealth. “We have shown that we can attract international companies to invest in Iraq and boost production through service contracts,” Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, said recently. “They will not have a share of Iraqi oil, and our country will have total control over production.” [Emphasis added]

Heh.

The war in Iraq was supposed to be a cakewalk, as was taking control over the vast oil reserves Iraq has. George and Dick's Fabulous Adventure didn't turn out so well, did it, boys and girls.

Schadenfreude: it's not just for breakfast.

All For A Lie

It was an interesting visit to Watching America today. There were a few articles on American health care reform, a few on Afghanistan, a few more on Israel's discomfort with the Obama administration, in some cases castigated as "the worst ever," and a few analyses of the Obama visit to China.

The one that caught my eye, however, was an editorial in the United Arab Emirate's Khaleej Times. Ostensibly about the British inquiry into the Iraq War and how it all came about, the editorial also raises some serious and fair questions about the US and its complete refusal to look into the war.

Britain, the second leading member of the Coalition of the Willing headed by the United States, has ordered an inquiry into the Iraq war.

The committee headed by Sir John Chilcot, a retired civil servant, has promised to produce a “full and insightful” account of the most debated and contested war in recent history and the circumstances in which it was inflicted on Iraq. ...

So unless this probe results in concrete steps, leading to justice for the people of Iraq and preventing more unjust wars in the future, this is little more than a symbolic exercise.

But by initiating this Britain is at least trying to repent and make amends for the criminal blunders of its leaders. What about the United States? Why’s there been no action, no step whatsoever in this direction?

No attempts, however perfunctory, have been made by the US establishment, civil society and the media to confront their leaders on Iraq.

Yet more than a million innocent lives have been wasted in Iraq, not to mention the appalling, total devastation the war has unleashed on the country that was one of the region’s most modern nations. And all for a lie! [Emphasis added]

Why indeed.

We do know plenty about the steps taken to drag us into a war that had no reason to happen. During his first campaign, George W. Bush told his would-be biographer that he wanted to be a war-time president. Then, after the 9/11 attacks, White House officials, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, pounded on intelligence officials to find an Iraq link, even though all evidence pointed to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

By 1992, the propaganda was being catapulted furiously about Iraq, how it was a safe haven for Al Qaeda, how it was developing and was prepared to use weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, on its neighbors and on the US. Even though each bit of evidence put forward was trashed by our allies as gross misinterpretations at best and as outright fabrications at worst, the drum beats increased. We know that from the Downing Street Memos. Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations with sketches and equivocal photographs to try to convince the world that unspeakable evil would be unleashed by Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, unless the US was allowed to invade.

And invade we did, even though there never was any plausible reason for doing so, and the reasons offered were changed as they were shown to be laughable. No WMDs were found, so then it became a matter of regime change because Saddam Hussein was such a monster. Once he was removed, it became a matter of protecting Iraq's oil fields for the people of Iraq.

While we were engaged in that war, our intelligence services and our military engaged in what can only be called war crimes by civilized people. Back home, our civil liberties were shredded as warrantless wire taps issued and private emails were intercepted. The US Constitution became "just a piece of paper."

Yet the new administration has made it clear that it didn't want any investigation into this illegal and immoral war because the new president wanted the country to look forward, not backward. It was only by exerting pressure on the new government that Attorney General Eric Holder finally agreed to investigate some of the torture issues, but after that announcement, nothing further has been said about it.

If our closest ally can make even a perfunctory gesture towards looking into a war which is still going on, why can't we? Are we really that omnipotent that we can break international law with impunity. Are we so pure that our motives can never be examined, even though hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of our actions?

American exemptionalism at its best.

And how shameful it is.

"The Americans and Their Dust"

On my weekly trek over to Watching America I came across this picture, appended to this opinion article in Iraq's al-Rafidayn. The picture is a marvelous display of what wonders the US has wrought in Baghdad and all of Iraq. The massive dust storm is a fitting introduction to the article, marked as it is by understandable bitterness.

We are in the prime years of our servitude to the U.S and their occupation and yet we “esteemed” citizens have received nothing from our American masters but ruin and fear … and dust! This dust, a hallmark of our bond to our beloved America, is one of the more prominent legacies of American policy in the region.

It began with the American caravans, caravans of solders and of doom that brought the black Baath regime to Iraq and tyranny to the region. It dried up the marshes and killed the people and eradicated the trees- pustules of a war grew throughout the land and American boots churned the ground and wrought destruction. Then came the violence, liberating the people from their lives, compounding the dryness of the land and the dustiness of the air.

This dust, which has sapped us of natural life for generations, reminds us what it is that the American administration truly deserves, culturally, legally, and according to the laws of the United States itself: a trial before the courts for its crimes against society!

The lament reminds us that the US was involved in Iraq long before 2003, just not so blatantly as it was after this second invasion. The devastation brought by the second invasion has quite literally ruined the earth: the fertility has been pounded out of it by bombs, tank treads, and boots.

The author of the article calls for a trial which would result in the US having to fix what it has broken in Iraq. He wants the US to bring rain, but also to bring clinics which will offer treatment for the respiratory illnesses brought on by the dust.

And then he wants US and its soldiers and tanks to leave. It isn't hard to understand those feelings. Not hard at all.

They're Back ...

Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have an excellent opinion piece in today's Los Angeles Times reminding us of the true cost of war, especially one that is fought "off-budget" as the war in Iraq has been and now the one in Afghanistan apparently will be if the $80 billion "emergency" supplemental appropriations measure recently rammed through Congress is any indication.

...the U.S. has barely begun to face the enormous financial bill for the war. By our accounting, the U.S. has already spent $1 trillion on operations and related defense spending, with more to come -- and it will cost perhaps $2 trillion more to repay the war debt, replenish military equipment and provide care and treatment for U.S. veterans back home. Many of the wounded will require indefinite care for brain and spinal injuries. Disability payments are ramping up and will grow higher for decades. The stress of extended, multiple tours to Iraq means that a whole generation of U.S. military men and women may now be suffering from long-term mental health issues. The suicide rate in the Army is at its highest level since record-keeping began.

This wartime spending has undoubtedly been a major contributor to our present economic collapse. The U.S. has waged an expensive war as if it required little or no economic sacrifice, funding the conflict by massive borrowing. As we've observed in the past, you can't spend $3 trillion on a reckless foreign war and not feel the pain at home. ...

Early this year, President Obama committed 20,000 troops to a "surge" in Afghanistan. That, combined with a large, ongoing presence in Iraq and continued reliance on private contractors for virtually every aspect of military support, remains a recipe for staggering out-of-control expenditures -- now and in the future. Surely we can draw some lessons from the Iraq debacle and set aside money to care for our veterans, crack down on fraud and profiteering, and account for the true costs of the war in the budget so the American taxpayer can see what we are paying for. [Emphasis added]

At a time when our congressional leaders keep telling us that we can't have true universal health care access because it would be too expensive (OMG! a trillion dollars!), the White House and Congress continue to shovel money in the direction of the war machine with no real oversight of how it is spent. Because these "emergency" supplemental appropriations don't go through the normal budgetary process which requires that the figures be carefully examined in relation to other necessary budgetary items, members of Congress (and their constituents) can't possibly know if the money requested is either reasonable or necessary. As a result, for example, private contractors gouging the Pentagon can safely continue to do so because the office that is supposed to keep track of their bills is woefully underfunded and understaffed. That office has its funds determined by the usual process.

There are all sorts of reasons that this process stinks, but right now the strongest odor comes from the fact that after eight years, it's considered "business as usual."

That's not the kind of change we were promised.

That Victory

Free at last, free at last, thank Godalmighty, free at last!

U.S. troops pulled out of Baghdad on Monday, triggering jubilation among Iraqis hopeful that foreign military occupation is ending six years after the invasion to depose Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi soldiers paraded through the streets in their American-made vehicles draped with Iraqi flags and flowers, chanting, dancing and calling the pullout a "victory."

One drove a motorcycle with party streamers on it; another, a Humvee with a garland of plastic roses on the grill.

U.S. combat troops must pull out of Iraq's urban centers by midnight on Tuesday under a bilateral security pact that also requires all troops to leave the country by 2012.

All had left the capital by Monday afternoon, Major-General in Staff, Abboud Qanbar, head of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad, told Reuters.

Another Iraqi official who would not be named, said some units in cities outside Baghdad would leave at the last minute. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said 30 bases remained to be handed over. There are still some 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Addressing military leaders in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said: "Our sovereignty has started and ... we should move forward to build a modern state and enjoy security which has been achieved."

This isn't total freedom yet, for any of the parties to this disastrous war. That will take more time, and more working out handovers. It's a beginning though, and despite the violence that has broken out lately it is what we should have done long ago, second only to never starting the war in the first place.

The costs to all involved are so great, in so many areas, that it's hard to see how we will ever recover. The expense added immeasurably to our country's debts, and deprived this country of any number of programs that we now suffer the lack of. We will have the ill will of the Middle East for generations to come.

Hogwash

The Bush-Cheney revisionists are still at it. An op-ed piece in today's Los Angeles Times, written by John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served as Vice President Dick Cheney's national security advisor from 2005-2009, tries to make the case that Bush's invasion of Iraq was a strategic masterpiece, even if the last administration bungled the war badly, and President Obama is screwing up that brilliant strategy by being more concerned with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq than with consolidating our glorious victory.

For all his administration's mistakes in Iraq, Bush clearly understood the imperative of victory once U.S. forces were committed. He knew that removing our troops under fire would have been disastrous. Al Qaeda and Iran would have been emboldened. American credibility throughout the Middle East would have been shattered. Iraq would have descended into chaos, further destabilizing a region vital to U.S. interests.

More positively, Bush also understood that fulfilling our commitment to help Iraq establish a stable democracy could dramatically advance long-term U.S. interests. The Arab Middle East -- the region that provided the ideology, funding, leadership and foot soldiers for the 9/11 attacks -- would get a powerful example of a successful, modernizing democracy. And the United States would secure a strategic foothold in one of the Muslim world's historic centers of political, religious and cultural power. ...

Under Obama, Bush's commitment to winning in Iraq has all but vanished. Convinced from the start that the war was a mistake (a conviction fortified by the Bush team's post-invasion bungling), Obama has for years been the salesman in chief for a narrative of failure: Iraq is seen as a colossal disaster -- a senseless distraction that drained U.S. resources while alienating the rest of the world. While recognizing a vague obligation to help Iraqis forge a better future, Obama's bottom line comes through loud and clear: The war was a strategic blunder, and the sooner the U.S. can wash its hands of it and re-focus on our "real" priorities in the Middle East, the better. [Emphasis added]

What Mr. Hannah is trying to convince us is that the war itself was not a blunder, merely the execution of the war. The US had every right to invade a country because it was in our national interests to do so. It was a way to "secure a strategic foothold" in the Middle East, a region rich with oil and natural gas. The fact that the last administration lied us into that invasion, and then screwed up militarily, is unimportant to him. The vision was right.

That vision is no less demonic than the German invasion of France in World War II. No country has the right to invade another simply for strategic foothold. All of Mr. Hannah's blather about democratizing Iraq (after a particularly grisly 'regime change') is immoral non-sense used to justify an imperialistic goal: the global control of quickly disappearing natural resources. And the results of the failed policy include a loss of moral stature in the world, an economy that is still swirling down the toilet, over 4,000 dead American soldiers with thousands more grievously wounded, tens of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis, and the rise of Iran as a dominant force in that region of the world.

I'd rather listen to Dick Cheney's daughter. I can kind of understand her motivation in defending her father. This claptrap, on the other hand, continues the dangerous theme that the US will do whatever it chooses because it can.

Hogwash.

[Note: there's a sidebar poll included with the column. Kindly do an old lady a favor and freep it.]

Insisting Wrong is Right

The kind of discussion you get when you try to convince a die-hard believer is now typical of news releases from the representatives of what used to be the Republican party. I recall as a teenager pointing out to some one who insisted that Jonah (in the Bible) was swallowed by a whale, that the bible says 'big fish', not whale. The response was that it was, indeed, a whale, and nothing would change her mind. That sort of dug in adamant rejection of reason is becoming the standard in rightwinger claims.

It may be that 'becoming' is a false concept. It probably has always been the standard. As Frank Rich points out today at the NYT, Cheney's recent speech about torture - that wasn't torture - keeping us safe was easily torn apart, and while most media treated the lies as facts, McClatchy reporters did the job.

With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute. (Emphasis added.)

As the misnomer 'the media' increasingly refers to a masquerade, right wing talking points paraded as the news, some of those who have taken responsible positions and still crusade for actual security for this nation are forced to speak out.

Richard Clarke, who served in the Clinton administration and in the recently ended maladministration of war criminals, spoke out today in a WaPo op-ed.

Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.

The facts should be headlined, and presented as the major news, but I have heard more about Britain's Got Talent than about truths on the wrongheaded war on Iraq. The lies were treated as real news.

Irresponsible lies are the basis for the deaths of our troops, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. We will be supporting mind-numbing numbers of severely injured soldiers for the next generation. Those are some of the costs of allowing lies to stand, and form our policies.

This disaster wasn't caused just by reality-challenged criminals in our executive branch. It was caused just as much by our media, that kept its sources by ignoring the truth that contradicted them.

I repeat myself, but it's time to stop giving hits to the media pretenders who front for rightwing lies. "_blank">Avedon named several of them, and we see them constantly featured on news commentaries, repeating those same lies.

When we stop playing their numbers game by adding traffic to their sites, we are battling for the truth to be news, instead of a footnote. If you haven't thanked them yet, please join me in commenting at the sites linked above, with a thank you.

Sadly, Unsurprising

My peaceful morning at home was shaken by a CNN news alert announcing that a US soldier had killed four other US soldiers before turning his weapon on himself. While no details were provided in the brief report linked to (which I read at 7:40 AM PDT), the bare facts were not surprising, given the last 6+ years.

Our military has been stretched so far that what is surprising is that there haven't been more reports of such incidents. Many of the soldiers, young and not fully trained because of the press of fighting two wars, are on their second year-long go-round in Iraq. They face elusive and often invisible enemies whose hidden IED weapons explode at a moment's notice. They've seen buddies' legs and faces blown off during their tour. They're isolated from the very people they are supposed to be protecting. They get occasional visits from Washington big wigs who praise them to the skies and then sneak out as quickly as they came in. Most know the war was a mistake and that the American public wants them out as quickly as possible, yet, there they sit and watch and wait.

And they know that even if they manage to get home in one piece, relatively speaking, there won't be much waiting for them. The job market has fallen apart, so the chance of getting a job if they leave the military isn't all that great. They also have to face the fact that the lengthy deployments have wreaked havoc on their families, so there might very well be no husband or wife anxious to welcome them home. And if they've been wounded, whether the wound is visible or invisible, they know that they cannot count on receiving the treatment they need to return them to some measure of wholeness.

That is the hell of war. What is so remarkable is that it has become even more hellish because of the last administration being so eager to get its war on that they rushed into this one, lies paving the way.

Five soldiers dead, three wounded.

May God have mercy on us all.