Cross-posted at Daily Kos, Docudharma and Firedoglake
Hat tip to Henry Porter and the other diarists who posted on the videos and photos yesterday of the repatriation of service members slain in Afghanistan.
Henry wrote of how enraged he is that war criminals of the previous administration are walking free, of the pain he felt when he encountered a young disabled veteran, and that he finds "a measure of comfort in the hope that unlike his predecessor, this president has the courage, the character , the compassion and the judgment to make his decisions based on the best possible information and advice available to him."
It is not often that we are able to see photos depicting the cost of war to our troops and their families. Few people encounter our disabled veterans. The face of war is rarely seen.
During the war in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite made sure that Mr. and Mrs. America saw plenty of the reality, during the dinner hour.
Sensitivity to the wishes of our soldiers and their families must prevail over other considerations.
And, there are some soldiers and families who have been willing to share images of their sacrifice with us.
Why is it that every time we elect "peace" candidates we defund the peace movement, stop calling for an end to wars, and limit our demands exclusively to opposing war escalations?
In 2006 we voted into Congress the candidates who looked most likely to end the war in Iraq. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done. Then we mildly urged them not to escalate the war they'd been elected to end, and they escalated it anyway.
At least 85,000 Iraqis lost their lives from 2004-2008 in violence, the government said in its first comprehensive tally released since the war began.
The report by the Human Rights Ministry said 85,694 people were killed in the four-year period and 147,195 were wounded. It counted Iraqi civilians, military and police but did not cover U.S. military deaths, insurgents, or foreigners, including contractors or U.S. forces. And it did not include the first months of the war after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.(...)
Combined with tallies based on hospital sources and media reports since the beginning of the war and an in-depth review of available evidence by the AP, the figures showed that more than 110,600 Iraqis had died in violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and up through early 2009.
Eight years of slaughter, and not so much as a hint at what a "victory" would look like. It's gotten to the point where even polls by Fox News show a majority of Americans against escalating the war in Afghanistan, and polls by more honest organizations show a majority wanting to bring home the troops that are there now.
But our so-called representatives in Congress are reluctant to "interfere" with their own primary Constitutional responsibilities, and the so-called executive whom they've given free reign is undecided about whether to listen to us or the military. There's no time like the present to "go out there and make him do it."
Obama keeps sending Joe Biden to Iraq, where almost nobody pays attention when "Jabbering Joe" shoots off his stupid mouth.
Inside the embassy's sprawling compound, a piercing "duck and cover" alarm began moments after the American military commander, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, told reporters traveling with Mr. Biden that security remained at its lowest levels since the war began - despite major bomb attacks like the ones on Aug. 19 that badly damaged two government ministries and killed at least 132 people.
What sense does any of that make?
Shortly after the attacks, Iraqi police opened fire on a car speeding down Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad. That in turn prompted an American patrol to open fire on the Iraqi police in the confusion. "We had to hide behind blast walls," an Iraqi officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Luckily for those Iraqi cops, there are blast walls everywhere in Baghdad, and that great city has been completely transformed into an infinite maze of cages where millions of Iraqis live and die in ethnic isolation from each other.
"I think there has been progress," Mr. Biden said when asked why no significant progress has occurred since his last visit in July.
Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the sounds and images on our television sets, and the heroism of so many men and women. Three numbers that framed the events of the last decade and seemed like they would define my generation.
But eight years ago, many in my generation couldn’t vote. We didn’t choose the President, his wars, or his policies. In fact, young Americans have largely rejected the politics of fear and division that dominated those formative years of our political consciousness—voting 2 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. Today we remember the victims and honor our heroes, but we also have a new President, new crises, and three new numbers: 3-5-0. 350.
Just Foreign Policy maintains a running estimate of the number of Iraqis who have perished as a result of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on surveys in Iraq conducted by the Lancet and ORB, and for the typical holocaust deniers who always show up asking for proof, proof, proof, and more proof, and still more proof, and even more proof endlessly and forever, my response is... Eat shit and die!
Americans have been obsessing month after month about a "public option" for healthcare, and every other issue has been relegated to niche blogs and the back pages of a few newspapers, and meanwhile in Iraq, which has one hospital bed for every five patients, children die every day from injuries which could have been treated with simple antiseptics and a bandaid, if half of Iraq weren't so completely devastated that you can't even find a bandaid or a bottle of iodine, and if you're looking for links, links, links and still more links because you still don't know fuck-all about Iraq after 6 long years of the genocidal American occupation and you want me to prove everything step by step for the fiftieth time on the blogs... Go fuck yourself!
And in other news, Project Censored chose the annihilation of more than one million Iraqi men, women, and children under the American occupation of Iraq as the most censored story of 2009.
Have you heard of Ishmael? He is the bogeyman of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
In his column today, Cohen says that Ishmael, a fictionalized "terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything you want" who the U.S. will capture one day, won't talk because the Obama administration has outlawed the use of waterboarding and other abusive "enhanced" interrogation techniques.
I'm not as interested in foreign policy/national security issues as I am other issues, but a lot of the writing on Afghanistan lately has got me thinking. Derrick Crowe has a good piece over at The Seminal discussing Obama Administration officials' unwillingness/reluctance to define victory in Afghanistan, and how so far the objectives of securing support for the regime have not gone well.
On the victory front, it's like they've learned their lesson from Bush's "Mission Accomplished" flap a little too hard. I give them credit for the strategy, to some extent- if you define victory, and turn out to be completely wrong, as Bush was, it blows up in your voice. If you even muse at what victory might look like, you risk, as Derrick argues, public discussion/debate on that front. I can see dozens of panel discussions and Atlantic magazine pieces on the topic.
On the other hand, if you refuse to define victory or publicly state goals, the questions over stonewalling become equally as bad. As do the concerns that we'll be stuck in a never-ending campaign there, spending billions of dollars to achieve an objective that isn't defined. That's where the Administration finds itself now, and it runs the risk of turning into a version of Iraq, which is what has me so concerned. The drumbeat has started.
In early July, Sen. Kerry pledged to hold hearings this fall as chair of the Foreign Relations committee. Before that, Rep. McGovern said this during the floor debate on the funding bill:
"I'm sick and tired of wars that have no exits, deadlines or an end," an anguished McGovern said. "We owe our troops and their families much better. "
"And I'm deeply concerned about how long we will be able to sustain and pay for an expanded military presence in Afghanistan. I simply want to know, 'What is the exit strategy that brings our servicemen and women home?'"
If you switched the word "Afghanistan" with "Iraq" in that statement, you wouldn't notice the difference. That's what concerns me so much. This pounding will only get louder on this topic, as it should. Robert Greenwald took a trip to Afghanistan recently and he and Brave New Films just released a new documentary on the topic (reminder, you can support our projects at OpenLeft by purchasing it through this link). Today, we find out the Administration is considering sending more troops, up to 20,000, there after committing another 21,000 this year. Does this have echoes of Iraq for anyone else?
Let me be clear: I'm for having the necessary amount of troops on the ground to win the war, within reason. My problem is with the Administration's refusal to lay out what is victory and how we will achieve it. If the phrase "no exit strategy" enters the American lexicon again, not only will it hurt Obama, it causes folks like me to become angry at an Administration that comes across as thinking the public isn't smart enough to understand global geopolitics and thus isn't entitled to a straight answer on the topic. Like Chris wrote today, Iraq was the major contributing factor to the GOP losing the 2006 elections. I believe the issue was not only defined by America losing the war and that being unpopular, but by the public being furious that there was no clear line of victory, and no exit strategy. I do not want to be swallowed by Afghanistan in 2010 for the same reasons.
Update: A new CBS poll comes out showing 48% approve of Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan, down from 56% in April. 40% say they want troops levels decreased.
(Please note: This originally posted on http://www.stevesword.com/ and will be cross-posted on MyDD too.)
"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near." - SunTzu The Art of War
So those of you who read this site regularly probably know that I like to spout off at length about the linguistics of our political culture. But there are times when actions truly do speak much, much louder than words. Let me begin at the beginning.
In November 2008, then President George W. Bush and then Puppet Nouri al-Maliki negotiated an unprecedented, unconstitutional treaty to "legalize" three more years of war in a manner not unlike the "legalization" of invasions, detentions, torture, and warrantless spying by secret decree of the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice.
A few words from U.S. troops in Iraq, all quoted in Chapter 1 of Dahr Jamail's brilliant new book "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan":
There are a million and one things that people can do to try to end the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and to prevent new ones in Iran and elsewhere, as well as to close U.S. military bases in dozens of other nations around the world. Certain people are skilled at or interested in particular approaches, and nobody should be discouraged from contributing to the effort in their preferred ways. Far too often proposals to work for peace are needlessly framed as attacks on all strategies except one. But where new energy can be created or existing resources redirected, it is important that they go where most likely to succeed.
In May 2005 we launched AfterDowningStreet.org to publicize the Downing Street Minutes. By June we'd had great, if fleeting, success. During the following months and years, mountains of new memos and statements emerged on the Iraq War lies, many of them more damaging than the Downing Street documents. But increasingly nobody cared, because evidence of crimes was less interesting once Congress had dropped the pretense that it might take action. The single most powerful, and yet largely ignored, document yet to emerge, might, now in 2009, finally, produce results. And, of course, it is our friends over in England who are, as always, two steps ahead of us.
One thing, at least, could be said in the CIA's defense: McCoy never claimed that the CIA set out to promote the global drug trade. It was simply a byproduct of how it chose to "fight Communism." But this could not be said about his subsequent investigation into the CIA's role in developing torture techniques, the subject of his 2006 book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror . The CIA's development of novel torture techniques was intentional, deliberate, and took place over more than a decade at enormous cost, after which its methods were shared with authoritarian allies around the world.
McCoy previewed his findings in a 2004 article for TomDispatch, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib", an excerpt of which I'll present on the flip. It's safe to say that no critic has thought harder and studied more intently the hidden role and hidden costs of torture in modern American history.
Last Sunday, TomDispatch published a new article by McCoy, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture" that throws a chilling historical light on Obama's ongoing efforts to magically make torture disappear. Real change, of course, would mean putting an end to this nearly 60-year history of US involvement in modern torture. Instead, McCoy explains how Obama is simply preparing us for more of the same sordid history.
The House is about to vote on another supplemental spending bill for continued and escalated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not accustomed to winning in our efforts to block war money, but the Democratic leadership has delayed the vote out of concern that we will.
Matthew 7:4: How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye?
President Obama has traveled to the middle east this week to try to start a new relationship between the United States and "the Muslims." I think that's an excellent idea. But we should keep in mind that "the Muslims" did not attack the United States, did not threaten to attack us, have no apparent ability to attack us nor any apparent intent to do so. A gang of rich white men from Saudi Arabia apparently attacked us. But to assume that "the Muslims" attacked us shows the underlying problem in the U.S. assumptions towards the middle east.
President Obama warns Muslims everywhere that they should not resort to violence, should not blow up people, or kill them. I agree. I think that's a terrific idea. And that means that the biggest attacker, bomber, killer in the entire middle east -- the United States -- should stop doing that. Oh yeah: it's not our country, region, territory, or anything else, and we have absolutely no right and no business traveling so far around and the world and lecturing other people about how they should live their lives.
If President Obama wants to give morality lectures about how people should be decent, I suggest he return immediately to the United States and arrest all the war criminals from the Bush administration and enforce the law, as set forth in the U.N. Convention Against Torture, by investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning those who are liable.
If President Obama wants to give morality lectures about how people should be decent, I suggest he return immediately to the United States and arrest all the members of the criminal enterprise loosely named "Wall Street," many of the leaders of which are now sitting inside the Obama Administration within the White House, with complete control over our entire treasury and our economy, and they are ripping money out of the citizens' hands so fast that they've got fleets of trucks lined up outside the White House to haul away the loot. An insider job. These criminals need to be arrested, their assets seized, public hearings and investigations, prosecutions, and they need to be sent to prison.
Did somebody from Egypt attack the U.S.? Threaten us? No. So why would President Obama go to Egypt to give a lecture?
It's the old log in the eye syndrome.
SUMMARY OF OBAMA'S SPEECH
Lots of religion. You'd think this was a speech from the Bigoted Pastor Warren, so heavily overlain with references to holy books and major religions. I would prefer our political leaders speak English - in fact maybe we need a new "English Only" movement to stop our politicians from speaking "Religiousese" and instead speak English. I would prefer they quote the Constitution as support for their ideas instead of the Bible. I would prefer they spend their time studying the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions instead of studying the Koran or the Torah.
After all, the reason people developed governments subject to civil laws, made by men, is because the religious governments proved themselves to be solely war-mongering perverted murdering thieving manipulative fanatics trying to destroy the entire world to get more gold and jewels for themselves. Not to mention all the particularly bizarre sexual exploits of the men in cloth. Is it really a good idea to tout Christianity and the Bible to a Muslim country in the middle east when that moron and religious fanatic-Christian George W. Bush started wars against many of their neighbors based on his claim that his Christian God told him to go kill all the Muslims? And given Israel's ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians, is it really likely that an audience of Egyptian Muslims want to be lectured about the morality of the Torah? Doubtful. Obama should stick with the reality-based world and leave the God-stuff to the fanatics, of which there are already way too many.
Beyond the preaching, Obama made seven points:
Issue #1: Violent Extremism
He's against it. But he seems to define "violent extremism" as meaning non-state groups. Gangs, small groups of people who have hand-held rocket launchers and grenades to fight whatever their battles are. He does not seem to include in the category nations with full militaries. Under this discussion, it seems that a penniless and homeless Palestinian child whose land was stolen by some guy from Brooklyn, and who is roped into becoming a suicide bomber, is bad, but when Israel's air force bombs the Gaza Ghetto, Israel's re-creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, sends tanks in, knocks down homes, knocks down everything that grows in a field, denies people medical help, targets U.N. buildings, murders without limitations, that apparently is Okay. But I guess he can't really condemn violence and murder when the U.S. is responsible for most of it in the middle east. How about speaking out against all violence, against war, and committing to end war being waged by nations against the people of third world countries.
He claims that the only reason the U.S. is in Afghanistan is because of 9/11 and al Queda. He says we have to stay there because people in Afghanistan and Pakistan want to kill Americans. President Obama, listen carefully: there is no Congressional declaration of war against Pakistan. If you are conducting a war against that country, you are already violating the constitution as well as committing international war crimes. Pakistan has not attacked the United States. There is no legitimate grounds to start a war against that country.
He also says that, unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a "war of choice." Nice wording there. Otherwise known as a war of aggression and an international war crime. Unprovoked. And now that he has admitted that, he needs to get us out of there.
Issue #2: Israel And The Palestinians: Need Two States
His discussion on this subject is silly and weak in parts. If he wants two states, tell Israel we're cutting them off instead of sending them billions of my taxpayer dollars every year. Kind of a mixed-message, sending them all that money then trying to "get tough." He talks about the Europeans who set up the colony called Israel as being a persecuted group of refugees in search of a home. But then he says the same thing is true of the Palestinians. That's just silly. As well as false.
The Palestinians had a home - but the Europeans took it. The Europeans should have stayed in Europe, or maybe they could have come to the U.S. But they had no business stealing the Palestinian's land. And they have no business staying there. Obama says the Palestinians must recognize Israel's right to exist. This is also one of those silly mantras. Why must they? What if the Palestinians disagree completely with that bizarre claim by the Europeans? Does that mean they should be killed? People are allowed to think and believe what they want. To condition somebody's right to live in peace on their willingness to believe something sounds like the inquisition, the crusades.
Issue #3: Nuclear Weapons - Iran
He says he's against nuclear weapons, but then he says well, only against Iran having them. He admits the U.S. overthrew the democratically-elected leader of Iran but fails to mention we installed and propped up the Shah, a brutal and murderous dictator.
Issue #4: Democracy
He says we want it everywhere.
Issue #5: Religious Freedom
This is ridiculous. Our government is required by our constitution to stay out of religion. For him to go overseas and include as a major point in a speech that our government is committed to going around the world and enforce religious freedom makes him sound as batty as Bush was.
Issue #6: Women's Rights
Excellent. I wonder if we have Hillary Clinton to thank for this.
Issue #7: Economic Development And Opportunity Through Globalism
Economic development and opportunity are good ideas. If we stopped stealing the resources, stopping bombing and occupying and murdering people, then maybe they would have a chance. As far as the pitch for globalism, I disagree. Globalism is likely to destroy the world, and is certainly responsible for much of the current suffering. With Monsanto, for example, chemically modifying the foodstuff of the world so they can demand a royalty for every grain of rice eaten, starvation will likely rise along with the oceans due to global warming. Globalism is bad. We need to emphasize local agriculture and business. Too bad Obama is in the pocket of the U.S. corporate world which does not care if everyone dies, as long as they get all the money.
When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek. Not the new fangled remake from the 80s and 90s, but the original show from the late 1960s. I know, I know, for the non-initiated in such pastimes the cheese factor is high. But I can't help it. Pop culture has always had an insidious way of informing my experience.
I want to tell you about this one episode (for sticklers out there, it's an episode called "A Taste of Armageddon") in which the crew of the Enterprise arrives on a planet where two countries have been fighting a lengthy war. The weird thing is that the crew doesn't encounter a devastated and war-torn planet. You see, the warring groups had gone and made their war virtual. They'd set it up so that each attack and counterattack occurred via computer game. When each side lost in the game, they'd send a group of their citizens to die (for real) in a sort of sci-fi body-pulverizing gas chamber. There you go. No fuss, no muss, no mess.
Well, Captain Kirk is so upset by this he takes it upon himself to destroy this virtual war system, even though the two countries believe it's made their war more humane. Sure, they haven't had true peace or diplomacy for generations, but they believe they've been managing pretty well. But Kirk rails that this is exactly the problem: Because there's no real physical aspect of their war, they'll fight it forever. From Kirk's point of view, if you decide to be enemies, you have to deal with the real-world consequences - the death and loss and hurt that war actually causes. The key takeaway of the episode: It's irresponsible to sanitize war.
More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney's recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney's torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, "At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."
Today, MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org joined the growing movement to amplify the testimonies of former interrogators and reveal the repercussions of treating prisoners inhumanely. Their joint campaign features a video with Jay Bagwell, an Afghanistan veteran and counterintelligence agent, who reaffirmed Alexander's assessment of Cheney's torture policy. According to Bagwell, "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo."
