Open Left - Iraq

100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan during 2011-2013 (Updated with denials)

Chris Bowers — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:09:42 GMT

President Obama will increase the American military presence in Afghanistan yet again:

Tonight, after months of conferences with top advisors, President Obama has settled on a new strategy for Afghanistan. CBS News correspondent David Martin reports that the president will send a lot more troops and plans to keep a large force there, long term.

The president still has more meetings scheduled on Afghanistan, but informed sources tell CBS News he intends to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal most, if not all, the additional troops he is asking for.

McChrystal wanted 40,000 and the president has tentatively decided to send four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops.

This is going to bring the total number of United States troops deployed to Afghanistan over 100,000 by the start of 2011:

The first combat troops would not arrive until early next year and it would be the end of 2010 before they were all there. That makes this Afghanistan surge very different from the Iraq surge, in which 30,000 troops descended on Baghdad and the surrounding area in just five months.(...)

The buildup would be expected to last about four years, until McChrystal completes his plan for doubling the size of the Afghan army and police force.

With 68,000 Americans already there, the Afghan surge would mean there would be 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the president's first term.

This matches up pretty well with the corresponding withdrawal from Iraq. Between now and next August, about 70,000 troops will leave Iraq (from 120,000 to 50,000), but add about 30,000 in Afghanistan. Given that 34,000 troops were sent to Afghanistan earlier this year, this means there will not be a significant decrease in overall American troop deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan until near the end of 2011.

Even though America will have zero troops in Iraq by the end of 2011, current plans are to keep troop levels in Afghanistan high until the end of 2013 (assuming the four-year build-up counts 2009). As such, Obama will run for re-election with about 60% of the number of troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan (100,000) as Bush typically did (about 160,000, apart from the original 2003 invasion and the subsequent 2007 escalation).

(Hat-tip: rayj in quick hits)

Update: The Obama administration is denying that they have decided on a long-term troop increase in Afghanistan of this level. I guess we still have to wait and see, but I bet it actually happens.

Costs Of War Not Seen In Dover Repatriation Photos; and Bill Moyers Closing Comments

Hound Dog — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:33:14 GMT

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.

Below, we see grim realities which are not adequately conveyed by the flag-draped caskets in the repatriation ceremonies.

Bill Moyers' website has a small collection of photos by photographer Nina Berman. More of these photos may be viewed here. These are part of a section at Moyers' website titled "Picturing The Costs Of War".

Photographer Nina Berman better understands soldiers and their war by meeting face to face with those who had fought it. With no official list of the wounded to go by, she tracked down newspaper articles on returning vets. She put her photographs of twenty veterans and their stories in her book PURPLE HEARTS.

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Family photo of Ty Ziegel at his post in Iraq in 2004.

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Ty Ziegel has some help getting dressed in his Marine uniform for his wedding.

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Ty Ziegel at the candy store at his home in Washington, Illinois. When kids ask Ty what happened to his ears, he says, "the bad guys took them."

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Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline have their portrait taken before their wedding.

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The following photos from the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan are by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times. They accompany an article in The New York Times Magazine by Elizabeth Rubin, titled "Battle Company Is Out There", published Feb. 24, 2008. More photos by Ms Addario may be seen here.

. .

Sgt. Tanner Stichter tends to a wounded Specialist Carl Vandenberge.

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Specialist Carl Vandenberge, right, and Staff Sgt. Kevin Rice, left, are assisted as they walk to a medevac helicopter after being shot by insurgents in the ambush.

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U.S. troops carry the body of Staff Sgt. Larry Rougle, who was killed when the insurgents ambushed their squad in the Korengal Valley.

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For every flag-draped coffin which arrives at Dover AFB, there are three more members of our Armed Forces who sustain life-altering wounds.

If you want our troops to be re-deployed, please put your concerns into action, by contacting your members of congress, preferably in person at their local offices. It is not necessary to have an appointment to go to their offices and make your thoughts known. And go back to their offices, write, and call as often as you can. Also, please convey your thoughts to the President.

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May God bless these service members for their courage and sacrifices, and for their courage in sharing these visual stories.

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And, Bill Moyers closing comments tonight are now available as a transcript at his web site:

October, as you know, was the bloodiest month for our troops in all eight years of the war. And beyond the human loss, the United States has spent more than 223 billion dollars there. In 2010 we will be spending roughly 65 billion dollars every year. 65 billion dollars a year.
The President is just about ready to send more troops. Maybe 44 thousand, that's the number General McChrystal wants, bringing the total to over 100 thousand. When I read speculation last weekend that the actual number needed might be 600 thousand, I winced.
I can still see President Lyndon Johnson's face when he asked his generals how many years and how many troops it would take to win in Vietnam. One of them answered, "Ten years and one million." He was right on the time and wrong on the number-- two and a half million American soldiers would serve in Vietnam, and we still lost.
Whatever the total for Afghanistan, every additional thousand troops will cost us about a billion dollars a year. At a time when foreclosures are rising, benefits for the unemployed are running out, cities are firing teachers, closing libraries and cutting essential maintenance and services. That sound you hear is the ripping of our social fabric.
Which makes even more perplexing an editorial in THE WASHINGTON POST last week. You'll remember the "Post" was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, often sounding like a megaphone for the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Now it's calling for escalating the war in Afghanistan. In a time of historic budget deficits, the paper said, Afghanistan has to take priority over universal health care for Americans. Fixing Afghanistan, it seems, is "a 'necessity'"; fixing America's social contract is not.
But listen to what an Afghan villager recently told a correspondent for the "Economist:" "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."
Listen, too, to Andrew Bacevich, the long-time professional soldier, graduate of West Point, veteran of Vietnam, and now a respected scholar of military and foreign affairs, who was on this program a year ago. He recently told "The Christian Science Monitor," "The notion that fixing Afghanistan will somehow drive a stake through the heart of jihadism is wrong. If we give General McChrystal everything he wants, the jihadist threat will still exist."
This from a warrior who lost his own soldier son in Iraq, and who doesn't need animated graphics to know what the rest of us never see.
So here's a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let's not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let's not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don't have jobs here at home, or can't afford college or health care for their families.
Let's share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let's bring back the draft.
Yes, bring back the draft -- for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.
Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.

That's right: He said, Courage to make this war into a war that this nation truly supports, or end it. Thank you, Bill Moyers.

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Amazing Grace is sung by Leann Rimes

Blocking Escalation of War Not Good Enough

davidswanson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:05:20 GMT

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.
In 2008 we voted into Congress and the White House the candidates who looked most likely to end the war in Iraq. Candidate Obama promised to pull out two brigades per month for sixteen months. Here we are in month 10 and that withdrawal has yet to begin. And what in the name of all that is true, good, and free-of-hope are we doing about it? Not a god damned thing.

Meanwhile Obama promised, much less noisily, to escalate a war in Afghanistan and has done so with no resistance, even as the American people have (at least in polls) turned against it. Now party leaders in Congress have given Obama the go-ahead for a larger escalation, and what have we done?

To begin with we've accepted the terms of the debate that our government officials always impose on us following an election: Are you for an escalation or do you think the current troop/mercenary levels are adequate? There is no room in that debate for arguing that the entire enterprise is illegal, barbaric, self-destructive, and must be immediately replaced with civilized acts of aid and diplomacy.

Of course we should oppose an escalation, just as we should prefer a "public option" to no healthcare reform at all. But self-censoring our demand for single-payer shifts the debate so far right that we can't even pass a public option. And self-censoring our demand for an end to wars shifts the debate to a point where the middle ground becomes an escalation of half the largest size anyone proposes -- and the war in Iraq is not even mentioned.

Well-meaning peace groups are pointlessly urging us to lobby the president, and are publicly whipping congress members on the following items: sponsorship of a bill that would require some sort of non-binding exit plan for Afghanistan if actually passed by the House and Senate and signed by the president, and sponsorship of a bill that would deny funding for an escalation in Afghanistan if actually passed by the House and Senate and signed by the president. But getting either of those bills through the Senate is going to be significantly more difficult than getting the House to stop funding the wars, and thus far no organizations have begun building a public list of House members committed to voting No on war money.

In June, because all the Republicans were voting No on the war money for their own crazy reasons, we only needed 39 Democrats to vote No to block it, and we managed to get 32. We could easily line up 39 right now if we worked at it. Then we could begin building from there in the direction of 218. Even if all you wanted to oppose was escalation, the way to actually do so would be to build a whip list of House members committed to voting No on war funding bills that did not limit troop levels in Afghanistan to the desired level. Nobody is doing that. The next supplemental spending bill will probably come by spring, and it'll come sooner the greater the escalation, but peace coalitions tell me they think it's smarter not to prepare for such fights ahead of time.

FireDogLake, which hosted our whip list in June, is fully immersed in healthcare struggles. United for Peace and Justice and a new anti-escalation coalition have both refused to host a list of congress members committed to voting No on war funding or even escalation funding. So, I'm going to provide, not a replacement for the anti-escalation campaigns, but a necessary addition to them. I'm going to post a list at the top of http://afterdowningstreet.org and encourage you to ask these 32 heroes from back in June (plus a very short list of Republicans) whether they are committed to voting against further funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Please phone them at (202) 224-3121 and post your responses on the website.

Tammy Baldwin
Michael Capuano
John Conyers
Lloyd Doggett
Donna Edwards
Keith Ellison
Sam Farr
Bob Filner
Alan Grayson
Raul Grijalva
Michael Honda
Marcy Kaptur
Dennis Kucinich
Barbara Lee
Zoe Lofgren
Eric Massa
Jim McGovern
Michael Michaud
Donald Payne
Chellie Pingree
Jared Polis
Jose Serrano
Carol Shea-Porter
Brad Sherman
Jackie Speier
Pete Stark
John Tierney
Nikki Tsongas
Maxine Waters
Diane Watson
Peter Welch
Lynn Woolsey

Ron Paul
Walter Jones

110,600

Chris Bowers — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:15:00 GMT

AP:

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.

I like to think this is one of the reasons why a super-majority of Americans think military action in Iraq was a mistake. I don't know if it is true, but I like to think that.

No Good War, No Good Drone

davidswanson — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:42:42 GMT

By David Swanson

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."
On Monday, October 5, citizens from across the country will join together at the White House in nonviolent resistance to and demonstration against the ongoing wars. You can safely demonstrate or you can choose to risk arrest as many of us will be doing. Sign up now at http://nogoodwar.org The more people who come, the more reluctant the police will be to arrest anyone, and the more reluctant our government will be to defy the will of the majority we represent. If you cannot come to DC, you can call your congress member on Monday, October 5th at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to vote no on any more money for wars. Here's where your congress member stands: http://afterdowningstreet.org/... And here are two lists of events happening all over the country marking 8 years in the Graveyard of Empires: http://natassembly.org and http://unitedforpeace.org

If, on the other hand, you CAN join us in our empire's capital, please consider coming for more than one day. On October 2nd and 3rd, Friday and Saturday (and you can come for just Saturday too), there will be a conference at Georgetown Law School in downtown Washington, D.C., that you won't want to miss called "Who Decides About War?" Here are some of the speakers:
* Jean Athey, Peace Action, Montgomery County, MD
* Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies
* Leah Bolger, National Vice-President, Veterans for Peace
* John Bonifaz, Attorney at Law
* Elaine Brower, Military Families Speak Out
* Prof. Marjorie Cohn, President, National Lawyers Guild
* Rep. Michael Fisher, State Representative, Lincoln, Vermont
* Bonnie Gorman, Military Families Speak Out, Boston
* Mort Halperin, Senior Adviser, Open Society Institute, Keynote Speaker
* Sen. Richard Madaleno, State Senator, Montgomery County, Maryland
* Ben Manski, Esq., Executive Director, Liberty Tree
* Geoff Millard, Chair of the Board of Directors, Iraq Veterans Against the War
* John Nichols, Esq., The Nation magazine
* Caleb Rossiter, Professor, International Service, American University
* Jeremy Scahill, author, Blackwater, Keynote Speaker
* Benson Scotch, Senior Legal Counsel, Bring the Guard Home! It's the Law.
* David Swanson, Founder, After Downing Street
* Don Wallace, Professor, Georgetown Law School
Learn more: http://WhoDecidesAboutWar.org

Wouldn't it be nice to hold a conference like this in your own town? You easily can, by arranging for one or more of these speakers to be there, and by using the magic of video. Videos of this DC conference will be made available. And there are wonderful videos already out there. For example, take a look at the videos called "This Is Where We Take Our Stand" ( http://thisiswherewetakeoursta... ). The latest one shows a U.S. veteran in tears after having mistakenly called in air strikes against an Afghan village. For more powerful footage along the same lines see the "Winter Soldier" videos: http://www.ivaw.org/wintersold...

Or consider showing Robert Greenwald's new film "Rethink Afghanistan." There are six parts available now online, covering the civilian casualties, the financial costs of escalation, the futility of the occupation, the impact on Pakistan, the impact on women, and expert views on the impossibility of "victory." Check it out: http://rethinkafghanistan.com

But please don't do events without music. I did some events this week with the amazing music of David Rovics http://www.davidrovics.com A musician in DC named Brenda Elthon just sent me this wonderful set of songs: http://www.myspace.com/SongsFo... And of course Emma's Revolution and dozens of great groups that I pre-apologize for not mentioning have been leading the way for years now: http://www.emmasrevolution.com

And do not -- I repeat -- do NOT hold an event meant to educate without making sure that people will attend who do not already agree, or without videotaping the event and immediately posting the video online. We actually have the technology and the reach needed to educate this country. We've already turned a majority against all wars, Republican wars, Democratic wars, bad wars, "good" wars. But our understanding of war, of what creates it, and of how exactly to stop it needs to deepen.

I received an Email today celebrating the "morality" of pulling out troops and sending more drones. Others have begun pushing the idea that Afghanistan may be, like Iraq, the "wrong" war, whereas the REAL "right" war is in Pakistan. All such talk reveals the thinness of our war opposition. Talking about the financial cost of war and the cost to the war-makers themselves can be useful if it brings a specific war to an end. But we must not stop clearly demanding an end to wars because they kill people. Period. Complicating the issue is not strategic or smart. It can be severely damaging. We must end all aggressive wars, or ending any one of them will just launch the next one.

Lobbying a president to end wars can be useful if it communicates the message far and wide, but presidents will never end the use of war, and strengthening the misunderstanding that such decisions should be up to presidents can do great damage. Influencing a president is almost impossible. Influencing a senator is extremely difficult. Influencing a House member is actually feasible and strategic. And luckily, we don't need the White House or the Senate in order to end wars. All we have to do is convince our representatives that we will give them hell, make their lives miserable, and vote them out of office if they vote for any more funding. That is the message you should call with on Monday, October 5th.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

The Genocide Clown-Posse

Jacob Freeze — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:48:34 GMT

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.

"I'm here to listen..."

WOOGA wooga WOOGA wooga WOOGA wooga WOOGA wooga WOOGA!!!

That sound you hear means, "duck and cover," Joe! Duck and cover, and...

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a...

WOOGA wooga WOOGA wooga WOOGA wooga WOOGA wooga WOOGA...

A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

Billy Parish — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:35:08 GMT

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.

350 is the most important number in the world. 350 parts per million (ppm) is the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. It’s the number agreed upon by many of the world’s leading scientists and recently endorsed by 80 countries, but it’s not the number in the current version of the climate and energy bill under debate in Congress or the target that seems likely to be set at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

350 is where we need to be “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” as James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist so dryly puts it. The bad news is that we’re already at 390 ppm and climbing. So, is it too late?

Is it too late for the obese man to quit junk food and start exercising? Is it too late for him to lower his cholesterol and prevent a heart attack? Absolutely not. But until he changes his lifestyle, he remains at a higher risk. And until we change our lifestyle, the Earth will remain in the danger zone. There is still time to bring carbon dioxide levels back down, but it’s going to take a major transformation in how we think and act. Getting back to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions. It means building wind farms not coal plants. And it requires that world leaders recognize our interdependence and work together like never before.

Eight years ago, I felt a swirl of emotions. I was scared for my family and friends in New York City, where I was born and raised. I was angry at the people who had done this to us. I was hurting for the victims and their families, especially those from Hook and Ladder Company 25, the firehouse where I used to play when I was a child. And I radiated with the patriotism that swept America, reveling in our shared sense of purpose. That night, I gathered with friends in my Yale dorm to mourn together and mark the immensity of the day. We knew our world had fundamentally changed and that that day marked a turning point for our nation.

Six weeks from today, on October 24, I hope for a similar turning point. The largest ever global grassroots action on climate change will take place, calling on world leaders to make 350 ppm the target in the global climate treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen. I’ll be in Flagstaff, AZ, where I live, spreading the word about 350 and joining with over 1,400 groups in 110 countries (so far), from the Great Barrier Reef to the Taj Mahal, who are organizing on behalf of our planet. Anyone can join a group or start their own by going to 350.org.

While October 24 is a day of hope, America is still being threatened by a politics of fear, hatred, and division. Witness Glenn Beck’s vicious smear campaign that led to the resignation of Van Jones, my friend and one of the most visionary leaders in the nation. We need fewer Glenn Becks and more Van Joneses. People, ideas, and events that inspire hope, justice, and collective action.

That’s why I love 350. 350 is a bright line to which we must return. It doesn’t belong to one group or one nation—it belongs to all of us alive today and those yet to be born.

350 slices through all the confusion and misinformation around the climate crisis. It’s about being prepared. Eight years ago, we were caught off guard. This time there is no secret memo. Everything we need to know is for all to see, out in the open.

I can’t wait to live in a post-350 world where the disastrous affects of climate change have been averted, and a thriving clean energy economy unites the planet. I hope some day my now one-and-a-half year old daughter looks back on my work with pride, and that she and her generation are up to the finishing the job. This is an intergenerational challenge and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

This entry is cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

Not every war is in defense of our freedom

glendenb — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:12:04 GMT

Today's Deseret News in Salt Lake City published the following letter:

Ken Halterman (Readers' Forum, Sept. 5) writes that he mourns the loss of heroes Cory Jenkins, Kurt Curtiss and his friend Mike Hughes. All died fighting for our country. Then, he goes further, saying they died for "nothing except pride and bravery."
The writer doesn't understand that freedom ... is never free. He doesn't understand that his freedom to read and write to this paper has been purchased for him by the blood of countless, nameless heroes.
I'm grateful that I do understand and appreciate the price others have paid for me. My son, Zachary Lee Padron, is serving right now in Afghanistan. Every minute of the day, his mother and I worry about him. We pray and trust he will come home safe. But if Zachary dies fighting for America, like so many before him, he will have laid down his life for all of us. There is no greater good.
Lee Padron
Draper

I can in fact understand the fear of knowing a loved one is in harm's way. Certainly, we want to believe that if our loved one dies in military service that their death had meaning, that their dying was truly in service of a greater good. We want to believe that if someone we know and love is in the military and they die in combat that their death makes us safer and freer.

But is the war in Afghanistan really in defense of our freedom? Is it truly a war that will improve our freedom? Is the war in Afghanistan even a war in defense of the United States?

From where I sit, it seems that the war in Afghanistan has failed in every one of its operational objectives. Al Qaeda has not been stopped. The people of Afghanistan continue to live amidst nearly constant violence. The nation is is still a chaotic patchwork of warlords and druglords and poverty and despair. I know it's not pleasant to admit but at some level, I'm not sure our presence in Afghanistan is doing anything beneficial for our nation. Did Afghanistan ever even pose a threat to us?

It seems to me that the greatest failure of American foreign policy in recent years has been our ongoing inability to discern the real threats to the US and decide on appropriate action. It seems we have been trapped in the illusion of our own military might and we have come to believe a set of lies about our military's greatness. We seem to have indulged in a mythology in which our ability to shape the world to our will is boundless and that we can do so anywhere and anytime we like. We spend more than any other nation in the world on our military but we seem never to ask is this a wise use of our wealth? We have tried to maintain our empire of consumption - a neverending supply of material goods to fill a hole in souls they will never - and have built a worldwide empire which drains our resources - moral and material.

Andrew Bacevich calls it the crisis of profligacy - the great unfolding crisis in which we spend ever greater resources to secure ever fewer rewards in the name of our chase for ever more material abundance, at the cost of ever more wealth and time and lives. And at the cost - here at home - of our freedoms. At some point, the American empire cannot be sustained and we must choose - will we abandon empire in the name of democracy or will we pursue empire and sacrifice democracy.

When the US invaded Afghanistan, then forgot about it to invade Iraq, it signaled a dire turning point, an inflection point if you will, of a spiral turning unremittingly downward as we lost the ability to discern real from imagined threats. At the cost of lives and billions of dollars and moral authority, we have pursued two wars without victory and stand alone before the world, a screaming colossus incapable of self discipline.

It is my hope that not one more American will die in Afghanistan or Iraq, that we will have strength of national character to end those wars and find a new way. And it is my hope for Lee Padron that his son comes home safe and sound and lives a very long life.

The "Public Option" in Iraq is Genocide

Jacob Freeze — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:02:24 GMT

JustForeignPolicy.org

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.

Did the Washington Post's Richard Cohen Scare the "#!#!" out of you?

David Danzig — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:42:35 GMT

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.

He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line -- that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.

The implication is that the U.S interrogator - who sits across the table from this trained killer - can do nothing (but maybe cry) when the terrorist laughs.

The reality is that U.S. interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere face thousands of real-life Ishmaels every day and they consistently get them to talk without abusing them.

Here are three real life examples that I hope Cohen (and others who are interested) will look into:

(1) The capture of Saddam Hussein

Eric Maddox, a former Army Staff Sergeant, spearheaded the effort to catch the most wanted man in Iraq. When he arrived in Iraq in July of 2003, he had never done an interrogation. Six months later he interrogated the man who was principally responsible for Saddam's security and he got him to reveal the location of the spider hole where the former Iraqi President was hiding within a matter of hours. Along the way he "broke" at least nine key insurgent leaders, using entirely legal techniques. He even has a book out describing how he did it - Mission Black List #1.

"There is nothing intelligent about torture," says Maddox. "If you have to inflict pain then you have lost control of the situation, the subject and yourself."

(2) The hunt for Al Zarqawi, the former head of Al Qaeda in Iraq
When Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym) began interrogating a cleric who used to bless Al Qaeda suicide bombers, the cleric told him that he wished he had a knife so that he could cut Alexander's throat. Three days later he willingly gave up info that set Alexander and his team on the path to find Zarqawi. Alexander, like Maddox, has been able to seduce senior level Al Qaeda leaders into talking to him about sensitive information hours after he begins an interrogation. Alexander's techniques are also described in a book that he wrote about the hunt for Zarqawi: How to Break A Terrorist.

"The former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice," says Alexander. "Our best chance to locate him would have been through Khalid Sheikh Muhammed or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded."

(3) Interrogations of Japanese soldiers during WWII

I chose this as a third example to show that this is not new. Generations of U.S. interrogators have been questioning hardened detainees and getting answers without resorting to abuse.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently published a study that reminds us that the most effective U.S. interrogators during WWII resisted the temptation to view their detainees as fanatical animals who should be brutalized. The same study catalogues efforts by three U.S. interrogators during the Vietnam War who treated their hard-core prisoners humanely and got them to talk. Check out: Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam and Iraq.

* * *

I have talked to Maddox, Alexander and COL Stu Herrington (one of the interrogators profiled in the DIA study). They all agree that torture can "work" in the sense that you can waterboard a detainee and he may talk. He may even tell you the truth.

Alexander says, "anything can work." He used to give a milkshake to a young kid whose dad used to bring him to suicide bomb Al Qaeda planning sessions. They'd drink their milkshakes and the kid would tell him who was involved and where they used to meet. Anything can work.

But they all say that the percentages are not on your side if you use waterboarding. "These are determined people," Joe Navarro, a former FBI interrogator explained to me once. "You think that if you rip their fingernails out or dunk them under water, they will all of a sudden change their minds and tell you everything? That's not how it works."

As we all know, torture leads to all sorts of larger problems. It undercuts the morale of your own force. It creates diplomatic hurdles. And it has been used as an extraordinary recruitment tool by the opposition. Intelligence officers who served in Iraq report that after the revelations of Abu Ghraib they often found pictures of U.S.-induced torture in the pockets of the foreign fighters they picked up on the battlefield.

Why would U.S. interrogators choose to use techniques that cause so much harm when other techniques have proven to be so much more effective?

If and when we do pick up the next Ishmael, I hope that the interrogator who questions him took the time to read Maddox's and Alexander's books and not just Richard Cohen.

David Danzig is the Deputy Program Director of Human Rights First, a New York City-based international human rights organization. Facebook Twitter

Echoes of Iraq

Adam Bink — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:00:00 GMT

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.

Ultimate Fighting Championship Taught Me Conservatives Are Right

jlars — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:42:12 GMT

(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.
This past weekend I went to a friend's barbecue and found myself in front of the TV watching Ultimate Fighting Championship for only the second time in my life. Many of the guys at the party were fighters themselves so I wasn't too surprised that they'd be watching fights. I've always been an exceptionally weak schoolyard warrior so I'm not sure exactly why I didn't move to another room, but I stayed and continued to watch these athletes brawl "inside the octagon." And while I know sometimes being a sissy drives a person to start taking self defense classes and becoming tougher, I instead decided to become a better sycophant. Again, if you're reading Steve's Word, I think you know what I'm talkin' 'bout. So obviously I had to ask a lot of dumb questions to get a sense for what was unfolding onscreen.

It was early in the series of fights. The fighters got increasingly tough as the night went on, I was told by the ox-like gentleman sitting next to me. I realized that this generous stranger would be my teacher, so I began to fire off my stupid questions:

ME: So, can you slam your opponent's head into the chain link fence?
OX: Only if you're lucky.

ME: Three rounds?
OX: Three rounds. The title-fight is five.

ME: What about headbutting?
OX: No, that's one of the only things not allowed.

ME: Groin-shots?
OX: Oh! Did you see that! (to me) Huh? Oh, no. They're wearing cups, dude.

And so on. After a few more questions I got the sense that I had worn out my welcome with Ox, so I shut up and continued to watch. Mostly it seemed like the guy who's back was against the fence was going to loose and that frequently they ended up wrestling around on the ground. I don't want to take away from the fact that the men battling were engaging in obviously some of the most intense athletics that I have ever witnessed. At the same time, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about so I won't get into the details too much. Each fight wore on and I kept track by getting up and getting another beverage between fights.

Upon returning to watch the fourth or fifth fight of the evening I walked back into the room and I could tell immediately that this fight was the one everyone had come to the party to see. The room had filled with people and yet there was a quiet excitement as they all focused on the TV. The host, my friend Brian, had taken time away from entertaining his various guests to watch. He knew I was one of those sissy-types so he took a seat near mine and gave me the quick back story on this main event.

"So look, Jeff, this guy Griffin who's walking in now, he's pretty tough." Brian told me, "he used to be the Light-Heavyweight Champion, but this other guy... there! That's the baddest motherfucker on the planet!" At this point Brian raised his voice to reiterate the status of the second combatant. He then continued, "Anderson Silva has pretty much destroyed everyone in his weight class and he has no one else to fight so they moved him up for this one and he's gonna take Griffin down."

"So Silva's lighter, but he's also favored?" I asked.

"Yeah man, look at him!"

Silva's highlight reel played onscreen as part of the lead up to the fight and sure enough opponents seemed to be dropping like flies. By this point, Brian had gotten so worked up that he was trying to get other people to bet against him on how quickly Silva would take Griffin down. Someone struck a bet on Silva in two rounds. Another guy had Silva in two minutes! I decided not to make any bets on something I know nothing about.

And then the fight began.

(Please note: if the above link of the video still works, I'd just watch that right now and skip my amateur-ish play-by-play that follows. If the link is down, sorry!)

Almost immediately Silva had knocked Griffin down twice, the second time Griffin had just barely escaped having his head stomped into the mat. As he rose from the second knock-down the cameras caught a discernible expression of fear on Griffin's face. Suddenly Silva dropped his guard to his waist and dared Griffin to take a swing at him. Even I knew such a blatant insult when I saw it. Griffin took a few crazy swings and Silva didn't even bother to put his hands up. Instead he dodged Griffin's fists twice and as he backed away from Griffin, Silva swung a hook from his hip. The awkward punch connected on Griffin's jaw and caught him completely off guard sending Griffin back to the floor. This third time, before Silva had a chance to cause any more damage, the delirious Griffin tapped out to save himself and just like that the fight was over. Griffin had been knocked out in the opening moments of the first round.

I was stunned. Stunned because of the blatant way that Silva had disrespected his opponent. Stunned because of the way that Griffin ran out of the octagon (once he was able to stand back up again). Everyone else was annoyed that they had all gathered for a fight that hadn't even lasted an entire round.

What struck me about the fight was the utter Jedi Mind Trick that Silva had used to defeat his heavier and (by most accounts) formidable opponent. The slow motion replays only served to confirm that while Silva's knock-out punch connected cleanly it really wasn't the fiercest blow of the evening. Silva had already convinced Griffin that the fight was over when he dropped his hands at his sides and demanded that Griffin land another blow. You can see how after that point Griffin was totally terrified. Terrified to take the bait and swing at Silva. Terrified to sit and wait.

Okay, so I will admit that I couldn't have known what Griffin was thinking there and then. Maybe he was as cool as a cucumber right before he dropped like a rock. What I do know is that he did leave the ring as soon as he was able to stand. He didn't even wait for the judges to call the fight in Silva's favor. I could tell by the way everyone else in the room was booing Griffin, that his premature exit was pretty unheard of, even for real UFC aficionados.

I think I've been a loser enough times to recognize when someone else is coming apart because of the realization that all those expectations - you're gonna lose, the other guy is better than you are, etc - are coming true. It's commonly referred to as getting "psyched out." This is not striking when it happens to me, because I've never been a great athlete especially in head-to-head competition with others. It's striking because Griffin is NOT a loser. He's won a UFC championship and he's (probably) upset opponents many times before. He should know how to stay within his own head-space and not loose his cool. The fact that Silva was able to drive Griffin out of his own mind-space so quickly and so obviously really speaks volumes about really how skilled an athlete Silva is.

Sun Tsu lived around 2500 years ago and would have been proud of Anderson Silva's picture perfect use of his teachings. I'm not a martial artist at all, so I won't try and get into what aspects, if any, people who train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (like Silva and Forrest Griffin) actually study and practice directly off of his collected wisdom in the book The Art of War. I've always had a love/hate relationship with that book because I think it activates a great number of conservative strict-father frames. Yet seeing that one punch revealed to me how accurately Sun Tzu's tactics could be mapped onto today's world. It's strange, but for a minute I felt like I understood why we attacked Iraq six years ago. Let me explain.

You see in Sun Tzu's world there is only kill or be killed. It's not pretty but neither is UFC. Sun Tzu's world-view shares many similarities with that of the Mixed Martial Arts of which UFC is a part. Both obsess over authority and power. Both assert that in order to have authority and power you must be disciplined. In both Sun Tzu's world and the MMA's world the person with the most authority and power is also the most disciplined and that de facto that person is also the best and most morally correct. For example you don't question the general or the dojo master or you get a court martial and/or a collective ass-whooping (btw, I know all this about martial arts and the military because I watched Beverly Hills Ninja, Kung Fu Panda, Full Metal Jacket and Glory recently. This also means I understand what it means to be overweight and to live in the year 1864). And within a Neocon mindset we had to make a "preemptive strike" because of WMDs and also it's "un-American to question the President." All of these ideas have always seemed ultimately bogus to me. That's probably the real reason I never got into martial arts (or maybe it's because I'm a pussy).

Regardless, watching those fights made me seriously question my own moral grounding because it proved to me that there are some times when there really is nothing but you versus an opponent and you have to be ready to kill or you will be killed yourself. And this realization got me thinking, as I often do, about politics.

There is a certain irony about it all when you look at the current political cluster-fuck of health care reform and the way liberals have always historically argued for bipartisanship. We here in the nurturing-parent fold have always viewed government as an all inclusive game where laws are better when everyone has a hand in making them. Unfortunately for us, we're up against the Anderson Silva's of politics who realize that when it comes to health care reform its the general public versus the insurance industry. So in order to get this legislation done, we lib-ruls have to understand that sometimes the conservatives are right and if we don't take a page out of their playbook we're not gonna get health care reform done. It's us versus them and if we don't all step up and show our support for the Progressive Block, we're all gonna end up on the wrong side of an Anderson Silva shot to the jaw. No jokes, call your Congress-peeps today!

Change in the SOFA

davidswanson — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:28:17 GMT

By David Swanson

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.

This treaty was public, but it was not called a treaty. Instead Bush presented it as a "Status of Forces Agreement" or SOFA, even though it went far beyond what any other SOFA had previously done. The U.S. Constitution requires that two-thirds of senators present consent to any treaty. A certain Senator Barack Obama favored upholding that requirement. Another senator by the name of Joe Biden introduced a bill (S. 3433) that, had it been brought to a vote and passed, would have cut off any money for U.S. operations in Iraq authorized only by an unconstitutional treaty.

The U.S. media barely told Americans the treaty was happening at all, never called it a treaty, and whited out the opposition from senators. Americans followed the treaty's progress in Iraq via bloggers like Raed Jarrar who translated Arabic translations of English documents back into English. (Jarrar should be publishing an update on the situation this week, so watch for it!) The Iraqi media covered the story well, and the Iraqi Parliament insisted on the right to vote the treaty up or down, no matter what Bush and Maliki called it. The parliament approved the treaty only on condition that the Iraqi people be allowed to vote it up or down in a referendum to be held no later than July 2009. If you haven't heard about this, or have succumbed to the collective amnesia, even the New York Times admitted this occurrence in a buried half a sentence on November 27, 2008:

"Approved Thursday along with the security pact were a nonbinding resolution that included a commitment to address longstanding grievances of minority blocs in the Parliament as well as a law requiring a referendum on the pact to be held in July 2009."

The treaty was actually called "An agreement regarding the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq and regulating the U.S. activities during its temporary presence, between the United States and the Iraqi government." It required that U.S. troops be out of all cities and localities by June 2009, and that US forces entirely leave all of Iraq by the end of 2011. The peace movement in the United States could not be persuaded to lift a finger to challenge the unconstitutionality of the treaty, because many feared any treaty actually approved by the U.S. Senate would be worse. In vain, some of us argued that this treaty was not legal and therefore could simply be ignored or revised, that it in fact had no more legal weight than the promises of then President elect Barack Obama, who was promising something arguably better than the treaty.

That this treaty worsened expectations even while being celebrated as an "end to the war" is illustrated by an action taken by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The AFSC had created a graphic that many pro-peace websites had posted. It counted down the days to withdrawal from Iraq based on Obama's often repeated (though hedged and qualified) promise to end the occupation in 16 months. Once the treaty was created, AFSC silently altered its widget to count the days to the end of 2011.

While a complete withdrawal is certainly better than Obama's promised incomplete withdrawal, even the incomplete withdrawal is not now happening. Any moment for accountability has been pushed off to the end of 2011, and there is no reason to expect a complete withdrawal to have been made by then.

On June 9, 2009, the New York Times reported that Iraq was moving ahead with holding the referendum required by the end of July 2009. Otherwise, the U.S. media has gone silent. And since July 9th the Times has too. An occasional wire service story, such as this one from Reuters, has suggested the referendum might not be held or might be pushed off until January 2010. To understand what this would mean, it's important to recall that from the very start most observers interpreted the prospect of a referendum as allowing the ending of the occupation one year after the referendum. The treaty claims, in its text, to be valid through one year following any date on which it is declared invalid. (Imagine getting your health insurance company to agree to such terms!) There has never been any doubt that the Iraqi public would vote the treaty down if permitted to, so a vote this week would be interpreted as requiring an end to the occupation a year from now, but a vote in January would require ending the occupation in January 2011. Majorities of the following groups have long told pollsters they want the "democracy"-imposing occupation ended: Iraqis, U.S. soldiers, Americans.

In January 2009, the U.N. fig leaf for an illegal occupation expired. It was replaced only by this absurd treaty. But the treaty itself was violated from the start. For eight months, the United States has failed to comply with its part of the bargain. The treaty regulates the behavior of U.S. forces in Iraq, but their compliance with its terms has been weak. And from the beginning, top US commanders have openly said they intend to remain beyond 2011. When required to exit localities last month, the United States re-labeled troops as "non-combat," redrew urban boundaries, stationed forces around cities, and simply failed to comply, continuing patrols in blatant violation of the agreement. Read Dahr Jamail's report here.

While American "journalists" might perhaps be forgiven for forgetting to ever ask Obama about the looming deadline for a referendum in Iraq, last week's press conference in Washington, D.C., with Maliki might have offered such an opportunity. Yet, as far as I have been able to learn, not even the progressive reporters in the room breathed a word about it. Instead they asked Maliki about U.S. troops remaining in Iraq beyond 2011 and then congratulated themselves for "making news" when he replied essentially that he'd be happy to see that happen. The New York Times has just published an article with this headline: "Iraq Can't Defend Its Skies by Pullout Date, U.S. Says."

I asked independent reporter Dahr Jamail what he was hearing from Iraq, and he told me:

"From what I can tell, the referendum has not been canceled. This surprises me, because if/when it does happen, the vote will overwhelmingly be to reject the SOFA. Thus, I'm watching the situation closely, to see if it does indeed happen, and if so, how will the US react to the inevitable results...but also to see if it's fixed, and then what happens in Iraq in the wake of that. Either way, there is nothing to indicate a real US withdrawal from Iraq, ever. So this begs the question, how will the US Government spin the referendum, if/when it happens. Yet, we're already seeing Gates openly discuss the US use of Iraqi air space beyond 2011, and Maliki already making gestures towards a US presence in Iraq post-2011."

The problem is obvious. If the referendum is honest and verifiable, the occupation has to end in a year rather than never. If it's rigged and the Iraqis protest, the US media might have a hard time condemning them while celebrating similar protests next-door in Iran. If the referendum is never held, and the Iraqis allow that, and the US media never mentions it, who's harmed? I mean, who in the power structure in Washington, D.C., is harmed? I'm not much into gambling, but you can guess what my prediction is here. My desire is to see Iraqis and Americans prove me wrong.

It's not as if the SOFA has been forgotten. Maliki is using it to justify crimes, incidents noticed even by the Washington Post. "It's our territory and it's our right to enter, to impose Iraqi law on everybody," defence ministry spokesman General Mohammed Askari told Al-Arabiya television, regarding a new assault. "They have to submit to the law, and to Iraqi sovereignty. The SOFA authorizes us to do what we did."

And what have we done? We've sat on our sofas while a so-called SOFA eliminated the requirement that our congress approve treaties and wiped out any remnant of the congressional power to begin and end wars. We've set an international precedent whereby wars of aggression are justified through treaties made with puppet governments installed by the invaders. We've proactively torn up Obama's promise to have (at least "combat") troops out in 16 months, so that he didn't have to. We've allowed violations of the treaty to pass unnoticed and announcements of intent to prolong the occupation further to go unchallenged. We've effectively made the occupation of Iraq permanent by allowing George W. Bush to play us all for fools from the comfort of his Dallas mansion, and by imagining that electing someone else to take his place had anything to do with our peace movement.

US Troops Hiding in Iraqi Homes

davidswanson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:55:49 GMT

By David Swanson

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":
"Oh yeah, we did search and avoid missions all the time. We would go to the end of our patrol route and set up camp on the top of a bridge and use it as an over-watch position. It was a common tactic. We would just sit there and observe rather than sweep. We would call in radio checks every hour and report that we were doing sweeps." -- Eli Wright

"Unit members would go and play soccer with Iraqi kids instead of going on patrol. I knew soldiers who learned to simulate vehicular movement on the computer screen, to create the impression of being on patrol." -- Josh Simpson

"Nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda, and shoot the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please leave them alone." -- Geoff Millard

"Our platoon sergeant, an E7, was with us and he knew our patrols were bullshit, just riding around to get blown up. We were at Camp Victory, at Baghdad International Airport. A lot of time we'd leave the main gate and come right back in another gate to the base where there's a big PX. They had a nice mess hall, and a Burger King. The BK is where we wanted to go and to the PX and look at DVDs and dirty magazines. We'd leave one guy at the Humvees to call in every hour, and we'd spend the full eight hours doing this." -- Cliff Hicks

"A big thing used to be squads putting up in some Iraqi's house for a day or two, just going there and staying. They insert themselves in a house covertly in order to watch a neighborhood without anyone knowing that they were there. But it is really not about watching. It is about sleeping. Hopefully the squad is well-accepted in the family. Sometimes they even make friends. A few soldiers keep watch, the rest of the squad catch up on sleep and relax for a change." -- Bryan Casler

"So we would go and drop the dismounted people at some house with an air conditioner, where they would kick in a door and hang out and drink tea with those people, while we would proceed with the vehicles and bide time out of visible range." -- Seth Manzel

What a bunch of slackers: that might be an appropriate response to all of this if there were some comprehensible and worthwhile thing that any of these people were supposed to be doing. But, as Jamail's book makes clear, when US soldiers in Iraq are not avoiding their duty they are engaging in harassment, abuse, torture, the murder of civilians, endless stress and trauma, and the risk of their own death and injury for no purpose that has been made clear to them. Soldiers quoted in the book point out that if their own nation were occupied they would certainly fight back just as the Iraqis do. In fact, these are soldiers who signed up to fight for a cause. Some of them fell for the post-9-11 propaganda and signed up thinking they would help defend the United States. Many of them signed up for economic reasons, but they also had a willingness to kill and risk death for a noble cause. Many of them tried to do so for years before losing faith. And what went away, other than their physical and mental well being, was not their courage or generosity. It was their ability to convince themselves they were risking their lives for any good reason.

As recounted in "The Will to Resist," which ought to be read by every American, avoidance of duty (or, rather, illegal orders masquerading as duty) in Iraq has often evolved seamlessly into refusal to obey. Jamail recounts incidents of individuals and squads refusing to obey orders. If you were sent out at the same time every night to the same place, and were losing more friends each time to predictable attacks, for no apparent reason, would you not at some point refuse to go out yet another time, at least without changing your path and timing? Most of these soldiers do not have any understanding that war is always a mistake. They are willing to fight a war if someone can explain to them what the purpose of it is, or what a victory would look like. But they have turned against this particular war, since nobody can explain it to them, and they have seen for themselves that what they do in it accomplishes no good.

So, some soldiers refuse to load their guns, risking their own lives rather than kill. Others go AWOL. Others, indeed, turn against all wars and apply for conscientious objector status. Some leave the country, some go to jail, some go to court and win. All of these stories are found in this book. So is a rich collection of stories from Winter Soldier, the series of events organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, at which veterans of the Iraq War have described what they did -- most of it far more shameful and painful than facing the charge of "slacker" from fat chicken hawks in air conditioned studios. Iraq Veterans Against the War turns five years old this week and continues to grow rapidly, as it should: http://ivaw.org

Other worthwhile organizations to join and support are described in "The Will to Resist," which includes a powerful foreword by Chris Hedges, and some excellent chapters on how veterans are trying to deal with PTSD, injuries, lack of income, and despair, the products of a war that kills more US troops through post-combat suicide than through enemy attacks. The resistance movement within the military to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is still not what it was during the Vietnam War. Soldiers today were not drafted away from lucrative careers. They are in the military because they do not have other options, and almost half of them have families to support. And soldiers are kept together in their units so that they will each fight out of loyalty to their buddies even if they all oppose the fighting. But, as Jamail discusses, soldiers who want to resist lack the same support from civilians that was provided during the Vietnam War. That's the rest of us. We have a duty to read these books, support the groups doing the work, build up the coffee shops near the bases, keep the military out of our schools, and offer our time to assist those willing to make a more courageous choice than that of simply obeying illegal orders.

A Plan to End the Wars

davidswanson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:30:37 GMT

By David Swanson

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 my analysis, we should be focusing on three things, which for purposes of brevity and alliteration I will call: Communications, Congress, and Counter recruitment / resistance. Communications encompasses all public discussion of the wars and impacts all other approaches, including targets I consider far less likely to be influenced by us than Congress, such as the president, generals, the heads of weapons companies, the heads of media companies, the people of Afghanistan, your racist neighbor, etc. If our communications strategy can change the behavior of any of these targets, terrific! We should be prepared to take advantage of such opportunities should they arise. But the first place we are likely to be able to leverage successful communications will be the House of Representatives. Counter-recruitment / resistance is another area that overlaps with communications but involves much else as well, and it is a strategy that we continue to underestimate.

COMMUNICATIONS

Our task is to communicate that:
--the wars are ongoing and will not end without our efforts,
--the wars must be ended,
--the peace movement has had many successes already and should by no means give in to frustration,
--the wars can be ended if a small fraction of the majority that wants them ended makes an effort,
--we have to choose between warfare and healthcare / other social goods,
--minimizing U.S. casualties will not satisfy the demands of the U.S. public,
--neither maximizing nor minimizing foreign casualties will satisfy the demands of the U.S. public,
--there is a personal cost to those who support wars and war crimes,
--Congress members will face opposition through negative communications, disruption of their lives, and electoral challenges if they fund wars.

We don't have to communicate all of that in one interview on cable television, or violate any other laws of physics, but we DO have to communicate ALL of that. And getting our spokespeople on TV has to be part of how it is done. But primarily we need to create our own media and work with decent independent media outlets. Online media has developed to the point where it can influence broadcast and print media. And yet we are still quite capable of creating powerful online media. We cannot overlook the need to work with communities that lack internet access, or the need to use the internet to generate offline activities. But it is very hard to overestimate the importance to our efforts of the internet, and working to get more people access to it might be one of the most helpful efforts we can make.

We stopped Bush-Cheney from invading Iran. They intended to do so, and we prevented it -- largely by exposing the grounds for invading Iraq to be lies. There was no press conference at the White House to announce this failure of theirs and success of ours, but that should have no impact on our claiming a victory and making it known to those who require encouragement and optimism. On the other hand, we have allowed the wars to be spread to Pakistan with barely a peep of recognition, and by proxy to Gaza with only a weak and muddled response. And the push to attack Iran directly or by proxy remains.

We dominated the news and the elections in the United States and shifted power in the House, Senate, and White House to a different political party. And we ended up with a House, Senate, and White House that all favor continuing or expanding wars. But we compelled President Bush to agree to withdrawal from Iraqi localities by the end of last month, complete withdrawal from the nation by the end of 2011, and a treaty that the Iraqi people have the right to reject by the end of this month in a vote that would move the complete withdrawal date to one year from now. I still question the wisdom of our having silently accepted a treaty making three years of war without the consent of the U.S. Senate, but a better way to reject the treaty is now upon us. Our focus for the next month should be on insisting that the Iraqi people are permitted to vote the treaty up or down in a verifiable election (which, of course, means that they will vote it down if those voting bear any similarity to those who have been polled). Everyone who has expressed concern for the voting rights of Iranians should be required to do the same for Iraqis.

The other advantage of our having shifted the partisan balance in our government, even without fundamentally altering our government's approach to war, is that we no longer have to do so. We can now move on to replacing pro-war Democrats with pro-peace Democrats (or Independents, Greens, Republicans, Libertarians, etc.) The claim that we should keep quiet about peace in order to elect Democrats who will then (contradictorily) give us peace can no longer be made and can no longer get in the way. And the advantage of having elected a president of a different party, without having fundamentally changed anything, is that the claim that a new president will give us peace can now be replaced by consideration of whether we should look to presidents at all, or Congress instead, to do such things.

We kept the occupation of Iraq smaller than it would have been and prevented other invasions through the success of counter-recruitment efforts and resistance within the U.S. military. Bush-Cheney having pushed the military to the breaking point is not a story of their incompetence or love for war and empire. It is a story of our efforts pushing back against theirs. The United States will always push the military to the breaking point until we succeed in countering the current militaristic agenda, but our job (one of them) is to make what is available to be pushed smaller.

We need to discuss our successes because nobody else will, and because 70 percent of Americans basically agree with us and do nothing about it, largely because many people do not believe they have the power to change anything. We have been building organizations and websites and Email lists for these past several years, and we have been achieving some successes and coming very close to more. Yet, a common response to "Will you gather signatures on this petition for peace?" is "We've tried that before and it didn't end the war." But it did expose the war lies. It did force Alberto Gonzales out. It did come within 7 votes just last month of -- at least temporarily -- stopping the war funding. And while doing all of these things, the same old tired tools can also build larger organizations, and have been doing so. I'm sure people told abolitionists not to print another newspaper because they'd printed one before and slavery was still around. Yet abolitionism was advancing despite not a single slave yet being freed. And we are advancing, but it is crucial to know where. We must absolutely put our signatures and our time and our money into those organizations that oppose war regardless of political party, and NOT into those organizations that claim to oppose war only when it allows criticism of a particular political party. (Here's a list of which is which: http://afterdowningstreet.org/... The list cannot possibly be complete, of course, and I apologize for whomever I have left off the list of heroes, but the major organizations are all here, listed as either heroes or frauds.)

Just as we should continue to push the corporate media while focusing on building our own, we should continue to push the pseudo-peace organizations to do better, but we should focus on building those organizations that have consistently taken a principled stand and pushed with skill and intelligence (even if not with success) for peace.

"Healthcare Not Warfare" should be our cry (following the example of Progressive Democrats of America), along with "Housing Not Warfare," "Jobs Not Warfare," "Schools Not Warfare," etc. We have to force recognition of the financial choice before us. In that choice we find a solution to the healthcare debate that is almost too easy to be believed, but deadly real. And we find a solution to the misconception that war does not impact the "Homeland." This is a discussion that should discuss the current wars as part of an expansion of military bases around the world, bases that make us less safe but cost us over $100 billion every year. The discussion should include the non-war military budget and the trade-offs involved. We should work harder to build alliances with people and groups focused on advocating for all the things we cannot pay for because we pay for weapons and wars.

But our communications strategy should be dominated by our true central reason for opposing wars, not any secondary reason that we imagine will move someone else. If wars are made cheaper and more efficient we will still oppose them, and that is a real possibility. If American casualties are reduced, we will still oppose wars, and that is the case at the moment. If smart decisions in military terms replace comical blunders, we will oppose wars all the more, and that may be happening. Fundamentally, we oppose wars because they kill people and they are part of hostile occupations that make people around the world hate and resent our nation. When a group like Brave New Films documents the impact of our war on the people of Afghanistan, we should promote those films as far as we are able. When an election leads to the corporate media humanizing the people of Iran, we should highlight that and ask why, if we do not want them killed by riot police, we should want them killed by bombs.

There is enormous potential, but uncertain, value in seeking to end and discourage wars by holding war criminals accountable for their crimes. Those working to end torture are right to emphasize that we tortured in order to generate false justifications for war, even after the war had begun. Those working to end war should emphasize that we tortured people in order to support the lies that at least one of the wars, and arguably all of them, is based on. Every war crime for which we are able to hold anyone accountable by exposing their crimes, unelecting them, impeaching them, finding them liable in civil suits, and prosecuting them at home or abroad, should be discussed as part of the ongoing wars. Congress members should understand that we consider their funding of wars to constitute a war crime. And they should understand that we require them to place peace before party.

One useful tool for mass communications is mass rallies. As argued below, our targets should be Congress members. National mass actions should be focused on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Local actions should target local Congress members. There was an action earlier this year on Capitol Hill aimed at cleaning up the local power plant and raising the demand for action on the climate. While that struggle is far from over, the march and protest suggested a useful approach. A large number of people, including young people, were organized to march and to risk arrest. But people were invited to march without risking arrest, thus boosting the crowd size and reducing the chances of anyone being arrested. This action was held on a weekday with Congress in session, and marched adjacent to the House office buildings. An action like this one on the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th, strikes me as the most obvious way to send a powerful message of opposition to wars. Combined, of course, with lobby meetings and in-district actions. And backed by lots of money and staff time.

Where do we get lots of money and staff time? That's where we'll need to be very good communicators. But there are wealthy people tired of funding politicians and ready to fund citizens, not to mention people with money who have watched Republicans prosecute and imprison top Democratic donors like Paul Minor and then watched the Democrats not lift a finger in their defense. There are no limits on contributions to peace and justice groups, and almost no limits on what we could accomplish if funded. More importantly, there are ways to influence Congress that do not require putting anyone on a bus and can be done largely by volunteers -- yes, in their pajamas in the basement eating Cheetos. Read on.

CONGRESS

While we have relatively little in the way of carrots or sticks with which to influence a president or a weapons maker (and influencing the military is discussed below), we have the ability to influence Congress members, at least those who represent districts rather than large states. And we have the ability to end the wars by succeeding only in the House of Representatives. We do not need to persuade a single senator or the president or any cabinet secretaries or any news producers. If we can do so, great. But we can end the wars by winning in the House of Representatives alone. This is because it takes two houses and the president to make a bill a law, but it only takes one house to prevent a bill from becoming law.

The House of Representatives is supposed to represent us and yet, on matters of war as on most other things, does not. Why not? Well, many flaws weaken our elections system, but on any given vote three major corrupting factors can usually be pointed to: party, media, and dollars. On an issue like healthcare, as on many issues, these factors should be listed in the opposite order. It is the dollars of corporate interests that do the greatest share of the corrupting. But on matters of war, party is the greatest corruptor. Of course, political parties are the largest funders of campaigns, so money is still right at the top. Members of Congress in both political parties have voted to fund these wars, over the wishes of their constituents, because their party leadership has told them to do so. Parties can promise money, committee memberships, chairmanships, votes on bills and amendments and earmarks, and press events in a member's district with cabinet members and presidents. Parties can threaten to withhold money, back a challenger, block measures from reaching the floor, and withhold chairmanships. It is very difficult and very rare for Congress members to oppose their parties' strong demands. But it is also rare for citizens to press them to do so, in part because many citizens and the groups through which they approach activism also take their orders from political parties.

The experience of opposing the most recent war supplemental bill, which was combined with funding for the International Monetary Fund, is instructive, especially as Congressman John Murtha has already indicated that there will be another war supplemental bill this year. Because all the Republicans in the House opposed the bill due to the IMF measure (five of them switching their votes to yes only after it had passed), 39 Democrats could have stopped the bill. This would have forced separate votes on the war and the IMF, and both might have passed. Certainly the war would have. But it would have created a serious block of peace votes in the House willing to vote for peace even when it mattered and the Democratic Party commanded otherwise. In the end, we persuaded 32 Democrats to vote No (two of them only in opposition to the IMF, 30 of them in opposition to at least the war). So we actually did establish a block of peace voters. It just contained 30 people instead of 39. And of those 30 people, three, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McGovern, and Lynn Woolsey actually urged their colleagues to vote No. This gives us 30 votes we can count on if we work like hell to hold them, and three leaders we can work with to whip together a larger caucus. And while we lost this vote, we exacted a price. We compelled the White House and the Democratic Party leadership to spend a week working on little other than bribing and blackmailing Congress members. And it will take many weeks to fulfill all the promises made. My own Congressman, who opposed the IMF but voted for it, has thus far held press events promoting himself in his district with the House Majority Leader, with the two top environmental officials in the White House, and has an event scheduled here this month with two members of the cabinet.

Over the past years, we have -- more often than not -- lacked the coordination and ability to push back hard against such intense lobbying from the other side. This time we surprised Congress and ourselves. Key to this effort was public whipping. We didn't have eight different peace groups keeping their own whip lists of who had promised them what. We had 8,000 citizen lobbyists feeding their reports to one website where the whip count was kept public, and where we promised to thank or spank people as appropriate once they had voted for peace or war. Critical to this effort were all the usual off-line activities of people in each Congress member's district. But the public whipping was central. It organized and encouraged the activism. It inspired the blogging. It infiltrated the corporate media.

Here's a history of this campaign:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/...
Here's the whip list:
http://action.firedoglake.com/...

Sadly, we've barely followed through on our promises to thank and spank, activities for which the Backbone Campaign offers tools and assistance. We should be celebrating and denouncing those who came through and those who let us down with at least as much energy as we threatened to do so. Otherwise we lose our credibility, and next time will be harder rather than easier. Disturbingly, even some who seemed willing to threaten repercussions to Democrats for voting yes appeared to decide afterwards that it would be inappropriate to follow through, especially since some other Democrats, not to mention most of the Republicans, were worse and never even pretended to be with us. But we're not handing out prizes in the afterlife here. We're trying to move those who might be moved.

Now, there is another reason why the next time is almost guaranteed to be harder. Unless the Democrats choose to include something else as strongly opposed by Republicans as the IMF, most of the Republicans can be expected to vote Yes. There may be nine who oppose the war funding. Combining them with the 30 Democrats gives us our block of 39 after all. (These would be the nine who voted No on the war supplemental before the IMF was added to it. But that was an easy vote. By that measure we had 51 Democrats, so these nine are not solid.) This means that, in a worst case scenario, we need to find -- in addition to these nine -- not 39 No votes, but 209 No votes, and most of them from Democrats. We're starting at 39 if we can hold them and need 179 more. This should not be considered impossible, not if we are succeeding at the communications strategy above and the counter-recruitment / resistance below. If most of the Congress members we have on our side found five more who would vote with them, we'd have a comfortable majority. We need to develop a system to whip Congress members to whip other Congress members. We also have the advantage of being able to tell them this time that when they told us last time that they were voting for the last war supplemental it was a lie.

This strategy of cutting off the funding for war, which can and should be used against standard military/war budget bills as well as supplementals, has always struck some people as a harder hill to climb than passing bills and amendments and resolutions that we approve of, steps that move us somehow in the direction of peace even while funding war. But this thinking ignores the existence of the United States Senate. While we can block a bill in the House, we have to pass a bill in both the House and Senate, and the chances of a good bill passing the Senate are smaller than Dick Cheney passing through the eye of a needle. There may be measures we want to advance in the House for communications purposes. And there may be measures we can persuade the House to slip into other bills the Senate wants to pass. But none of this should be our focus.

Bills that we might want to move in the House for communications purposes might include Rep. McGovern's bill requiring an exit strategy for Afghanistan, or legislation that turned the slogan of "Healthcare Not Welfare" into policy. A bill requiring that for every dollar spent on wars and military at least 25 cents must go into a fund for single-payer healthcare would be rhetorically useful. You can imagine the multitude of possibilities, as well as the impact if such a discussion were to penetrate the healthcare debate.

Bills that we might slip something very useful into and conceivably still get passed include House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's "paygo" bill, which has 159 cosponsors and the support of the Democratic leadership and the White House. This bill requires that any expense be paid for by a tax increase or a cutback elsewhere. But the bill makes an exception for "emergency" legislation, which is of course what war supplementals are claimed to be. An amendment to the paygo bill stipulating that no war already in progress for over five years is an "emergency" would, I think, effectively impose a paygo requirement on war supplementals. And suddenly you'd be unable to pass a war supplemental without explaining where the money was going to come from. In such a situation, it's conceivable that Blue Dogs and Republicans would join us faster than Progressives.

Congress can do other useful things as well, things that it is easier to get them to do. The House can pass a resolution supporting the right of the Iraqi people to a verifiable election this month on whether to agree to the treaty mislabeled a Status of Forces Agreement. The House can hold hearings on the subject. Advancing that issue, through Congress and elsewhere, should be our immediate priority. And in the back of our heads should be plans to demand a public vote for the people of Afghanistan.

We should also be working to sign incumbent and challenger candidates in the 2010 congressional elections onto a platform committing them to voting no funds to continue wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. It's not that we can trust them to keep their word. Only intense immediate pressure can control them. The point is to begin shaping the election in terms of how they will vote on war money between now and the election.

COUNTER RECRUITMENT

I've gone on at too much length to burden you with a detailed discussion of counter-recruitment and resistance when others can provide more expertise than I. The National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth at http://nnomy.org provides excellent resources on the crucial work of keeping recruiters out of schools. NNOMY is holding a national conference July 17-19 in Chicago, and you are invited.

Courage to Resist at http://www.couragetoresist.org provides up-to-date information on efforts within the US military to refuse illegal orders.

Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's new book "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" is good background, as is "Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War and Build a Better World," by Aimee Allison and David Solnit.

As Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. We must deny them the army they want. If we succeed beyond our wildest dreams for the next decade, at some point it might make sense to take into consideration the actual defense needs of the United States. At this point, the best thing our military could do to defend us would be to stop endangering us by doing everything it is doing.

COME TOGETHER RIGHT NOW

There's a national conference at which strategies to end the wars will be deliberated happening in Pittsburgh on July 10-12, and you should try to be there. The event is organized by the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations at https://www.natassembly.org

I've submitted the following action proposal to the assembly and I hope to see you there.

ACTION PROPOSAL

Organize a mass protest march and civil resistance against war funding at House side of Capitol Hill on the 8th anniversary of invading Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th. The House of Representatives is where we have the greatest chance of ending these wars. If we cut off the funding there, nothing else is needed. We can influence House members with activities in districts, online, in the media, and on Capitol Hill. But not on a weekend when they aren't there. We need to be present on a weekday and lobby them before and after we march. There was an action earlier this year on Capitol Hill aimed at cleaning up the local power plant and raising the demand for action on the climate. While that struggle is far from over, the march and protest suggested a useful approach. A large number of people, including young people, were organized to march and to risk arrest. But people were invited to march without risking arrest, thus boosting the crowd size and reducing the chances of anyone being arrested. This action was held on a weekday with Congress in session, and marched adjacent to the House office buildings. An action like this one on the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th, could send a powerful message of opposition to wars. Combined, of course, with lobby meetings and in-district actions. While such an action would be open to those willing to risk arrest and those not willing to do so, it would indeed fail to include those unable to participate on a Wednesday (except by making phone calls and holding in-district events). However, it WOULD include the people we intend to influence but which the corporate media cannot be counted on to inform of our doings over a weekend. Some members of Congress would even JOIN us.

What Bush Told Blair Could End the Wars

davidswanson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:26:01 GMT

By David Swanson

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.

This document, or rather, reports of it, emerged in February 2006. We labeled it the White House Memo and began promoting awareness of it. We did not get far with the US corporate media. This is the same document that Vincent Bugliosi refers to as "the Manning Memo" in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder". Bugliosi rightly makes it central to his case. Part of the conversation recorded in the memo is recreated in Crawford, Texas, rather than the White House, in Oliver Stone's 2008 film "W."

The memo was first mentioned in Philippe Sands' 2005 book "Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules." And it was Sands, an attorney from England, who publicized the memo in February 2006. Now the British media is questioning whether the British government's upcoming review of the Iraq War lies will include such damning pieces of evidence as the White House Memo. And Philippe Sands is advocating for its inclusion. Peace groups led by the Stop the War Coalition in England are planning a rally at Parliament on Wednesday to demand that the governmental inquiry be public. Secrecy, after all, is what allowed the war in the first place.

And what difference might it make if the public in the United Kingdom or (can you imagine it!) in the United States knew about this memo? Well, this is a document that goes beyond proving that Bush wanted war and lied about the reasons for it (That's so 2002). This document proves that Bush was willing to provoke Saddam Hussein into attacking Americans.

On January 31, 2003, prior to the full-scale invasion of Iraq in March, President George W. Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House. After their meeting, they spoke to the media (video) and claimed not to have decided on war, to be working hard to achieve peace, and to be worried about the imminent threat from Iraq to the American people. They claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to al Qaeda, and -- Bush implied, but avoided explicitly stating -- to the attacks of September 11, 2001. They also claimed to have UN authorization for launching an attack on Iraq. These were all blatant lies, as revealed in the White House Memo, which recorded what Bush and Blair had talked about behind closed doors just prior to the press conference. And yet, to my knowledge, not one of the reporters you see in the above video has made a peep about it.

Blair advisor David Manning took notes that day. The accuracy of his memo has never been challenged by Bush or Blair. According to Manning, Bush proposed to Blair a number of possible ways in which they might be able to create an excuse to launch a war against Iraq. One of Bush's proposals was "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours [sic]. If Saddam fired on them," Bush argued, "he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. In other words, Bush wanted to falsely paint US planes with UN colors and try to get Iraq to shoot at them. This is what Bush really thought about the horrible, evil threat of Saddam Hussein: he wanted to provoke him. He wanted to get US pilots shot at in order to start a war that Congress would then fund for years, and perhaps decades, on the grounds that doing so would "support the troops."

Bush understood that the United Nations had not passed a resolution to legalize an attack on Iraq. The White House Memo describes Bush telling Blair that "the US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." (These are Manning's notes of what Bush said.) In other words, going to the United Nations was not actually an attempt to avoid war, but an attempt to gain legal cover for a war that would be launched regardless of whether that project succeeded. And Bush wasn't kidding about twisting arms; that very same day the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a plan to bug the phones and e-mails of UN Security Council members.

At this time, a month and a half before the full-on invasion of Iraq, the US military was already engaging in hugely escalated bombing runs over Iraq and redeploying troops, including to newly constructed bases in the Middle East, all in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, and all with money that had not been appropriated for these purposes. The reporters who questioned Bush and Blair on January 31, 2003, did not know about or ask about those activities.

That Bush was interested in provoking Iraq is confirmed by extensive covert operations called DB/Anabasis reported by Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their 2006 book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War." These operations "envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by US fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war. On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees -- including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat -- were briefed."

A similar story came out about Dick Cheney with regard to Iran in 2008. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported at a journalism conference in 2008 that at a 2008 meeting in the Vice President's office, soon after an incident in the Strait of Hormuz in which a US carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats, "There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don't we build -- we in our shipyard -- build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy Seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of -- that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected."

After the invasion of Iraq, with no weapons or ties to 9/11 having been found, Diane Sawyer asked Bush on camera (ABC News, December 16, 2003) about the claims he had made about "weapons of mass destruction," and he replied: "What's the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger."

Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion and occupation, measured above the high death rate under international sanctions preceding the attack, are estimated at 1.2 to 1.3 million by two independent sources (Just Foreign Policy's updated figure based on the Johns Hopkins / Lancet report, and the British polling company Opinion Research Business's estimate as of August 2007). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of Iraqis who have fled their homes has reached 4.7 million. If these estimates are accurate, a total of nearly 6 million human beings have been displaced from their homes or killed, as of August 2008. Many times that many have certainly been injured, traumatized, impoverished, and deprived of clean water and other basic needs.

That we can't prosecute torture is bad enough. That you have to cross an ocean to even find a discussion of accountability for war lies is worse.

Torturing Truth--Bi-Partisan Denial

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:15:00 GMT

Torture is neither new nor peripheral to American foreign policy, historian Alfred McCoy reminds us.

In 1972, fledgling historian Alfred McCoy published one of the most shocking exposés of an exposé-filled decade, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which documented decades of cooperative relationships between the CIA and drug dealers, beginning with deals that allowed the almost-dead heroin trade to revive after WWII, and culminating in the role of the CIA in the drug trade surrounding the Vietnam War, which lead to the addiction of tens of thousands of US troops. The CIA tried-and failed-to have the book suppressed. A revised, updated and expanded version, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade was published in 2003.

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.
In his diary, " Obama, John Rawls, and a Defense of the Unreasonable", nonpartisan wrote:

Read his books and you'll see that, despite the fact that Obama holds strikingly liberal views on a variety of issues, his anger at the Bush administration is directed not at its policies, but at its politics. For Obama, Bush's supreme betrayal was in breaking the Rawlsian consensus. Bush's extreme partisanship, his utter disregard of the Democratic members of his government, turned Americans against each other and polarized the electorate. For Obama, that was Bush's greatest crime -- because to the President, we are a nation of consensus before we are a nation of laws or dreams or anything else.

McCoy's take on where we may be headed with regard to torture policy is fully in line with that observation--it's just that McCoy's understanding of America's consensus position on torture is very, very different from the official story. As McCoy describes it in his book, the consensus position is both the official condemnation of torture in public, and the official support for it in private, with the messiest details outsourced to other countries whose secret police and/or intelligence services we have helped train and support in the practice of torture, among other things. And this is the consensus to which Obama would have us return--official condemnation in public, official, but outsourced, practice in private.

Those are my words. But they're almost identical to McCoy's own words as well:

If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years.
Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto Pinochet or the Philippines after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington after Bush is now trapped in the painful politics of impunity. Unlike anything our allies have experienced, however, for Washington, and so for the rest of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit.
Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five years since the Abu Ghraib photos first exposed our abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture scandal continues to spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it, including now Obama himself. By embracing a specific methodology of torture, covertly developed by the CIA over decades using countless millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically revealed in those Iraqi prison photos, we have condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever promises might be made to end this sort of abuse and are instead already returning to a bipartisan consensus that made torture America's secret weapon throughout the Cold War.

Before going into the Cold War history of American torture, McCoy takes pains to point out that what we're talking about is not "torture lite":

Before we head deeper into the hidden history of the CIA's psychological torture program, however, we need to rid ourselves of the idea that this sort of torture is somehow "torture lite" or merely, as the Bush administration renamed it, "enhanced interrogation." Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, psychological torture actually inflicts a crippling trauma on its victims. "Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychological manipulations and forced stress positions," Dr. Metin Basoglu has reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry after interviewing 279 Bosnian victims of such methods, "does not seem to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the severity of mental suffering."

When it comes to understanding torture historically, you've got to stop thinking 24, and start thinking X-Files. You know, MK-Ultra, not Big Foot and Chucacabras. Here's McCoy's incredibly condenses summary:

During the 1950s, two neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, under CIA contract, found that the most devastating torture technique of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, was simply to force a victim to stand for days while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, and hallucinations began -- a procedure which we now politely refer to as "stress positions."

(This is what Rumsfeld ognorantly said, "So what?" to, noting that he stood for hours on end each day, as if it were the same.)

Four years into this project, there was a sudden upsurge of interest in using mind control techniques defensively after American prisoners in North Korea suffered what was then called "brainwashing." In August 1955, President Eisenhower ordered that any soldier at risk of capture should be given "specific training and instruction designed to... withstand all enemy efforts against him."
Consequently, the Air Force developed a program it dubbed SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to train pilots in resisting psychological torture. In other words, two intertwined strands of research into torture methods were being explored and developed: aggressive methods for breaking enemy agents and defensive methods for training Americans to resist enemy inquisitors.

That was the foundation. Then we started spreading it around:

In 1963, the CIA distilled its decade of research into the curiously named KUBARK Counter-intelligence Interrogation manual, which stated definitively that sensory deprivation was effective because it made "the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure... strengthening... the subject's tendencies toward compliance." Refined through years of practice on actual human beings, the CIA's psychological paradigm now relies on a mix of sensory overload and deprivation via seemingly banal procedures: the extreme application of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine -- all meant to attack six essential sensory pathways into the human mind.
After codifying its new interrogation methods in the KUBARK manual, the Agency spent the next 30 years promoting these torture techniques within the U.S. intelligence community and among anti-communist allies. In its clandestine journey across continents and decades, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm would prove elusive, adaptable, devastatingly destructive, and powerfully seductive. So darkly seductive is torture's appeal that these seemingly scientific methods, even when intended for a few Soviet spies or al-Qaeda terrorists, soon spread uncontrollably in two directions -- toward the torture of the many and into a paroxysm of brutality towards specific individuals. During the Vietnam War, when the CIA applied these techniques in their search for information on top Vietcong cadre, the interrogation effort soon degenerated into the crude physical brutality of the Phoenix Program, producing 46,000 extrajudicial executions and little actionable intelligence.

Just one more way in which we're repeating Vietnam all over again!

He then goes on to describe how Clinton-using language drafted by the Reagan Administration (yeah bipartisanship!)-included four diplomatic "reservations" in the 1994 ratification of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which had the effect of severly limiting mental torture to "just four acts: the infliction of physical pain, the use of drugs, death threats, or threats to harm another." This left the entirety of CIA-developed methods untouched:

Through this legal legerdemain, Washington managed to agree, via the U.N. Convention, to ban physical abuse even while exempting the CIA from the U.N.'s prohibition on psychological torture.
This little noticed exemption was left buried in those documents like a landmine and would detonate with phenomenal force just 10 years later at Abu Ghraib prison.

With this sort of preparation already on the books, the way was cleared for a "great leap forward" in torture after 9/11 when the "war on terror" began. Among other things, McCoy notes:

From recently released Justice Department memos, we now know that the CIA refined its psychological paradigm significantly under Bush. As described in the classified 2004 Background Paper on the CIA's Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques, each detainee was transported to an Agency black site while "deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods." Once inside the prison, he was reduced to "a baseline, dependent state" through conditioning by "nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling...), and dietary manipulation."
...
After General Miller visited Iraq in September 2003, the U.S. commander there, General Ricardo Sanchez, ordered Guantanamo-style abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. My own review of the 1,600 still-classified photos taken by American guards at Abu Ghraib -- which journalists covering this story seem to share like Napster downloads -- reveals not random, idiosyncratic acts by "bad apples," but the repeated, constant use of just three psychological techniques: hooding for sensory deprivation, shackling for self-inflicted pain, and (to exploit Arab cultural sensitivities) both nudity and dogs. It is no accident that Private Lynndie England was famously photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed like a dog.
These techniques, according to the New York Times, then escalated virally at five Special Operations field interrogation centers where detainees were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation, beating, burning, electric shock, and waterboarding. Among the thousand soldiers in these units, 34 were later convicted of abuse and many more escaped prosecution only because records were officially "lost."

After a brief discussion of the role of high-level Administration officials--Rice, Cheney, and others--McCoy then turns to the clean-up phase. Here's the heart of what he has to say here:

No matter how twisted the process, impunity -- whether in England, Indonesia, or America -- usually passes through three stages:
1. Blame the supposed "bad apples."
2. Invoke the security argument. ("It protected us.")
3. Appeal to national unity. ("We need to move forward together.")
For a year after the Abu Ghraib exposé, Rumsfeld's Pentagon blamed various low-ranking bad apples by claiming the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military." In his statement on May 13th, while refusing to release more torture photos, President Obama echoed Rumsfeld, claiming the abuse in these latest images, too, "was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals."
In recent weeks, Republicans have taken us deep into the second stage with Cheney's statements that the CIA's methods "prevented the violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people."
Then, on April 16th, President Obama brought us to the final stage when he released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, insisting: "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." During a visit to CIA headquarters four days later, Obama promised that there would be no prosecutions of Agency employees. "We've made some mistakes," he admitted, but urged Americans simply to "acknowledge them and then move forward." The president's statements were in such blatant defiance of international law that the U.N.'s chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him that Washington was actually obliged to investigate possible violations of the Convention Against Torture.

And there you have it--We're just like Chile! Or Argentina!

Except we're not. They were the periphery. We are the core. We're the mothership of "Free World" torture, as McCoy describes above. Which is what makes our insistence on averting our eyes all the more serious, since it means a return to business as usual, with lots of outsourced torture for all.

This process of impunity is leading Washington back to a global torture policy that, during the Cold War, was bipartisan in nature: publicly advocating human rights while covertly outsourcing torture to allied governments and their intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

And, of course, such torture did nothing in the way of "making us safe". It was never intended to do that. It was intended to terrorize the powerless into not even thinking about challenging the powers that be--which,, on the global scale, meant us, the US. All of us.

But McCoy ends his article by warning that trying this again is just asking for more trouble on a scale we can't begin to imagine. The cat is out of the bag now, and no one can pretend we don't know what's going on anymore:

This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not provide the same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat into torture by remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the next scandal that will do yet more damage to America's international standing.
Over a 40-year period, Americans have found themselves mired in this same moral quagmire on six separate occasions: following exposés of CIA-sponsored torture in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988), and then throughout Latin America (1997). After each exposé, the public's shock soon faded, allowing the Agency to resume its dirty work in the shadows.
Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look into a sordid history that reached its depths in the Bush era, and so begins to break this cycle of deceit, exposé, and paralysis followed by more of the same, we're likely, a few years hence, to find ourselves right back where we are now. We'll be confronted with the next American torture scandal from some future iconic dungeon, part of a dismal, ever lengthening procession that has led from the tiger cages of South Vietnam through the Shah of Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu Ghraib and the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
The next time, however, the world will not have forgotten those photos from Abu Ghraib. The next time, the damage to this country will be nothing short of devastating.

Better we take responsibility now for a terrible past than seal our fates for a terrible future.

That's what real patriotism looks like.

Stop the War Supplemental

davidswanson — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:44:26 GMT

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.
Here are three reasons to join with the peace movement in asking your representative to vote No: This bill funds illegal and immoral wars; it funds the IMF; and it bans the release of torture photos and videos from the Bush-Cheney years.

Republicans may vote No because of reason #2 (good for them!) and 41 Democrats have signed a letter from Rep. Maxine Waters asking for good changes to #2 (good for them! but why monkey around with a war bill?).

Democrats may try to get reason #3 removed (good for them! but why monkey around with a war bill?).

The "leadership" may stick in a cash-for-clunkers measure or other bribe to get "progressives" to vote for the war money (bribes that could be passed on their own).

But what we need are No votes on the war funding, no matter which other outrages or good measures are attached to it.

Call your Representative and urge them to vote no: 202-224-3121.

Whip list here with contact info and updates.

This will be the lead story on the June 5th Urban Journal.

Pres. Obama's Speech In Egypt (Summary)

NABNYC — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:35:17 GMT

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.

Full speech is at white house website and at this same article at http://NABNYC.blogspot.com

The Sanitizing of War and..Star Trek?

rufus xevious — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:30:56 GMT

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.
In the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself thinking about this Star Trek episode. Why? Well, just listen to the TV and the radio, read our newspapers. How do we talk about war?

You know how it sounds. The language we use in the United States to talk about war uses a lot of technical and political terminology, words and phrases that didn't really exist before WWII - things like "collateral damage", "theater", "actionable intelligence", "non-state actors", "unmanned drones". Strange phrases that seem to have only vague meanings, and tend to just wash over those of us who go about our increasingly busy lives of school, work, family, community, and place of worship. Add to that the fact that we never see an actual war zone on the TV news (as people did during Vietnam), never see the bodies, the blood, the crumpled buildings, the coffins, the shell-shocked soldiers and civilians. It's hard for people to get a real understanding of the consequences of war if they never have to come face to face with them. For better or for worse, human beings learn best by experiencing things.

I wonder sometimes if these sanitized phrases have come into existence - not just because of the media or political forces - but because it's simply not that easy to talk about war (not even for soldiers) if you really confront it. Because confronting it involves looking at death. Not person-by-person death, say from disease, or auto accident, or old age. But mass death because of metal tearing apart flesh and buildings coming violently to pieces. It's beyond disturbing and if you think about it too hard, if you put yourself there inside your mind, if you really use your imagination about what war is, you can quickly get overwhelmed with a whole host of unpleasant feelings.

If we, in our ostensible democracy, are going to make decisions together about stuff like war, it's awfully hard to do what's right for all of us if we don't get a little more real in assessing the consequences. After all, they don't go away just because we changed the names of some ugly things to make them sound not so bad and made sure some upsetting pictures don't get shown in nice folks' living rooms. You can blame the media or the politicians for our sanitized wars, but we also have ourselves to confront.

Getting back to the episode, I think what Kirk did was call out the cowardice involved in waging war while running from a reckoning with its brutality.

What language do you use when you about war? With your children? Family? Co-workers? What do you think about how war is portrayed in the media? Does it matter?

Open Left - Iraq

100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan during 2011-2013 (Updated with denials)

Costs Of War Not Seen In Dover Repatriation Photos; and Bill Moyers Closing Comments

Blocking Escalation of War Not Good Enough

110,600

No Good War, No Good Drone

The Genocide Clown-Posse

A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

Not every war is in defense of our freedom

The "Public Option" in Iraq is Genocide

Did the Washington Post's Richard Cohen Scare the "*#*!#!" out of you?

Echoes of Iraq

Ultimate Fighting Championship Taught Me Conservatives Are Right

Change in the SOFA

US Troops Hiding in Iraqi Homes

A Plan to End the Wars

What Bush Told Blair Could End the Wars

Torturing Truth--Bi-Partisan Denial

Stop the War Supplemental

Pres. Obama's Speech In Egypt (Summary)

The Sanitizing of War and..Star Trek?

Did the Washington Post's Richard Cohen Scare the "#!#!" out of you?