And why did all this happen? Because four Blackwater military contractors were killed. Not only that, but the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (yes, it's a government committee) "fault Blackwater in Fallujah ambush." (Unfortunately, this report came out 3 years after the fact. We never seem to know these things at the time, or our 'leaders' don't.) So, because four contractors were killed, we basically go into a city use depleted uranium and other toxic weapons and destroy the entire city, killing thousands. This is clearly a war crime, and people need to be taken to task for it.

[cross-posted at NPR Check]

NPR do luv them some Nagl. John Nagl, Mr. Soup with a Knife genius, has been one of their regular counterinsurgency go-to guys for a while - and they did pick the right horse. Nagl is climbing the rungs of power (to the Defense Policy board along with neo-imperialist Robert Kaplan). You can bet we'll hear a lot from this COIN snake oil soup salesman.

Yesterday on ATC Siegle had a chummy talk with Nagl about our clients in the colony of Iraq. It was the typical "training wheels" talk about whether Iraqis can manage without all the great protection and security the US military has brought to Iraq. Siegel asks Nagl, "How well prepared are the Iraqis to deal with threats to their own security?"

Think Progress:

In an analysis of trends in suicide attacks worldwide since 1981 (pdf), researcher Assaf Moghadam presents a pretty shocking statistic:

Iraq accounts for 1,067 suicide attacks in the period under review — “a number that accounts for more than half (54.8%) of all suicide attacks since 1981. The sheer volume in which this tactic has struck Iraq is even more impressive since no suicide attacks were recorded in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

McClatchy's top story today tells how a Kuwaiti subcontractor to our old friend KBR has been holding about a thousand men from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in warehouses near Bahgdad for three months. These poor guys paid more than $2000 for the privilege of being treated this way.

The story has more heartbreakers in it than I have time to extract, so go read. Just a taste:

A group of about 50 men living in tents about a mile away were even worse off than the men in the warehouses, and they appeared to be victims of human trafficking. They live in huts they built with tarps and pieces of carpet, and said they had no access to food or water.
...

I know other people have written on the Interior Department scandal, but so far I have yet to see anyone, anywhere, use the one word which is correct. Gregory W. Smith didn't just engage in "sex" with a subordinate, he's accused of behavior by one that is rape.

There's got to be a metaphor in here someplace, really, for the the Republican way of life, rape everything. The people, the environment, the constitution, the treasury. Every thing. Let me pull out the relevant paragraphs from the here, in the government report on all of this.

I'm just all about linking and not saying anything tonight. Still...Your Prozac Army:

One in six American soldiers in Afghanistan and one in eight in Iraq are taking daily doses of prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills or painkillers to help them cope with the stresses of combat, according to figures contained in a US Army mental health advisory team report seen by The Herald.

The findings mean that at least 20,000 troops are on medication such as Prozac or diamorphine while serving in the front line or on equally dangerous convoy escort or driving duties in conflicts where insurgents regularly target the supply chain.

While the vast majority would have been barred automatically from combat roles in earlier wars on medical and safety grounds, the pressure to provide up to 200,000 soldiers at any given time for the two major deployments has led to a relaxation of the rules.

Keep reading, it gets "better."

Odd, weird, kewl, something else? I guess I don't know.

This is one of those 'posted without comment' thingees, but I think I'll add it to m y Netflix list, just for fun.

So, first off: Happy Birthday MJS! We miss you! And love you! And your beautiful, gracious, thoughtful wife, who in turn gave me a gift by asking me to give you one. I hope you enjoy your book. Secondly, I'm too heartbroken to explain Tel Asmar; just google "Tel Asmar UChicago dig house" and you'll understand- it's gone. My pain is nothing to the families of the dead who have lost infinitely more than that thanks to a reckless war of lies and greed.

Seeing as how Corrente is now a High Literary Society, I thought I should contribute something. The background on this short fiction is this: it's "historical" in feel and tone, but in no way up to the scholarly standards of my past. I feel badly I'm fuddling some historical and philological fact for the sake of fiction, so to my Assyriology friends: take it easy on a sister, yo? Also, due to a mix-up on the due date, I wrote this in exactly one morning and gave it all of one look-thru before publishing it for MJS' gift. So forgive the slightly choppy and unfinished element to it, it's essentially a first-draft. Someday, I may go back and clean it up and turn it into a long book; I've been sitting on a larger story of which this is part for some time. Anyway, here you go, Birhtday Boy and Gentle Readers.

"The Ashes of the House of Ur"
I

The tall brute looked and sounded exactly like his name implied; son of the war goddess indeed. Hulking over Ibrahim’s second wagon like a trained ape at the temple fair, he could hardly articulate the goods of passage, let alone write them. Lucky for him, a clever palace scribe was there to cover his ass and get the job done.

“Twelve woven blankets,” the brute slurred.
“Actually, your honor, “ said Ibrahim. “That’s ten. The other two are for the flooring.” He tried his best to look unconcerned, but the high ranking palace scribe's presence implied that the political scene was as dangerous for him as ever, perhaps more so. “That looks like more than ten to me,” the hulking mass of a beer-guzzling Akkadian said. “Are you saying I can’t count?” His muscular concern mirrored the urgency with which his scribe sought to insert herself into the conversation. Ibrahim took advantage of this.

“Lady Lali,” he said to the skinny scribe and using her nickname, which was known to him because they shared the same blood of the old families. “What say you of these blankets?” His deep, liquid eyes pleaded with her. He knew she knew all he wanted to do was leave; to escape the increasing burdens of all merchants of the Old Blood in a crumbling empire. To take his family, herds and goods to a new land; one long since abandoned by the ancient people of the sea, where the hills where green, and lightly populated by wild flocks or predators. The rumors of the place had spread in the last famine, when the empire had failed to provide for the people. Ibrahim had spoken out against the temples and their increasingly anti-traditionalist leadership then. He had paid for it ever since.

Lali looked at the small herds and poor-quarter quality of Ibrahim’s carts. Another reject of the new order, refugees taking flight, she thought. They were so common these days, what with the empire restricting its support to the “loyal families” and all. Sad, she thought. In the old days, merchant princes like Ibrahim would’ve been invited to compete for choice temple bids, their herds culled for the finest representatives for use at the city festivals and temple competitions. But no longer; the young prince was woefully easy to sway, and mostly a fool. His advisors had convinced him that a “loyalty” purge was long since due, and that the gods demanded it.

“Geb,” she called to her co-worker. “I’ve got to get some beer, and take a piss. It’s too fucking hot for this shit.” It was true, the midday was nigh, and they’d been processing passers at the gate for six hours. Some beer and dates, and an indoor break, were long overdue.

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

I know Robert Fisk is controversial. But he lives and breathes the Middle East and has intimate knowledge of it. In his latest column for the Independent, he reports on the restraint that Al Jazeera has shown considering the amount of atrocities on tape it receives:

""We've trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this," Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera's deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station's headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera's reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.

I'm not so sure Obama has seized the remote, but in the sofa ruckus he may have luckily hit one of the buttons. There are indications he may be creating broader acceptance of his proposals for Iraq and Afghanistan:

Sen. Barack Obama, on his first and likely only overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has remade the campaign's foreign policy playing field, neatly sidestepping Republican charges that he has been naive and wrong on Iraq and moving to a broader, post-Iraq focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In essence, Obama has declared the war in Iraq all but over...

To Zoriah.

Not vouching, Ok, I'll vouch. FDL says he needs our support. I'm happy to give it.

Today, Jackie Speier was sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. And what does she immediately do? Gives an anti-war speech and gets booed by Republicans.

For a few feel-good moments on the floor of the U.S. House today, Jackie Speier basked in bipartisan applause as she was sworn in as its newest member. Her family, supporters and kids cheered as she embraced her new colleagues.

The plainest way to say it is that everything, every last fucking thing, is "constructed" in the SCLM product/discourse/fairy tale. Someone thinks about what it is in it, and what is not, and how, one word at a time. So when this happens, people should remember it's a feature, and not a bug. What is funniest to me is that the WaPo, and the District, are queer havens, places where queer culture and thought and activity are open, vibrant. I guess I've just never been a part of that group of self-hating types who want to play these games.

But guys: trust me when I say, str8 America is over all this silliness. I look forward to the day, and indeed I believe it will come in my lifetime, when this sort of stunt is uncommon and quickly forgotten.

As the Blade reported last week, Maj. Alan Rogers, by all accounts a hero for his brave acts while serving in Iraq, was killed in January and buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Rogers lived as openly gay a life as he could, given the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. He had many gay friends in D.C., patronized gay businesses and even worked as treasurer for the D.C. chapter of American Veterans for Equal Rights, a group working to overturn the military’s gay ban.

But the mainstream media accounts of his death omitted any reference to his sexual orientation. These were not benign omissions. The Washington Post, in particular, worked overtime to excise any mention of Rogers’ sexual orientation. It did not even report his work for AVER. Several of Rogers’ gay friends told the Blade that they were interviewed by a Post reporter at the funeral, but their memories were not included in the paper’s coverage.

I say this as only one of my age and "race" can: there comes a time when people decide to hate others for different reasons. No construct lasts forever, and nothing cannot be changed. Yes, blah, I know it works 'both ways,' but in this case, working with younger people and knowing what they tell me about sex and sexuality and gender, I'm confident that this country is on the verge of finally shedding our particularly vulgar and unimaginative form of homophobia. And that's a good thing.

Feh, I'll chalk it up to yet another example in which the WaPo reminds me that I'm not sorry I don't read them. /tosses hair/ So tired, they are.

I'm curious. If this is true:

Defying the White House, Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday the House will change its rules to avoid a required vote this year on a hotly disputed free-trade agreement with Colombia.

Why then is it so hard to say, change some rules and make war funding votes not happen? I'm sure there's a "reason."

Obama's top Iraq advisor has written a paper in which he advises that through negotiations with the Iraqi government “the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000–80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground).” (Emphasis mine.)

Now, of course, Obama's campaign denies that this position is his position, but Colin Kahl heads his Iraq working group and Obama has never said how many troops he'd leave on the ground in Iraq. Obama's advisors have also said that he wouldn't rule out using Blackwater and other mercenaries in Iraq.

I don't mean to be understated but ... Houston we have a major fucking problem.

Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.Numbers reported by the Department of Defense show a sickening pattern. In 2006, 2,947 sexual assaults were reported -- 73% more than in 2004. The DOD's newest report, released this month, indicates that 2,688 reports were made in 2007, but a recent shift from calendar-year reporting to fiscal-year reporting makes comparisons with data from previous years much more difficult.

Link

It means nothing to the dead and little to their families, but it's still an important step in moving this nation back towards sanity. Conservative blogger Cole bitchslaps the stupidest of Villagers thusly:

see that Andrew Sullivan was asked to list what he got wrong about Iraq for the five year anniversary of the invasion, and since I was as big a war booster as anyone, I thought I would list what I got wrong:

Everything.

And I don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but I do sort of have to face facts. I was wrong about everything.

I was wrong about the Doctrine of Pre-emptive warfare.
I was wrong about Iraq possessing WMD.
I was wrong about Scott Ritter and the inspections.
I was wrong about the UN involvement in weapons inspections.
I was wrong about the containment sanctions.
I was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the Middle East.
I was wrong about this making us more safe.
I was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq.
I was wrong when I stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath.
I was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps.
I was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the Middle East.
I was wrong about dissolving the Iraqi army.
I was wrong about the looting being unimportant.
I was wrong that Bush/Cheney were competent.
I was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators.
I was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors.
I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies.

I mean, I could go down the list and continue on, but you get the point. I was wrong about EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. THING. It is amazing I could tie my shoes in 2001-2004. If you took all the wrongness I generated, put it together and compacted it and processed it, there would be enough concentrated stupid to fuel three hundred years of Weekly Standard journals. I am not sure how I snapped out of it, but I think Abu Ghraib and the negative impact of the insurgency did sober me up a bit.

War should always be an absolute last resort, not just another option. I will never make the same mistakes again.

I salute you, Cole. It takes a real man to stand up and say, "I was wrong." Kudos.

Speech-acts don't impress me so much anymore. Nor do websites. Or rallies. Cucking Stool reminds us of the real cost of the continuation of the clusterfuck that is Iraq, and it's hefty:

Nobel Economics Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and his co-author, Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, have estimated the total cost of the war, just to the United States, to be three to four trillion dollars. The rest of the world will pay similar amount. They wrote a book called The Three Trillion Dollar War, but that estimate is apparently out of date, although the book just came out:

All of the war-price tallies include operations in the war zone, support for troops, repair or replacement of equipment, reservists’ salaries, special combat pay for regular forces and some care for wounded veterans — expenses that typically fall outside the regular Defense Department or Veterans Affairs budgets.

The highest estimates often include projections for future operations, long-term health care and disability costs for veterans, a portion of the regular, annual defense budget, and, in some cases, wider economic effects, including a percentage of higher oil prices and the impact of raising the national debt to cover increased war spending.

The debate raging on Capitol Hill, on the presidential campaign trail, in research institutes and in academia touches on such esoteric factors as the right inflation index for veterans’ health care costs; the monetary value of nearly 4,000 soldiers killed; and what role, if any, the war has had in higher oil prices.

Some economists who track the war expenses say they worry that politicians are making mistakes similar to those made in 2002, by failing to fully come to grips with the short- and long-term financial costs.

“The relevant question now is: what do we do now going forward? Because we can’t do anything about the costs that have already happened,” said Scott Wallsten, an economist and vice president of research with iGrowthGlobal, a Washington research institute. “We still don’t hear people talking about that.”

In discussions about the economy, the elephant - boy, is that an apt metaphor - in the room is the war. The national debt has soared, as has the price of oil, and the dollar has plunged. The Fed keeps throwing "liquidity" on the fire; it seems to help for a little while - at least in terms of buoying the stock market - but only for a little while. As the Fed accepts dodgey-er and dodgey-er debt as collateral, the prospect that the taxpayer is going to foot the bill becomes more and more inevitable.

Privatize the profits and socialize the losses!

Whiskeyfire notes that Klein is now admitting he was "stupid" to support the invasion and occupation, and gets mean enough to say that "willful blindness" probably played a greater role. To me, this hardly goes far enough.

Let's role-play. Imagine one day, a bomb falls on your house. Half your family is killed, including all your children and your grandmother. The people who bombed you were complete strangers with whom you'd had no interaction or relation, and they did so for political purposes that had nothing to do with you. If a few years later, Joe walked up to you and said, "gosh, I was stupid to support bombing you!" you would likely punch him in the face, or worse.

It seems as if most Villagers have no imagination nor compassion. They are truly inhumane, and times like this I'm reminded of that. The list of the true reasons for the invasion and the wide support for it at the time is a long one: greed, racism, bloodlust, insecurity, lack of vision, ignorance, arrogance, local/domestic political posturing, greed...

"Stupid" is too kind. It's disengenuous, it undervalues the true degree of the sin and crime. It's like a frat boy turning up his hands when the arresting officer comes by to pick him up on the charge of rape, saying, "Sorry, I was drunk" and expecting to get away with it. It's the 'liberal' element of the Unity meme. Republicans will always deny they made a mistake and blame someone else, but 'liberals' like Klein will have the 'good grace' to admit to some wrongdoing. Minor, of course. Just enough to make them seem different than their Republican co-cronies and apologists and criminals. "Stupid" is like "silly" and "sorry." It's unlike "bloodstained" and "warmongering" and "war criminal."

That's what Klein really is. And millions are dead, homeless, shredded in mind and body, because of people like him. I don't forget that. Fuck him. And his "stupidity."

Very good, almost enough to make me want to care about rock and roll again. Seriously, let me highlight some of the scarier parts. Myth isn't strong enough to describe what the bobbleheads in the Village are obsessing over, the truth of what is happening in Iraq is stark, and damning:

He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. "In Saddam's time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded.

Some time ago I realized we'd all been giving them too much credit. Rovian Maths, Rummy's Unknown unknowns...they are and were always as stupid and arrogant as they seemed. Only the Mightiest of Wurlitzers has been able to keep that fact from being baldly obvious to a great majority. They can do nothing right.

his is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

Via eriposte at The Leftcoaster, compare and contrast:

Last September 10, as David Petraeus was giving Congress a rosy evaluation of the situation in Iraq, a poll of Iraqi public opinion was released that belied Petraeus’ reporting. The poll received little attention amid the media’s love-fest for David Petraeus. But the findings of the poll should send shivers down the spine of anyone concerned with the lives of Iraqis and American in Iraq.

The poll (conducted in August 2007) found increasing resistance to the occupation, especially when compared to Iraqi public opinion polling from five months earlier (March 2007). Among the poll's findings:

From the Dept. of "Lambert Can't be Cynical Enough," comes this blood boiling reminder that Republicans are Scum of the very first order. There just isn't invective strong enough for this:

Retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks was paid $100,000 - out of donations made to wounded veterans - for allowing his name to be used on fundraising appeals by a charity that has come under increasing scrutiny for the way it handles its money.
Lawmakers questioned the ethics of the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes Foundation not only for using donors’ money to pay Franks, but for failing to disclose to potential donors who received the mail solicitations that Franks was paid for his endorsement.
… ”If we disclose, we’d be out of business,” [president Roger] Chapin said.
“Your words are wonderful, because if the public knew, they wouldn’t donate,” said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.
Chapin acknowledged that his organization has used inflated numbers in its mailings when describing what percentage of donations actually helps veterans.
While some mailings have stated that 92 percent or even 100 percent of donations have gone to veterans, the real figure is closer to 25 percent, according to a congressional study.

I think that soon, we'll find ourselves needing to come up with a new word, one that describes "domestic post-battlefield fragging." Franks better not go into any VFW halls anytime soon. This was in "Military Times," so word is going to get out. Asshole.

It's all lies. Or distortion. Or confabulation. Or misdirection. But I found this example rather egregious. I bet you DFHs remember this sort of thing from back in the day:

Radio Sawa broadcast on December 11 the good news from the American forces that the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha had been definitively cleared of the last vestiges of AlQaeda. Here's what their website reported that day

Joseph Inge, fourth brigade, third American infantry division, said his forces with the aid of the Awakening forces had been able to clear out the last strongholds of AlQaeda in the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha south of Baghdad. He told Radio Sawa: "We have secured the area by freeing it from the threat of AlQaeda, with the assistance of local citizens". And Captain Inge called on the families that had fled to return to their homes in those areas, promising every type of support and assistance to those families.

On Thursday 40 "targets"--described by the miitary as "reported AlQaeda safe-havens"--were hit by a total of 40,000 pounds of bombs dropped on Arab Jabour in a 10-minute raid by the American Air Force assisted by another brigade, the second, of the same third American infantry division that had invited families back into the area only three weeks ago. The military had no information on how many people it killed.

On a thread at our Grey Lord's Estate, one commenter reminded me of one of my favorite antiwar songs. It's been a long time, Tralfaz. Thanks.

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