Samantha Power’s book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, would have received much more, and well-deserved, publicity if she had not made a stupid comment to a journalist regarding Senator Hillary Clinton. As a result, she resigned from Barack Obama’s campaign and this has probably affected her promotion of the book. It is a shame because it is indeed a fascinating book regarding the complex and frustrating internal workings of the United Nations through the prism of another fascinating figure: Sergio Vieira de Mello.  Read more 

Why won’t the war end? Money, of course.

U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed.

Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups.

Plenty of Dems on that list. I think too often points like these are left out of discussions about the war, when it will end, why it goes on. Some argue the war is the only real stimulus to the economy, and when it ends the preznit of the time will be the guy/gal without the seat in an economic game of musical chairs (from the perspective of the rich). We’ll see. But the amounts this article mentions are peanuts, compared to the real profit being pocketed by those unelected, unrevealed by our press, figures who appoint and select “our” politicians. Trillions, that’s the relevant perspective. Where’d they go?

In anticipation of Petraeus’ testimony this week, it might be helpful to have some reality-based talking points about recent events in Iraq to bulwark against the inevitable flurry of right-wing BS and journalistic laziness soon to come:

Juan Cole breaks most of them down very succinctly, referring also to Frank Rich in today’s NYT (more on that later):

1. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Da’wa Party, which back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, are closer to Iran than the Sadr Movement.

2. It was al-Maliki’s parliamentary coalition that sought the cease fire by asking their Iranian patrons to broker it.

3. The main motivation for the attack on Sadrist neighborhoods in Basra was to ensure that ISCI wins the elections in that key oil province in October.

[paragraph broken into bullet points by me]  Read more 

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.  Read more 

Like it or not, our next president will have to deal with conflicts all over the world. The nature of warfare has been changing (a lot of ink has been spent on this already) but obviously, this administration did not read the memo.  Read more 

As the MSM largely ignores what is truly occurring in Iraq, the bumper-sticker tactics of the Republican Party (and their minions) seem to be working.  Read more 

Why I can no longer watch cable news.

Edited by vastleft: please don’t post copyrighted works in their entirety. Especially something by a good guy like Tom Tomorrow.

[Reposting because I want to remind you: McCain lacks virility, self-confidence, needs to be succored by women decades younger than himself, and he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about when it comes to Iraq. Titter, GOS front paged this one, way back in the day when we were all about crushing Republicans, and not each other.]

Just got back from AEI, and boy, they really need air conditioning! No, really- by the end of the chat I and everyone else in the room were about to fall over from heat exhaustion. I wonder if Joe always has that effect…
But seriously, I suppose you want to know what happened. Well, the good news is…Joe and John made friends in Iraq! They talked to happy, fluffy people who said things are going great and we’re winning and can win and that they want to stay. In fact, things are so good over there, Joe and John told us, that we should send more troops over to join in the fun!

The Surge is on. I have about 12 pages of notes, but here’s all I’m going to subject you to.

1. We aren’t winning enough (they couldn’t bring themselves to say “losing”) because of the naughty, feckless generals who misinterpreted Bush’s brilliant strategy thus far. But Casey and the others are on the way out, and the new guy, Petreus (sp?), is a “proven anti-insurgency” fighter with winning tactics. He’s going to get back to the plan, which John and Joe both told us they’d been avocating all along, and we’re going to surge to victory.

2. The surge will be sustained for at least 2 years. Timelines embolden the Enemy, and so we shouldn’t set one for withdrawl. We’ve got to stay as long as it takes to “finish the mission.”  Read more 

On this day of the dying god’s return/rebirth (which as an atheist of course I don’t believe ever happened) let us remember that today, perhaps tomorrow, the 4000th American death will occur in Iraq.

And of course “no one” is counting Iraqi dead anymore, but taken together, how many are dead from disease, malnutrition, gang violence, murder, bombs, forced migration…it must be well above a million by now.

On this holiday, I hope you’ll take a moment to think of those who will never come home, never be with their children and families, and never breathe the fresh spring air again. And why it is so important that no matter which one it is, we must have a Democratic administration that can be pressured to end this evil occupation. We know that won’t ever work with Republicans.  Read more 

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!  Read more 

Lynndie England, of Abu Ghraib fame, gives a lengthy interview in the German magazine Stern. England was sentenced to three years in prison for her part in the deeds there. She served 521 days and is now out on parole. How’s life for her?

“(She sighs) Oh, it’s just little things going wrong. I’m just trying to get by. Trying to find a job, trying to find a house. It’s been harder than I expected. I went to a couple of interviews, and I thought they went great. I wrote dozens of applications. Nothing came of it. I put in at Wal-Mart, at Staples. I’d do any job. But I never heard from them.”  Read more 

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.”

The New York Times is reporting that Admiral William Fallon, the top commander in the Middle East, is retiring early.

As you probably already know Admiral Fallon has been at the center of recent controversy for opposing any war with Iran. So, naturally, having said something so sane and sensible, he must be driven out of his job.

See the NYT article.

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.  Read more 

Via eriposte at The Leftcoaster, compare and contrast:  Read more 

U.S. Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law

As with the Montagnards of the Vietnamese mountains in the 1960s — so with the Kurds of the Iraqi mountains in 2008.

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:  Read more 

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.

Funny. I would have thought it was more. From the Center for Public Integrity, via AP:

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

This is news? Though it is nice to have the numbers:  Read more 

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.  Read more 

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