Normandy - 65 Years

Update: Obama marks D-Day's 65th anniversary at Omaha Beach, France. "Don't forget ... ."

Today is June 6.

My girlfriend still talks about her late father and his service in World War II to defeat Nazis and fascists.

And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead and had me), we grew up hearing of the society-wide, shared sacrifice.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like when they were protected by the Bush administration.

Not like the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Lieberman-Neocon crowd doing their big con as 1o,000s come home dead, wounded, traumatized - different people - all for the lies of the policymakers; and Lieberman crowing for years that Iraq is "...the test of our generation." What a lying coward.

I post some World War II artifacts above that my girlfriend and her family treasure. Somehow, looking at them brings forth the truth of the World War II sacrifice and honor by mostly scared kids, in opposition to the imbecility and cowardice of the crowd of warmakers and liars, mostly but not exclusively in the Republican Party.

No one had the swagger and casualness of George W. Bush when it came time to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of real people and their loved ones.

Recollection of a Bush Imbecility

Considering the Israeli-Arab conflict early in his administration, George W. Bush was warned by Secretary of State Colin Powell that comprehensive American action in the peace process [such as it was] is imperative to prevent the emergence of a more militaristic Israeli foreign policy, and to avoid dire consequences for innocent Palestinians.

Bush's response to the warning was stunning.

As recounted by Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill (O'Neill, The Price of Loyalty, Simon & Schuster; pp 71-72), Bush said, "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things. ... [and restore 'balance']."

Putting aside the striking ambiguity of Bush's idea of balance and clarity as foreign policy objectives in arguably the most important region in the world, the results of the stupidity of Bush's hands-off-let-Israel-wage-war stance is now on display as just another catastrophe of the Bush administration as the death toll in Gaza mounts.

Let's hope the new Obama administration restores some rationality in foreign affairs.

Pictured below is a Palestinian woman and child at the site of a house damaged by Israeli air strikes on a nearby governmental building, December 30, 2008. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

BBC: Shoe-throwing Reporter's Brother Says He Has Been Severely Injured

We savaged a country; perhaps it's fitting that now Iraq savages a protester as we watch.

Palin the Lightweight

Speaking in apocalyptic terms to shore up the-anti-Christ-is-near vote, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she can follow political marching orders and that she is strikingly ignorant.

Big Dog Delivers

Bill Clinton Ought Hit McCain on National Security Tonight

Time to let the big dog loose on national security.

Hit the economy today and tonight and then: Bill.

Obama closes the deal tomorrow.

See Running for War President at Any Cost by Robert Scheer, for discussion of what's at stake.

Haaretz: U.S. puts brakes on Israeli plan to strike Iran

Is the predicted catastrophic economic and political fall-out from an Israeli strike against Iran preventing the U.S. from giving Israel a go-ahead?

A Haaretz article by Aluf Benn reads that the U.S. is putting the brakes on the execution of a strike:

The American administration has rejected an Israeli request for military equipment and support that would improve Israel's ability to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

A report published last week by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) states that military strikes are unlikely to destroy Iran's centrifuge program for enriching uranium.

The Americans viewed the request, which was transmitted (and rejected) at the highest level, as a sign that Israel is in the advanced stages of preparations to attack Iran. They therefore warned Israel against attacking, saying such a strike would undermine American interests. They also demanded that Israel give them prior notice if it nevertheless decided to strike Iran.

US-Israel Crimes in Gaza

Update: See Death in Gaza.

There's a word for people like the IDF who shoot children: Pigs.

One rarely reads of the US-supported Israeli atrocities committed in Gaza and the occupied territories. I mean what's Gaza, and are Palestinians really human beings?

They are. And what's being done to the Palestinians is an obscenity, a bloody siege described in a widely-distributed pamphlet at a 2002 demonstration as a "macabre saga of violence and methodical repression (Islamic Circle of North America)". It's unclear that if the violence and repression were to be featured on broadcast TV what the reaction would be.

[Picture above is of a demonstrator in the largest Palestinian human rights protest held in American history on April 20, 2002 in D.C.]

As one commenter wrote a couple of years back: "You can't be half-humanistic and half-fascist."

Writes Jeff Halper in CounterPunch:
In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza. The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity. The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations. Our voyage also exposes Israel’s attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. Israel’s claim that there is no Occupation, or that the Occupation ended with “disengagement,” is patently false. Occupation is defined in international law as having effective control over a territory. If Israel intercepts our boats, it is clear that it is the Occupying Power exercising effective control over Gaza. Nor has the siege anything to do with “security.” Like other elements of the Occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel has also besieged cities, towns, villages and whole regions, the siege on Gaza is fundamentally political. It is intended to isolate the democratically-elected government of Palestine and break its power to resist Israeli attempts to impose an apartheid regime over the entire country.
This is why I, an Israeli Jew, felt compelled to join this voyage to break the siege. As a person who seeks a just peace with the Palestinians, who understands (despite what our politicians tell us) that they are not our enemies but rather people seeking precisely what we sought and fought for – national self-determination I cannot stand idly aside. I can no more passively witness my government’s destruction of another people than I can watch the Occupation destroy the moral fabric of my own country. To do so would violate my commitment to human rights, the very essence of prophetic Jewish religion, culture and morals, without which Israel is no longer Jewish but an empty, if powerful, Sparta.

Tell Sen. Lieberman to immediately withdraw his commitment to deliver the keynote address at Hagee's Israel Summit on July 22.

Tell Sen. Lieberman to immediately withdraw his commitment to deliver the keynote address at Hagee's Israel Summit on July 22.

Activist Dems are delivering a petition to Joe Liberman who is desperate to prove that the is more of a whack than we would have thought.

Does Iran Have Right to Self-Defense

Update: Robert Dreyfuss: We aren't going to war with Tehran.

Iran is an authoritarian nightmare, like many of America's other allies in the region. But is a country developing weapons to protect itself against aggressors really that outrageous?

The neocons used to believe that is was not so outrageous.

From Norman Finkelstein:

In 2000, leading neoconservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol edited a volume of foreign policy analyses titled Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books). The chapter on Iran was written by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst on the Middle East. Here’s what he said:

"Tehran certainly wants nuclear weapons; and its reasoning is not illogical. Iran was gassed into surrender in the first Persian Gulf War; Pakistan, Iran’s ever more radicalized Sunni neighbor to the southeast, has nuclear weapons; Saddam Hussein, with his Scuds and his weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions, is next door; Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most ardent and reviled religious rival, has long-range missiles; Russia, historically one of Iran’s most feared neighbors, is once again trying to reassert its dominions I the neighboring Caucasus; and Israel could, of course blow the Islamic Republic to bits. Having been vanquished by a technologically superior Iraq at a cost of at least a half-million men, Iran knows very well the consequences of having insufficient deterrence. And the Iranians possess the essential factor to make deterrence work: sanity. Tehran or Isfahan in ashes would destroy the Persian soul, about which even the most hard-line cleric cares deeply. As long as the Iranians belie that either the U.S. or Israel or somebody else in the region might retaliate with nuclear weapons, they won’t do something stupid.

"A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would of course check, if not checkmate, the United States’ maneuvering room in the Persian Gulf. We would no doubt think several times about responding to Iranian terrorism or military action if Tehran had the bomb and a missile to deliver it. During the lead-up to the second Gulf War, ruling clerical circles in Tehran and Qom were abuzz with the debate about nuclear weapons. The mullahs…agreed: if Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, the Americans would not have challenged him. For the “left” and the “right,” this weaponry is the ultimate guarantee of Iran’s defense, its revolution, and its independence as a regional great power. (pp. 138-39)"

Winning in Iraq

Patrick Cockburn has an insightful analysis from Iraq. See Special Report from the Battlefields, Who's Actually Winning in Iraq?

Bush's best hope for his illegal act of aggression: An Iranian-aligned Shia government tolerating a long-term American presence in Iraq as a bulwark against Sunni and Shia rivals.

...Paradoxically, the Shia governing parties in Baghdad, ISCI and Dawa, have traditionally had closer links with Iran than the Sadrists. ISCI was founded by the Iranians in Tehran in 1982 to be their puppet if they succeeded in defeating Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. It is still heavily influenced by them, but at the end of the day neither ISCI nor the Sadrists want the Americans nor the Iranians to treat Iraq as a client state...

Iraq Does Not Want US in Their Country

Al-Maliki: May Ask US Troops to Leave; Al-Sadr Forms Special Groups to Fight Occupation

It's like they don't want us there. Can we leave, now?

No WMD.

No Saddam.

No 911 conspirators.

Well, let's throw in a few $trillion more, sacrifice some more troops, and then maybe they'll like us this time.

Wisconsin Flood Victims Can't Get Aid

From bad to worse: Residents may not get flood coverage, it's just people, let's send the money to Iraq instead.

Why Militarism?

This video shot last year is appalling.

Footage showing Irish Noble Peace Prize recipient, Mairead Maguire getting shot by Israeli army who opened fire at peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 20, 2007, following the international conference on popular resistance (April 18-20, 2007). Maguire was shot by a rubber-coated-metal bullet in the leg. Maguire speaks after she received first aid. [Footage by Ana Nogueira]

Thousands of innocent Palestinians getting shot, imprisoned and killed is appalling.

I read Norman G. Finkelstein's preface, an angry challenge to Barack Obama, and then watched the video.

We need more, not less anger at what Israel (with American complicity) has now become, and what we have all become. What a travesty.

American progressives often fret that the Israel-militarism issue will split the Democratic Party, parting the way for radical Neocon dominance of American politics for generations.

But do we add our voices of condemnation and challange Israeli-American aggression and human rights violations, or ought we be silent?

Being silent; in Germany, in Poland, in Guatemala, Chile, one can go on, has never been the answer.

Rev. John Hagee Is a Bigoted Whack Whose Endorsement McCain Sought and Received

How can a complete whack like the Rev. John Hagee whose endorsement of and political relationship with John McCain are a matter of public record not dominate the airwaves?

The apocalyptic-minded and anti-Catholic Rev. John Hagee was pursued by John McCain, and Hagee ultimately endorsed McCain in late February when they appeared together in San Antonio. (picture at right)

Hagee is a bigoted nut, but also a major Republican political player whose specific foreign policy prescriptions are seen by him as preparing the way for the Second Coming, and are identical to the controversial policy positions taken by McCain on Iran and Iraq, now.

Turns out that Hagee, of the let’s-bomb-Iran corner of the rightwing, is also a prominent signer of the Forgotten American Coalition's statement proclaiming that we need to stay in Iraq and that the “… Iraq War must be seen in the broader context of Islamo-fascism's war on America and Western Civilization. It is one front in a global conflict fought from Europe and the Middle East to Africa, the Balkans, the Indian Subcontinent and, finally, to the streets of our cities. ...”

If those words sound familiar, it’s because McCain had been repeating them in substance in his stump speech for months.

What has not been repeated for months is Hagee's venom coming from the Founder and National Chairman of the religious right's Christians United for Israel.

As Frank Rich writes this morning of Hagee:

Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is 'the Great Whore,' Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking 'the blood of the Jewish people.' That’s because the Great Whore represents 'the Roman Church,' which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Have a look at this video and you'll get the picture.

Buchanan: Petraeus Points to War With Iran

The fear and/or prediction of many that Bush, Cheney, McCain/Lieberman and company just may be stupid enough to launch an air strike against Iran this year has long been shared by isolationist, conservative columnist, Patrick J. Buchanan.

Because candidate McCain is so unschooled in foreign policy, McCain has repeatedly "confused the basic Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide that's absolutely fundamental to grasping the Middle East ... ," he fits in well with the neocon, imperialist foreign policy school.

Buchanan, citing Petraeus' testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee this week and other development, writes in his Petraeus Points to War With Iran:

The neocons may yet get their war on Iran. ... This is Bush's last chance to strike and, when Iran responds, to effect its nuclear castration. Are Bush and Cheney likely to pass up this last chance to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and effect the election of John McCain? For any attack on Iran's 'terrorist bases' would rally the GOP and drive a wedge between Obama and Hillary. ...

Buchanan notes that the congressional Democrats have acted with the moral courage that is on a par of that displayed by the many authoritarian Arab countries that Vice President Cheney has been touring lately in the region.

In early 2007, Nancy Pelosi pulled down a resolution that would have denied Bush the authority to attack Iran without congressional approval. In September, both Houses passed the Kyl-Lieberman resolution designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

Courtesy of Congress, Bush thus has a blank check for war on Iran. And the signs are growing that he intends to fill it in and cash it.

This is going to be one fascinating fall election; less fascinating, though, if you happen to be a human being living in Iran.

The Iraq Lie

via mal contends

Comes up every once in a while. My girlfriend so proud of her dad talking about what she knew of her late father's service in World War II to defeat some pig NAZIs and fascists.

And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead to have me), we hear of the society-wide, shared sacrifice.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like today when they are protected by the Bush DOJ.

It's not like the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Lieberman-Neocon crowd doing their big con as 1o,000s come home dead, wounded, traumatized - different people, all for the lies of the policymakers; and Lieberman has the gall to crow for years that Iraq is "...the test of our generation." What a lying coward.

Makes one pretty sick.

I post some World War II artifacts above that my girlfriend and her family treasure. Somehow, looking at them brings forth the truth of the World War II sacrifice and honor by mostly scared kids, in opposition to the imbecility and cowardice of the crowd of Bush policymakers that we have today.

No one had the swagger and casualness of George W. Bush when it came time to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of real people and their loved ones.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Ending the Iraq War

The never-ending but always changing reasons offered by the administration and its political allies why we need to continue the occupation of Iraq are easily dismissed by any serious, honest analysis.

Zbigniew Brzezinski offers a straight-forward analysis in the Washington Post.

The case for U.S. disengagement from combat is compelling in its own right. But it must be matched by a comprehensive political and diplomatic effort to mitigate the destabilizing regional consequences of a war that the outgoing Bush administration started deliberately, justified demagogically and waged badly. ...

Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush's obsessions with the removal of Saddam Hussein were worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars -- not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States' world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing -- the answer would have been an unequivocal "no."

Corporate Genocide

Imagine the audacity of Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern media to object to being invaded and occupied.

Here's an uppity Al Jazeera's piece by Nofa Khadduri on Iraq's corporate genocide.

And pay no mind to that big Basra Oil Terminal in the picture above; we invaded Iraq to bring democracy and protect the world from weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, and whatever else we decide to say in the future.

The Invasion of Iraq - Five Years in Disgrace

Update: Obama Delivers Speech on 5th Anniversary of Iraq War

Listening to Bush at the Pentagon this morning on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, one would be generous to brand this callow and disingenuous performance as that of a braying ass.

The truth is that this war has shattered the lives of 100,000s of Americans and millions of Iraqis, in a calculated set of lies with consequences so grave that one struggles to find the appropriate words of condemnation.

Juan Cole gives us a start in Salon. How President Bush and his advisors have spent each year of the war peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished

Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who retired in late 2002, is the "three-star Marine Corps general who was the military's top operations officer before the invasion," has "urged active-duty officers to speak out now if they had doubts about the war." [NYT, April 10, 2006] Wrote Newbold:

Bush's decision to invade Iraq "was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions —or bury the results."

There is no way for us to understand the Bush regime's willingness to lie and sacrifice fellow human beings, as they speak about freedom and liberty—rights and inherent dignity of human beings that Bush and his minions neither understand nor appreciate.

What we do know is that Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and everyone who played along with these people, and that includes Senators Clinton, Biden, Kerry, Edwards, Kohl, the whole lot of them, ought to begin to make reparations by actively resisting the continuation of this obscenity.