Islam Knows War Is Depraved

Update: Greenwald: We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment:

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to 'look to the future.'

We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions 'inflame anti-American sentiment' is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would 'inflame anti-American sentiment.' It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

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Do not look at the pictures below - they are disgusting and repulsive to any civilized human being. [ I took them down, they make me feel sick. AfterDowningStreet keeps them to remind people that war is not a video game.]

But they make a point: That War, is awful and depraved.

Understand that President Obama's sub-moronic statement - "(T)he most direct consequence of releasing (the Abu Ghraib photos), I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger" - is ludicrous in the face of the 1,000,000s killed, wounded and traumatized for life in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Who wrote that for Obama?

Put aside the anti-democratic nature of secrecy and domestic government censorship for a moment, the families of the people we killed would gladly be tortured if they could bring back their children, their brothers, their fathers. Hey, these guys are actual human beings.

To reduce it to political terms President Obama, think of war as a bad PR strategy, a rude thing to do to your fellow human beings in other countries and something that inflames anti-American opinion. War supports the message that we don't like you.

What the hell do you think war does for anti-American opinion?

Dick Cheney Stays on Point

Update: Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP

Dick Cheney is competing with Rush and Newt as the leader of the new GOP.

We wish him luck.

Maureen Dowd and Juan Cole analyse Cheney's macabre machinations that apparently will not stop ever. From Cole:

This week's news is about the grand old pit bull's struggle to continue to define his own party. Cheney emerged last Friday to warn on a North Dakota radio program that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to moderate its message. (Does that mean it is now radical?) Then on Sunday Cheney told Bob Schieffer of 'Face the Nation' that it was a mistake to stop using waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation, and that they did not constitute torture. He also poked fun at Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican and expressing a preference for the waspish Limbaugh as the party's leader.

Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

In a typically clear eyed, fact-based assessment by Patrick Cockburn in CounterPunch, Cockburn paints a picture of Iraq that whatever the pretend nature of our enterprise, the results are a catastrophe.

This is pretty standard stuff in most of the rest of the world, but one wonders how much of the American populace either knows or cares. Not at all clear.

Cockburn concludes:

Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined country behind them.

Let's hope that most Americans do not ape Rumsfeld and say: Stuff happens.

Public decency in Iraq

Illegally invading Iraq didn't work wonderfully to create an authoritarian client oil state, nor did it work out so very well to make a society recognizing human rights.

A million dead, millions displaced from their homes, millions traumatized, our own military reeling, 10,000s of young men and women injured and traumatized for life, and on and on.

Here's a gem from this morning emblematic of how wonderful Iraq is now:

A freelance journalist imprisoned in northern Iraq for violating a public decency law by writing a story about homosexuality has been pardoned and released, the writer and officials said Wednesday.

Public decency.

That's in the liberal, semi-autonomous part of Iraq. These guys make the Mormons and the religious right look like civil libertarians.

Wisconsin lawmakers participate in "Bring the Guard Home" campaign

The Iraq Waris largely silent at the Democratic Convention in Denver.

From WIBA Radio (Madison, Wisconsin):

State Rep. Mark Pocan (Madison) drafting a bill to strip the feds of its power to send National Guard troops to Iraq
By The Wheeler News Service

An anti-war group wants state lawmakers around the nation to strip the federal government of its power to send National Guard troops to Iraq. The "Bring the Guard Home campaign" held a news conference in Denver today near the DNC site. Mark Pocan, a state representative from Wisconsin, was one of the speakers. He says Wisconsin is one of eleven states where bills are being drafted aimed at ending the deployment of National Guard troops to Iraq. The bill could be introduced this year.

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.

McCain Is a Fool

Asked about American troops remaining in Iraq for decades, Senator John McCain said, "No, but that's not too important. What's important is casualties in Iraq."

Right, so it's not important that we walk across highways at rush hour either, just that we don't sustain casualties.

We are paying 10s of millions of dollars to former "terrorist" Sunnis not to attack us, millions more to prop up a Shiite government (adding up to about $12 billion/month), among other expenditures, while condemning the most popular movement in Iraq because they, like most Iraqis, want us out.

One has to ask: How seriously dumb is John McCain?

The invasion was illegal, though the resulting occupation ironically has the patina of a UN mandate, though the Bush dreams of a client oil state are gone.

Twelve billion a month? I wonder if families in the United States have any use for that money. How about our veterans sent to war on the basis of lies?

Bush/Neocons Against Democracy; McCain Admits War Is for Oil

via mal contends

Update: John McCain: "My friends, I will have an energy policy which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East." Said Chris Mattews: "“You know, if somebody else were to say that, they would be accused of being a communist, or radical, or a leftist…for John McCain, a war hero, to say that we’re fighting in the Middle East to protect our oil sources is an astounding development.”

Reading the James Kitfields, neocons, and chickenhawks of the world takes a dose of good humor.

That's because the humanitarian disasters that James Kitfield (along with other neocon cheerleaders, including McCain) excuses and his unseemly enthusiasm for defending the perpetrators tend to grate on the nerves of those for whom tyranny and authoritarianism are repulsive.

Consider James Kitfield in the cover story of the National Journal, Democracy Stalled.

Apparently mystified by the Arab peoples' utter rejection of the American imperial project, Kitfield in his 4,400-word piece references Bush's second Inaugural Address in which Bush, and you can look it up, mentioned "freedom" and "liberty" a whole bunch of times.

Writes Kitfield:

Remarkably, it was just three years ago that President Bush unveiled a new 'freedom' agenda in his second Inaugural Address, rallying the United States and its allies to a generations-spanning effort to transform the Middle East through democracy. In his soaring speech, Bush called the campaign to topple the forces of tyranny and authoritarianism a national security mandate and a moral imperative.
'America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,' Bush proclaimed. 'We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.'

Well, remarkably it was just five years ago that Bush decided to invade Iraq in violation of international law (hey, come along UN if you want to be "relevant"), and proceeded to be forced into accepting direct election of local officials under threat by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Now, as civil war continues, Bush is paying Sunnis millions of American tax dollars not to kill our troops, all the while insisting that we must keep the troops there as an occupation force against whoever Bush decides for the moment is the real threat to America.

Though Bush soared in his rhetoric, a quick examination of Kitfield's piece reveals a couple of deflating facts.

He mentioned the word "oil" not once.

Noam Chomsky cuts through this ideological oil constraint nicely in an interview from 2006.

"Doctrinal managers would like us to believe that the US and UK would have 'liberated' Iraq even if its major exports were lettuce and pickles and the major energy resources of the world were in the South Pacific. It takes really impressive discipline 'not to see' the obvious."

Also, Kitfield mentions "Abu Ghraib prison" not once.

These democratic idealists like Kitfield are just too busy analyzing to be bothered by such fare in their pieces.

As Kitfield delves into what What Went Wrong with Bush's idealistic democracy-promoting enterprise, it's worth noting that Kitfield, one has to believe, deliberately ignores the mission, vision, objectives and goals of Bush and his regime.

That would be controlling oil, not exporting democracy.

Carl Estrabrook sums it up nicely, though not on the pages of the National Journal.

Since the Second World War -- from which the United States emerged as the world's only undamaged major country and proceeded to organize the economy of the world -- a cornerstone of American policy has been control of Middle East energy resources, the greatest geopolitical prize in the modern world.

Kitfield ought to consider that no human blood is justified for American control of oil.

Instead he ponders:

Confronted with mounting internal instability, an ascendant Shiite Iran, and empowered Islamist groups throughout the region, authoritarian Sunni Arab governments allied with the United States have cracked down on opposition groups and the press, reversing their own modest democratic reforms. Each day seems to bring news of more opposition figures or government critics arrested and imprisoned, and more restrictions imposed on the press in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

You mean we're invading these countries next? Democracy-exporting sure can be hard work sometimes.

So it is with good humor that one must say to Kitfield and his ilk: Leave democracy and liberty out of it; you're out of your league. And you may wish to ask your editor for a new headline: Imperialism Stalled.

Post Wins Pulitzer for Walter Reed Army Medical Scandal

The Washington Post has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its "continuing coverage of the state of the military health care system," including the military's appalling treatment of Army 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside.

See also the Post's PTSD Primer for an excellent resource on PTSD.

Horton on Iraq

Good piece by Scott Horton at Harper's.

"... starting with the media’s own framing of the question: “Is the surge working?” The question should be different, namely, what are the U.S. objectives in Iraq and are they being met, or even served, by these developments?"

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.

Iraq and Afghanistan War Facts

This is why we don't want an administration with D.C. experience over good sense and sound judgement:

From Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) e-mail:

- 300,000 Injured and Ill Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

- Cumulative U.S. service members deployed: 1,641,894

- Diagnosed with a mental health condition: 120,049 (40% of patients)

- Veterans diagnosed with PTSD: 67,717 (23% of patients)

Consider other costs such as millions of Iraqis dead, wounded, traumatized and displaced, trillions of U.S. dollars, the enmity of an entire region, and one can see why a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton is an awful prospect for the next president.

Krauthammer: Wrong About Iraq as Usual, Worse than a Broken Clock

Update III: U.S. Moves the goalposts in Iraq, again

Update II: ‘Wave Of Violence’ Against Women In Iraq Undercuts White House’s Claims Of Success

Update: Krauthammer has been lying all along (imagine that): 20,000 vets' brain injuries not listed in Pentagon tally.

Charles Krauthammer in this morning's Post brings more happy news from Iraq: Now, really, really, it's going well; our illegal war is working.

The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.

"(P)alpable." Let's take a glance at this morning's news. Juan Cole's blog shows us:

Friday, November 23, 2007
Dozens Killed in Bombings,
Clashes 3 Million Iranian Pilgrims Expected
41% of Jihadis are Saudis

That doesn't sound so good to establish a client oil state for us.

Maybe that day was just an outlier day, let's look at Thursday:

Thursday, November 22, 2007
Abu Abd and Baghdad Security
US Soldier Killed
dozens of Iraqis Killed or Wounded

Here's a second glance:

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq for Wednesday. Excerpts:
BAGHDAD - A U.S. soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were killed ... Three U.S. soldiers were wounded. ...

DIWANIYA - Police arrested 30 people, accused of assassinations and other attacks against Iraqi security forces ...

RAMADI - At least six people were killed when a car exploded ... with 15 wounded...

BAGHDAD - Three policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in Mansour district of western Baghdad, police said...

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi army found six decomposed bodies buried...

LONDON - Two British military personnel were killed in Iraq on Tuesday...

Today, is Nov. 23, and only 30 Americans killed so far this month. Wonderful news.

Only a few hundred Iraqis killed this month. Millions dislocated and moved from their homes. Segregated neighborhoods. A country occupied against its will.

Charles Krauthammer, the neocon chickenhawk, is really right this time, he says. How could we have ever doubted him?

You heard the saying: "Even a broken clock is right twice a day"?

The neocons aren't even that good.

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Anti-war Sentiment Towards Iraq War at Record High

Yeah. Maybe this will inject some spine into the Dems' next week House vote.

Reports Katy Byron from CNN:

Opposition to the war in Iraq has reached an all-time high, according to
the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Thursday morning.

Support for the war in Iraq has dropped to 31 percent and the 68 percent who oppose the war is a new record.

Despite the drop in violence in Iraq, only one quarter
of Americans believes the U.S. is winning the war. There has been virtually no change in the past month in the number of Americans who believe that things are going badly for the U.S. in the war in Iraq.

The public also opposes U.S. military action against Iran. Sixty-three percent oppose air strikes on Iran, while 73 percent oppose using ground troops as well as air strikes in that country.

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We're Responsible for Iraq War

Responsibility for the Iraq War lies with the duplicitous Bush administration of-course, the compliant American press and the enabling Congressional Democrats such as Sen. Kohl, Sen. Biden, Sen. Clinton, Rep. Kind, among others.

But what of the American people's responsibility? Responsibility not just for the catastrophic damage done to America, but the crimes inflicted onto millions of innocents in a war that is illegal under international law.

This summer saw the passing of two leading scholars of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg and Norman Cohn, whose analyses have as constant companions the questions of how the Holocaust could have occurred and which Germans bear responsibility. The mood of "passive compliance" is the culprit.

Frank Rich takes up the question of responsibility for the Iraq War today in The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us.

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves. ...

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin. ...

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day.

Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

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McClatchy: New military leaders question Iraq mission

Who are these guys? Defeatocrats?

Nancy A. Youssef and Renee Schoof have the story:

Four and a half years after the nation's top military leaders saluted and fell in behind President Bush's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, their replacements are beginning to question the mission and sound alarms about the toll the war is taking on the Army and the Marine Corps. The change at the Pentagon is striking but little-noticed, in part because Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a longtime veteran of the CIA, is quiet where his predecessor Donald H. Rumsfeld was not.

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Getting Back to Normal in Iraq

Normal. That's how Bush described the wonderful effect of continued U.S. occupation of Iraq, people were just getting back to a normal life, with all its small joys and stability.

Fortunately, this blatant lie was knocked down across even the corporate, broadcast media with an unusual display of disgust.

This morning's NYT has this description of normalcy:

Iraqis have continued to flee their homes throughout the American troop increase, which began early this year, and despite assurances that it is becoming safe to return, uncrossable lines have been left in Iraqi minds and neighborhoods. Schools, hospitals and municipal buildings are quickly losing their diversity, and even moderate Iraqis like the Muhammads say they cannot imagine ever going back. ...

The patterns started to form in 2005, when militants began pushing Iraqis out of their houses, a deeply personal violation that often leaves families jobless and impoverished.
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An Oily and Bloody Fiasco

BuzzFlash nails it:

The Times piece, "Compromise on Oil Law in Iraq Seems to Be Collapsing," epitomizes the "Big Oily and Bloody Fiasco."

Cannot wait for tonight to hear Bush's determination and grit. Wouldn't you like to just deck that prick who calls himself the president?

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Top Admiral Who Said Attacking Iran 'Will Not Happen on my Watch,' Splits with Bush on Occupying Iraq

As the current policy desires of the American people bear no weight with George W. Bush, the hope of millions of Americans is the spectacular emergence of an unimpeachable administration insider blowing the lid off the Bush scam in Iraq so convincingly that another war with Iran is halted and Democrats in congress are infused with a spinal column on the existing war with Iraq—the human embodiment of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, Joe Wilson and the retired Generals who have blasted the administration all rolled into one.

This hope is naïve of-course; no one is unimpeachable to the amoral Bush administration, and the career inducements for going along with Bush’s insane ploys prove irresistible for war planners and for those who simply know better.

But human decisions matter, no matter the anti-democratic ethos of the Bush administration and indeed the entire Republican Party.

The Washington Post fronts a report this morning chronicling a split in the administration involving Adm. William J. Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command overseeing Middle East operations, and the administration’s newest frontman, Gen. David H. Petraeus, whose White House-authored report delivered to Congress can be expected to be, if not laughed out of Washington, met with great skepticism and ridicule, though this incredulity won’t lead to much congressional action to halt the policy so disbelieved.

The page one, 3,639-word Post piece quotes on very deep background one administration official’s description of the schism between General Petraeus and Adm. Fallon as follows:

"Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it."

As the administration attempts another bald-faced, lying PR campaign to continue the Iraq occupation and apparently plans for a military engagement with Iran, it’s worth noting Adm. Fallon’s reported words this February on striking the politically and militarily powerful Iran: An attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch".

Could Fallon be the ultimate insider that millions of Americans wish for who would blow the lid off the administration’s lies?

Maybe Colin Powell will discover that moral courage over career is the honorable course.

One can hope.

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Bin Laden Is Not Important, Republicans Now Say

The Republicans invent their own reality: About the imminence of a Shia caliphate (Islamic state) taking over the world, about the Sunni bin Laden changing everything about America so that George W. Bush must have special powers to fight him and our Constitution changed to prevent attacks from him.

But when bin Laden gets on tape demonstrating the idiocy not just of Bush's military policy, but Bush's competence, Republican reactions change fast:

Via Steve Benen at Crook and Liars:
Fred Thompson’s reaction to today’s Osama bin Laden tape:
“Bin Laden is more symbolism than anything else,” he said.

Mitt Romney on bin Laden: [Romney] said the country would be safer by only “a small percentage” and would see “a very insignificant increase in safety” if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney said.

George W. Bush on bin Laden: “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

Benen asks, "At what point did the GOP decide that bin Laden no longer matters? And how would the right respond if Dems made similar comments?"

Here's a good one by Greg Saunders at This Modern World:

These Colors Sorta Run

What happens when a grandstanding fool whipped into a patriotic fervor makes a sucker’s bet that George W. Bush would do a good job?

Bob Flournoy swore after 9/11 that he would wear the same patriotic tie until the day Osama bin Laden was captured or killed.

He figured that it would take the USA a couple of weeks to find the notorious terrorist leader. Despite that miscalculation — it’s been almost six years — the city attorney has kept his word. He’s been wearing the same red-white-and-blue necktie since the attacks on America.

“It looks like Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner,” Flournoy tells The Lufkin (Texas) Daily News. “It is faded, worn and tattered. It has been reworked, patched and pieced together. Velcro has been added around the neck because it is too fragile to tie and untie. It is smaller and even a little smelly, but it is still a grand old flag. Betsy Ross would be proud. . . .

“If Bin Laden is alive, I challenge him to prove it by Sept. 11, 2007,” Flournoy says. “If he does not come forward with some proof, I am personally going to declare him dead, and I will be able to take off my tie and give it a proper burial.”

Poor guy just wants to take off his smelly tie and in a few more days…
Crap. Osama just messed with the wrong Texan.

Flournoy said he has had enough of waiting for proof of bin Laden’s death. He thinks his friends and those around him every day will be very happy once he stops wearing the tie.

“Flies kind of gather around me, and I don’t have quite as many friends,” Flournoy said.. . .

“If by chance Bin Laden is not dead and proves it by Sept. 11th, I offer to meet him, man to man, at the park at City Hall and fight him to the death of one of us,” Flournoy said. “He just can’t kill Americans and get away with it.”

Flournoy doubts his challenge will reach Tora Bora, but wants a way to put his tattered old flag tie to rest once and for all.

“It’s been fun, but the fun’s about to end,” Flournoy said.

Writes Saunders: "That’s right, Osama. You’re about to get your ass kicked by somebody wearing a disgusting tie. Let’s Roll!"

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