Shoe Throwing Hero Brutally Beaten

From the BBC:

The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody.

Muntadar al-Zaidi has suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding, as well as an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC. Mr Zaidi threw his shoes at Mr Bush at a news conference, calling him "a dog".

The head of Iraq's journalists' union told the BBC that officials told him Mr Zaidi was being treated well.
[...]
Mr Zaidi told our correspondent that despite offers from many lawyers his brother has not been given access to a legal representative since being arrested by forces under the command of Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my definition of being treated well does not result in a broken hand, broken ribs, internal bleeding and an eye injury. Nor does this brutal response jibe with Bush's own protestations that 1) it wasn't that big a deal and 2) that it was somehow an example of the new freedoms that Iraqis enjoy thanks to the heroic efforts of US troops. And we already know too well that Bush's definition of freedom includes being locked up in a cell indefinitely and denied legal representation.

As the same BBC article shows, Mr. Zaidi is now regarded more as a hero than a criminal - which hardly bodes well for Bush's attempts to pass the whole thing off as insignificant. Reaction to the incident only underlines how misguided it is to brutalize someone who now has a reputation as a hero in the Middle East.

Our correspondent says that the previously little-known journalist from the private Cairo-based al-Baghdadia TV has become a hero to many, not just in Iraq but across the Arab world, for what many saw as a fitting send-off for a deeply unpopular US president.
[...]
The shoes themselves are said to have attracted bids from around the Arab world. According to unconfirmed newspaper reports, the former coach of the Iraqi national football team, Adnan Hamad, has offered $100,000 (£65,000) for the shoes, while a Saudi citizen has apparently offered $10m (£6.5m).

The daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Aicha, said her charity would honour the reporter with a medal of courage, saying his action was a "victory for human rights". The charity called on the media to support Mr Zaidi and put pressure on the Iraqi government to free him.

Does anybody remember back when Bush was trying to sell this war to the American people, the UN and an array of countries who might join the coalition of the willing? One of the talking points was how the general Arab and Muslim world would embrace American intervention in the region and move towards a more stable and US-friendly footing. How's that working out for you Mr. Bush?


TAGS: The Shoe, Dumbya, World's Worst Statesman, Dodgy Diplomacy

4000.

The story speaks for itself:

BAGHDAD (MSNBC, 10:30 EDT) March 23 - Four U.S. soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad late Sunday, raising the death toll for American forces since start of the war to 4,000, according to the Pentagon.

The grim milestone was reached less than a week after the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion to topple former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and coincided with a spate of violence across Iraq on Sunday that left at least 61 people dead.

The attacks included rockets and mortars fired at Baghdad's U.S.-protected Green Zone and a suicide car bomb detonated at an Iraqi army post in the northern city of Mosul.

The latest violence underscored the fragile security situation and the resilience of both Sunni and Shiite extremist groups as the war enters its sixth year.

The attacks in Baghdad probably stemmed from rising tensions between rival Shiite groups — some of whom may have been behind the Green Zone blasts. It was the most sustained assault in months against the nerve center of the U.S. mission.

Late Sunday, four U.S. troops were killed and another injured after being attacked with an improvised explosive device while conducting a vehicular patrol in Baghdad, the military said.

The military said the soldiers were from Multi-National Division but gives no other details about their identities.

The deadliest attack of the day was in Mosul when a suicide driver slammed his vehicle through a security checkpoint in a hail of gunfire and detonated his explosives in front of an Iraqi headquarters building, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and injuring 42 other people, police said.

Iraqi guards opened fire on the vehicle but couldn't stop it because the windshield had been bulletproofed, said an Iraqi army officer. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not supposed to release the information.

Mosul, Iraq's third largest city about 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, has been described as the last major urban area where the Sunni extremist al-Qaida group maintains a significant presence....

The rest is here.

Now pardon me, as I must stick my head out of the window so as to begin screaming BLOODY MURDER!

Happy anniversary.

As you read this, on the fifth aniversary of the launch of the Bush regime’s immoral and illegal war of empire against Iraq, we are almost half-way through yet another week where another $5 billion will be spent on this apparently endless debacle.

Other costs to date:

Americans dead: 3,990

Americans wounded: 29,000 +

Iraqis dead: At least 100, 000, maybe closer to 500,000

Iraqis wounded: Unknown

Iraqis displaced: At least four million

That’s all I have. There’s not much more to say.

"Semper fi"?

Not hardly. Not if the wounds you suffer are to your heart and to your soul:

Denial in the Corps by Kathy Dobie, from The Nation

Marine Lance Cpl. James Jenkins is buried in the same New Jersey cemetery that he used to run through on his way to high school, stopping at the Eat Good Bakery to get two glazed doughnuts and an orange juice before heading off to class. When his mother, Cynthia Fleming, visits his grave, she looks over the low cemetery wall at not only the bakery but the used-car lot where James used to sell Christmas trees during the winter and the nursing home where he worked every summer and says, “Lord, son, you’re on your own turf.” James, who died at 23, is buried in Greenwood Cemetery; the owners told Cynthia they’re proud to have him there.

During his short career as a Marine, Corporal Jenkins received many commendations recognizing his “intense desire to excel,” “unbridled enthusiasm” and “unswerving devotion to duty.” It was for heroic actions performed during a fifty-five-hour battle with the Mahdi militia in Najaf that Jenkins was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. The fighting, which began on the city streets in August 2004 and moved into the Wadi al Salam Cemetery, was ferociously personal. Marines and militiamen were often only yards apart, killing one another at close range. When the battle was over, eight Americans and hundreds of militiamen were dead.

After that tour, his second in Iraq, Jenkins could barely sleep. When he did, the nightmares were horrible. He was plagued by remorse and depression, unable to be intimate with his fiancée, run ragged by an adrenaline surge he couldn’t turn off.

Back at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton the following January, Jenkins took to gambling, or gambling took to him; he became addicted to blackjack and pai gow, a fast-moving card game where you can lose your shirt in a minute. The knife-edge excitement felt comfortingly familiar. Jenkins went into debt, borrowing thousands of dollars from payday loan companies. Busted for writing bad checks, he was locked up in the Camp Pendleton brig that spring pending court-martial. In the months that followed, he was released, locked up and released again. He spoke often of suicide. The Marines never diagnosed his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When his mother called his command seeking help, Jenkins’s first sergeant, who had not served in Iraq, told Fleming he thought James was using his suicidal feelings to his advantage. “I have 130 Marines to worry about other than your son,” she recalls the sergeant saying. When his command decided to lock him up a third time, James Jenkins ran.

On September 28, 2005, eight months after returning from Iraq, Jenkins found himself cornered in the Oceanside apartment he shared with his fiancée. A deputy sheriff pounded on the front door, while a US Marshal covered the back. The young man with the “intense desire to excel” decided he could not go back to the brig or get an other-than-honorable discharge. He would not shame his family or have his hard-won achievements and his pride stripped away. And he was in pain. “He said, ‘I can’t even shut my eyes,’” his mother says, recalling one of his calls home that month. “He said, ‘I killed 213 people, Mom.’ He said, ‘I can’t live like this.’ He said, ‘Everything I worked for is down the drain,’ and he was crying like a baby.” While the officers waited for his fiancée to open the door, Jenkins shot himself in the right temple…

The rest here. Prepare to be angry if you read it. Really. Angry. The outrage I felt after reading this piece made my heart race. What had been a good day was spoiled. The excitement I had felt on Tuesday over the primaries evaporated into a seething rage. I felt sick. Physically sick. It got my acid reflux all in a mess.

As I mentioned a while back, I have a former student who is a Marine, who is due to ship out to Iraq this month. And we just found out that another former student has just signed up. With the Marines.

When soldiers returned from the Civil War with what we know call post-traumatic stress disorder, their condition was referred to as “melancholy.” After the First World War, the doctors called it “shell shock,” and they knew it was caused by the horrors of war in the trenches. Some of those soldiers actually received some forms of treatment. World War Two? “Battle fatigue.” Many of that generation just dealt with their nightmares and flashbacks on their own, through sleepless nights, ruined marriages, alcoholism. It was only after Vietnam, with advances in psychiatry and psychology and an enlightened culture that physicians finally realized that what happens to those who serve in combat is a disorder, a mental illness, something that needs to be diagnosed and treated. Those who suffer from this condition are ill: they are sick. They are patients, not “slackers” or “malingerers” or “losers.”

It is shameful - if not criminal - that the Marine Corps, which so prides itself on espirit de corps and teamwork, which sells itself to young people as being the best of the best, the “few and the proud,” can treat its own members in such a disgracefully shabby fashion. They have turned back the clock over one hundred years. Even those who tried to nurse Johnny Reb and Billy Yank back to health were more compassionate and empathetic than the callous, cold, heartless excuses for human beings who so wrongly dealt with the young men in this article.

Rather than wasting time looking into which teams might have "illegally" videotaped the practice sessions of what other teams in the National Football League, or which over-paid, over-exposed baseball players might have used “performance-enhancing” drugs, the United States Senate ought to be investigating how America’s elite fighting force mistreats and abuses its own troops. How it ignores them at best, misdiagnoses them and cuts them off from benefits as a matter of routine policy, and, at worst, leaves them adrift, abandoning them to lives of isolation, addiction, and madness, to die at their own hands, all the while denying any complicity or responsibility for their fate. And then disrespecting their families when they have the temerity to try to get to the truth.

Read this article. But don't just be angry about it. Print out a copy. Photocopy that copy. Share this. Leave it around, in doctors' offices, on the seat on the bus, in the pew at your house of worship. And be sure to show it to any young person you might know who might be considering enlisting in the military.

Show them the truth. “Always faithful”? Not to those who serve.

They just get thrown out with the trash.

155,000 "eggs."

Give or take...

GENEVA (Reuters) Jan. 9 - About 151,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of their country, according to World Health Organization (WHO) research published on Wednesday.

The new study, which said violent deaths could have ranged from 104,000 to 223,000 between March 2003 and June 2006, is the most comprehensive since the war started.

The study drew on an Iraqi health ministry survey of nearly 10,000 households — five times the number of those interviewed in a disputed 2006 John Hopkins University study that said more than 600,000 Iraqis had died over the period.

While well below that figure, the United Nations agency’s estimate exceeds the widely-cited 80,000 to 87,000 death toll by the human rights group Iraq Body Count, which uses media reports and hospital and morgue records to calculate its tally…

The White House said it had not seen the study, but mourned the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

“The unmistakable fact is that the vast majority of these deaths are caused by the willful, murderous intentions of extremists committed to taking innocent life,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto...

The rest is here. Another “unmistakable fact” that Mr. Fratto conveniently left out is that these people would probably not have died if the Bush/Cheney regime had not launched an unnecessary, illegal, immoral, indefensible war of aggression based on lies and media manipulation against a country which posed no immediate threat to us.

But hey, these aren’t Americans we’re talking about here. During the summer after the Iraq War began, my family and I took a day trip down to the Jersey Shore. I had my “Peacemonger” and “War Is Not The Answer” bumper stickers emblazoned (as always) across the back window of my Honda CR-V. We were curbside unloading our beach paraphernalia when this guy comes by on his very expensive imported Italian racing bike (the kind with peddles) and starts heckling me. He didn’t like my stickers. My wife told me to ignore him, but that just made him angrier. So my son said, “Let him have it, Dad.” So I did. Very politely. With my usual litany of peacemongering questions:

- “How many of the September 11th hijackers were from Iraq?”

- “How can you justify attacking a country which has never attacked us?”

- “How can you say that oil isn’t what this war is about, when Iraq sits on the third largest oil deposit on the planet?”

That kind of thing. The biker guy started sputtering. And then I said, “Sir, with all due respect, I am not willing to have your president kill my sons so that he can try to prove he’s right about what is obviously so wrong.” And the guy says, “Well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.“ And then he rode off.

I still can’t get over that.

“Egg” count, as of Jan. 10, 2008:

- Total U.S. combat deaths in Iraq: 3921 (NINE just yesterday)

- Total U.S. combat wounded: 28,000 +

- Iraq civilian deaths: 151,000 (est.)

- Iraq civilian wounded: Only God knows

- Progress made by the new Iraqi government towards peace and reconciliation: Zero.

- End in sight: None.

And Bush Fiddled...

...While the Children Died.

Like so many horrific things, child mortality in Iraq has "surged."

According to a report (State of the World’s Mothers 2007) released by Save the Children, mortality among children in Iraq has increased dramatically since the UN imposed economic sanctions in 1990: “Iraq’s child mortality rate has increased by a staggering 150 per cent since 1990, more than any other country.” The BBC reported that under the UN sanctions, the mortality rate among Iraqi children under five years of age doubled.

Recent figures show worsening mortality since the US led invasion in 2003:

Some 122,000 Iraqi children - the equivalent of one in eight - died in 2005, before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of the deaths were among newborn babies in their first month of life...Conservative estimates place increases in infant mortality following the 2003 invasion of Iraq at 37 per cent.

That's right. Children in Iraq are now dying at a rate that is greater than the grossly elevated rate at which they were dying under the UN-imposed economic sanctions. Another mission accomplished.

"I am Iraq", originally uploaded by Prairie.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always evil, never good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. ~Jimmy Carter

And just how are Iraqi children dying? Combined, pneumonia and diarrhea account for over 30% of child deaths. Causes of the child mortality surge include:

1. tense security
   
2. deteriorating health services
3. lack of medical supplies
4. shortage of electricity
   
5. insufficient clean water
6. soaring inflation
7. prevalent pneumonia
8. rampant diarrhea

Watch this clip on the health crisis in Iraq from March 2004. What's going on is that because Iraq is so unsafe, there are not enough medications, not enough doctors, not enough medical facilities, and furthermore, traveling to the existing medical facilities is, itself, dangerous.

In hospitals throughout the country, it is not uncommon to hear the wails of grieving mothers, such as 30-year-old Zaineb Mohammed, whose two-month-old baby died after she failed to get him to hospital in time....En route to the hospital ...her family was repeatedly stopped at roadblocks and checkpoints...The delays caused the child’s condition to worsen and when they finally arrived there weren’t paediatric specialists to treat her. Mohammed has vowed not to have another child. "I don’t think that I can bear to lose another baby to the poor health and public services in Iraq," she said.

The sound of grieving mothers wailing. The sound of Bush fiddling ... while fortunes are being made, while people are tortured, killed, and rendered missing. The sound of Bush's "Freedom on the March" -- Freedom to profit on a war based on lies. Apparently, Iraq is for sale, along with its children.

Tell me again how this represents a "culture of life", because as sure as Bush lies, I don't get it.

TAGS: Humanitarian Crisis, Profiteering, War, Iraq, Sanctions, Child Mortality, Cost Of War

Lies, Damned Lies, and Dead Lies

Bush Lie Dispenser, originally uploaded by azrainman.

The Bush administration has presented you and me with some spectacularly false information. Consider this mini list of "untruths"...

• Saddam Hussein and Iraq were linked to the terrorist acts on 9/11/2001.
• Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
• The military conflict would be short (5 days, 5 weeks, maybe 5 months).
• The mission was accomplished.
• The war would pay for itself.

The complete list is so much longer. (That's 7 good Bush Lie links, not including Crooks and Liars, which tracks the whole crooked lot of them.) Most recently, there are these last two matters of Bush botched record keeping:

• The reported number of brain injuries linked to the conflict in Iraq.
• The number of US Iraq war/occupation deaths.
  

The number of brain injuries inflicted on US personnel affects the ultimate long term cost of the war and occupation, something I have been fretting over for a while now, and I'm not alone. Thus, the injury and cost untruths are intertwined.

The last item in the list is blood curdling, at least for me. In a recent edition of CounterPunch, Mike Whitney asserted that, "The Pentagon has been concealing the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it."

Whitney tells the tale of CBS's Investigative Unit and its experience obtaining misinformation from the Department of Defense (DOD). Whitney's article reveals that CBS submitted a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the DOD for a story on military suicide. After a 4 month wait, CBS received a DOD document indicating, "that between 1995 and 2007-- there were 2,200 suicides among 'active duty' soldiers."

Trusting the DOD about as much as I do and realizing the DOD was only answering part of their question, CBS went on to collect veteran suicide data from 45 states and learned that in 2005 alone there were 120 suicides each week for a total of 6,256 suicides among those who had served in just that one year.

Active and retired military personnel, mostly young veterans between the ages of 20 to 24, are returning from combat and killing themselves in record numbers. We can assume that "multiple-tours of duty" in a war-zone have precipitated a mental health crisis of which the public is entirely unaware and which the Pentagon is in total denial.

Adding these 6,256 suicide victims from 2005 to the 3,865 combat casualties "officially" reported by the DOD yields a sum of 10,121 military deaths. Furthermore, even a conservative "low-ball" estimate of 2004 and 2006 suicide figures indicates that US military casualties from the Iraq war and ongoing occupation now exceed 15,000.

That's right; 15,000 dead US servicemen and women in a war that--as yet--has no legal or moral justification.

CBS interviewed the head of mental health at the Department of Veteran Affairs, Dr. Ira Katz, who attempted to minimize the suicide increase, but Whitney doesn't seem to buy it.

Maybe Katz is right...Maybe it's perfectly normal for young men and women to return from combat, sink into inconsolable depression, and kill themselves at greater rates than they were dying on the battlefield. Maybe it's normal for the Pentagon to abandon them as soon as soon they return from their mission so they can blow their brains out or hang themselves with a garden hose in their basement. Maybe it's normal for politicians to keep funding wholesale slaughter while they brush aside the casualties they have produced by their callousness and lack of courage. Maybe it is normal for the president to persist with the same, bland lies that perpetuate the occupation and continue to kill scores of young soldiers who put themselves in harm's-way for their country.

If you want to know my personal opinion (which is consistent with what some officials in a position to know have claimed), the Bush administration has not misled; it has not misinformed; it has not been mistaken. It has lied. They are crooks. They are liars. They are war criminals. And they provided incomplete information about the number of military suicides with the intent to mislead, as they have on every other matter.

To say that the "official" information provided by the Bush administration cannot be trusted is an understatement. And heaven knows, I wouldn't want to be accused of that. I'm just trying to figure out which one of them will blame the soldier suicide surge on the Democrats.

And by the way, it's not normal. You know what else isn't normal? Taking it lying down.

Take lying down~ to hear or yield without protest, contradiction, or resistance: I refuse to take such outrageous lies lying down.

Agitate. Find a way.

TAGS: Iraq, Casualties, Suicide, Bush, Lies, Brain Injury, War, Occupation

Go ahead: defend THIS.

I Dare You.

Just sitting here waiting for one of the more prominent warmongers to defend this latest lie. Submitted without further comment. From today's USA Today:

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon's official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

The number of brain-injury cases were tabulated from records kept by the VA and four military bases that house units that have served multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One base released its count of brain injuries at a medical conference. The others provided their records at the request of USA TODAY, in some cases only after a Freedom of Information Act filing was submitted.

The data came from:

• Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, where troops evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan for injury, illness or wounds are brought before going home. Since May 2006, more than 2,300 soldiers screened positive for brain injury, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw says.

• Fort Hood, Texas, home of the 4th Infantry Division, which returned from a second Iraq combat tour late last year. At least 2,700 soldiers suffered a combat brain injury, Lt. Col. Steve Stover says.

• Fort Carson, Colo., where more than 2,100 soldiers screened were found to have suffered a brain injury, according to remarks by Army Col. Heidi Terrio before a brain injury association seminar.

• Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where 1,737 Marines were found to have suffered a brain injury, according to Navy Cmdr. Martin Holland, a neurosurgeon with the Naval Medical Center San Diego.

• VA hospitals, where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been screened for combat brain injuries since April. The VA found about 20% of 61,285 surveyed — or 11,804 veterans — with signs of brain injury, spokeswoman Alison Aikele says. VA doctors say more evaluation is necessary before a true diagnosis of brain injury can be confirmed in all these cases, Aikele says.

Soldiers and Marines whose wounds were discovered after they left Iraq are not added to the official casualty list, says Army Col. Robert Labutta, a neurologist and brain injury consultant for the Pentagon.

"We are working to do a better job of reflecting accurate data in the official casualty table," Labutta says.

Most of the new cases involve mild or moderate brain injuries, commonly from exposure to blasts.

More than 150,000 troops may have suffered head injuries in combat, says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force.

"I am wary that the number of brain-injured troops far exceeds the total number reported injured," he says.

About 1.5 million troops have served in Iraq, where traumatic brain injury can occur despite heavy body armor worn by troops.

Good grief. It just goes on and on. As will the pain and suffering of all these vets.

"Happy" Veterans' Day?

Veterans' Day is this Sunday. Try to remember the following when you go out to hit those sales:

WASHINGTON (AP) Nov. 7, 2007:

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.

Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

The rest is here, at The Huffington Post.

My late father served in the United States Navy during the Korean War. His dad sailed around the world with The Great White Fleet. My late father-in-law fought the Nazis as an artillery man during the last year of World War Two. My uncle served four years on a tin can in the Pacific: he signed up the day after Pearl Harbor. This past summer, I spent a lot of time interviewing World War Two vets for the young adult novel I'm writing about conscientious objectors who served as combat medics in Europe (and as smoke jumpers here at home) during World War II. While I call myself a pacifist, and while I detest and abhor war - ALL war - I respect and appreciate the sacrifices and service of our veterans, even when they serve in conflicts with which I disagree. Which would pretty much be all conflicts. No matter where you stand on the subject of war, THIS story is an utter and complete outrage. I would challenge everyone who reads it to link to the article and to send that link to their elected members of Congress this weekend, just in time for the "holiday" we set aside each year to honor our vets. Add a simple line: "What are YOU going to do about this?"

Make them give you an answer. Something more than "I support our troops."

We need to do better. And we need to end the senseless conflicts which lead to such long-lasting pain and suffering.

Pray for peace on Sunday (or Friday or Saturday). And work for it, too.

Stark Ain't Apologizing

Or, What Exactly Is Bush Laughing At?

UPDATE: Stark apologized.
UPDATE 2: Jane Hamsher salutes Nancy Pelosi for making poor Pete Stark bow his head. The salute was with one finger. Guess which one.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement Friday evening rebuking fellow San Francisco Bay-area Representative Pete Stark for comments he made about the President during a debate on children's health care Thursday.

Strak's statement is certainly strong political rhetoric. In the past Democrats have certainly apologized for less. Republicans have refused to apologize for more, so maybe we split the difference on this one.

Listen to what Stark said in full because as the update to this Mahablog post explains, there's some confusion



Stark's not apologizing no matter what Nancy Pelosi says. In fact he says that his critics should apologize and give children health care.

Certainly Stark asked for trouble by claiming President Bush is amused by sending soldiers to get their heads blown off. There's no proof of that. The President is always laughing, in that Beavis and Butthead way of his, but no one can substantiate what he's laughing at, so it was probably unwise for Stark to speculate.

Digby at Hullabaloo thinks that the right wing might be exaggerating their outrage a bit because they have the political equivalent of battered wife syndrome.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has a message for Democrats--"Stop Apologizing".

TAGS: Pete Stark, Digby, Iraq War, S-CHIP

An inconvenient genocide.

ISTANBUL (Washington Post via Boston Globe) Oct. 15 - The commander of Turkey’s armed forces warned that US-Turkish military relations will be irreparably damaged if the US House of Representatives approves a resolution accusing his country of genocide for the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago, according to an interview published yesterday.

“If this resolution passed in the committee passes the House as well, our military ties with the US will never be the same again,” General Yasar Buyukanit told the daily newspaper Milliyet in the interview.

The admonition from the senior officer in Turkey’s politically powerful military echoed warnings from the country’s top civilian political leaders since the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the resolution Wednesday. Turkey argues that the killings and disappearances of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were not genocide but the result of brutal war during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.“The United States is clearly an important ally,” Buyukanit said. “But an allied country does not behave in this way.”Bush administration officials and US military leaders who oppose the resolution say they fear Turkey could limit crucial air and land supply lines into Iraq as punishment if the measure is accepted by the full House of Representatives.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, reaffirmed that the resolution would be called to the floor this week. A similar resolution was pulled from the floor in 2000 by then-speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, after he was asked to do so by President Clinton. Pelosi said she had not heard from President Bush about this bill.

“There’s never been a good time” for the measure, Pelosi said on ABC’s This Week, adding that when she entered Congress 20 years ago, “it wasn’t the right time because of the Soviet Union. Then that fell, and then it wasn’t the right time because of the Gulf War I. And then it wasn’t the right time because of overflights of Iraq. And now it’s not the right time because of Gulf War II. And, again, the survivors of the Armenian genocide are not going to be with us.” [Emphasis mine]

The rest is here. True. There will never be a "good time" for this, considering - as the breathless warcheerleaders in the Bootlicking Corporate Media are quick to tell us over and over during the last few days - that so much of “our” so-called “war on terror” is so “dependent” on our alliance with Turkey. We need the bases, we need the fly-over airspace, we need a whole list of things from them. And we need them NOT to invade northern Iraq in their efforts to subjugate the PKK guerrillas who are seeking an autonomous Kurdish state, which the Kurds are loathe to acquiesce to. As I write this, CNN is reporting, as they have been since Friday, that the Turks are “massing troops” at their border with Iraq, apparently waiting for this resolution to pass so they can have their excuse to invade. Or something like that.

I do find the timing of this Congressional resolution interesting, and I wonder whether it’s only being pushed now as a way to hamper The Decider’s war in Iraq. If it is, I wonder why it took this long for Speaker Pelosi to get around to bringing it up, if it was so darn important. I mean, we have had many decades to do this. And I wonder at the energy and emotion that’s being brought to this resolution, when it seems like so much other more important and much more pressing business (like our war in Iraq and, say, impeachment) doesn’t garner half the fuss and bother that this thing has.

But, then again, we do understand that what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks (then the Ottoman Empire) beginning in 1915 was GENOCIDE. It’s really all you can call it. Calling it was it is, by its proper name, is important. America failed to act when this happened, as it failed to act as the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, as it failed to act during the other genocides that have occurred since then, as it is failing to do in the case of Darfur right this very minute. Congress - with a few vocal exceptions - has been almost completely mute on that subject, along with the lip service being paid by the Bush/Cheney regime, but here, we get lots of strong words, and, one would think, the understanding that passing this resolution will - rightly or wrongly - have serious consequences almost a century after the fact.

However, it is up to nations which consider themselves to be democracies to speak out for human rights and against crimes against humanity. America has its own such crimes to answer for: in the killing of millions as a result of the African slave trade, in the extermination of the American Indians, in its active involvement in the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor, in the way it turned its back on Cambodia and Rwanda, in its coming too late to the game in the former Yugoslavia. So our ability to take a stand on the slaughter of the Armenians in undermined by the bloodstains on our own history. A resolution like this one could have served a useful purpose, and maybe could have opened the way toward a conversation which could have forced us not only to take a hard look at our own history, but also to force us, once and for all, to decide just what it is our country - and we - stand for as citizens of the world.

Sadly, Mr. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq has made that impossible now. Political and military expedience will once again over-ride saying and doing what is right. And the blood will continue to flow as the butchers are left to do their work, and as the rest of the world stands by and pathetically wrings its hands.

Plenty of Outrage to Go Around

Each of these items deserves their own post, but my blogging time is limited today. Not my outrage about the ongoing shitstorm coming from Bu$hCo™, the criminal conspiracy that poses as a legitimate government. From today's edition of POAC (Project for the OLD American Century, the best news aggregator, IMO)

In yesterday's Washington Post:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

In intelligence circles, this is known as 'burning the source.' If you have ever read Tom Clancy's novels (a great writer, even though he's pretty far to the right - and until the Iraq war he was a bit rah-rah about American interventionism) you know about the dilemma that intelligence analysts have when dealing with the product of intelligence operatives. If you act on a particularly juicy item gleaned from the enemy, you could give away the methods by which you garnered that item. You could save lives or gain some other strategic advantage on one hand, but is it worth it? The classic example of this is when the Brits didn't warn the people of Coventry they were about to be firebombed by the Nazis, because to do so would let the Nazis know they had access to an Enigma machine.

This isn't like that. There was no strategic advantage to be had, no lives to be saved. The source was burned just to gain a brief and intangible political advantage, out of purely irresponsible childish stupidity. I've said before that the key to Bush is that he was brought up in an environment where he was always bailed out of any jam he got himself into. 'DUI charges? - no problem, daddy will make it go away. Vietnam draft fears? - I'll get you into the Texas Air National Guard. Don't want to show up for TANG because they want you to piss in the bottle before they give you a multi-million dollar fighter jet? Daddy will fix.' As a result of this - HE HAS NO SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY WHATSOEVER. The only question left in my mind about George W. Bush is this - is he more evil, or more stupid? Demon or moron? I think I'll just call him demoronic and let it go at that.
Olbermann's excellent take on this story is available at C&L.

---

Outraged about the wanton killing of civilians by Blackwater, Inc? Me too. The Iraqi government is calling AGAIN to have them out of the country, the sooner the better, as two Christian women got killed yesterday by security contractors in a Baghdad intersection . Not good ol' Joe LIE-berman, who chairs the commitee responsible for government oversight of that kind of thing. He has declared that he won't be chairing an investigation into either the killings or corruption by Iraq contractors in general, as blogged at HuffPo. And this guy posed for most of his political career as a Democrat? As Seth and Amy would say, REALLY?!?

Maybe it's because Blackwater CEO (another hypoChristian fundy, BTW) Erik Prince interned with representative Dana Rohrabacher (R - Huntington Beach, CA) back in 1990 "and they have since become friends." Well, whoopdee-doo. Congresswoman Rohrabacher has said that her old BFF is "An American Hero Just Like Ollie North Was." Considering that North was involved in Iran/Contra up to his neck - illegally selling American high-tech weapons to an enemy in order to illegally fund a bunch of bloodthirsty thugs - and should have ended his career deciding on whether to accept the cigarette or the blindfold, I'll accept that comparison. Except for the hero part, of course.

And one other thing - while Joe-Mo is busily providing no oversight over corruption in Iraq anyway, he might as well not oversee the $750,000,000 (and counting) construction of the American Embassy in Iraq, the opening of which has been delayed indefinitely by shoddy construction from the Kuwaiti contractor. I guess 3/4 of a BILLION dollars just doesn't go as far as it used to. Henry Waxman wrote a letter to Kindasleazy Liesalot asking for an explanation. "Problems were so severe and widespread that the inspectors concluded that none of the buildings on the new embassy compound could be approved for occupancy." Documents showed hundreds of violations of fire codes and other regulations and electrical problems throughout the complex.

---

Not content just to waste vast amounts of money in Iraq and in support of tax cuts for the elite, Bu$hCo™ have allocated yet more funds to pushing a national ad campaign promoting abstinence. That should at least help their friends in the porn industry. No money of course is available to help sick children, but one suspects that some is getting funneled to the sick pundits of the reight wing who attack those very children from their various positions in the 'mainstream' Corporate-Owned Media.

Kind of gives a new meaning to the term 'bully pulpit', doesn't it?

---

Of course there's plenty of residual outrage over the usual things - the administration's lawless defiance of FISA, the continued unconstitutional 'suspension' of habeas corpus, torture, rendition, the growing threat from multinational corporations.. ..ad nauseum. And all of that is contributing to a growing outrage that Congress and the Democrats are doing little more than ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to address any of the above. Democracy cannot function in the absence of a real opposition party, or a press corps dedicated to the truth.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of a tyranny."
-- James Madison --

Isn't that exactly what we're seeing happen every day?

TAGS: Corruption, Iraq Contractors, Intelligence, Congressional Oversight

Echoes of Vietnam

Emphasis on Kill Count Sign of Genocide

This disturbing story shows that once again, when there's nothing left to do that resembles progress, colonial powers resort to slaughter and then try to convince people that a robust kill count means we're winning.

From Raw Story:

The murder trial of the "Painted Demons," an elite US sniper unit that prided itself on fomenting fear in the so-called triangle of death has revealed a shocking -- but perhaps not unexpected -- product of war.

According to the LA Times, the Painted Demons' trial at Camp Victory, on the grounds of the Baghdad airport, portrays a group of young soldiers who say they were pressured to kill.(more)

I've mentioned Jean Paul Sartre's critique of the Vietnam War before. It's worth another look.

VIDEO: Part one of a BBC profile of Sartre.


TAGS: Jean Paul Sartre, Iraq, Vietnam, Genocide

What Happened to the Postwar Dream?

"We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad."--Seymour Hersh in an interview published Friday with Der Spiegel.

The march to war in Iran continues unabated. Well, actually according to Sy Hersh, the original rationale behind the march to war in Iran was completely abated--to the point of being abandoned. Nevertheless, the administration has a new rationale because no one was going to buy the WMD bait and switch again.

So are we supposed to buy into the shifting rationales for war approach again?

Is this a game?

Hersh thinks the White House thinks so.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has with Iran come from?

Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That's just their game.

How does one play the game?

Well, since Les Enrages.Org houses the prestigious Pink Floyd University, let's consult with the cannon.

From "Have a Cigar":

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy/We call it riding the gravy train.

Today the conductor of the 'war-with-Iran' gravy train is John Bolton.

But why do we keep following leaders down this road? A similar question was posed by Professor Roger Waters directly to Margaret Thatcher on my favorite Pink Floyd album The Final Cut on the song "The Postwar Dream":

Should we shout/should we scream/what happened to the postwar dream?
oh maggie, maggie what have we done?

Here's some insights from Rolling Stone's review of The Final Cut:

The Final Cut began as a modest expansion upon the soundtrack of the film version of The Wall, with a few new songs added and its release scheduled for the latter half of 1982... Around the same time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, irked by the unseemly antics of an Argentine despot, dispatched British troops halfway around the world to fight and die for the Falkland Islands... Out of the jumbled obsessions of the original Wall album, he fastened on one primal and unifying obsession: the death of his father in the battle of Anzio in 1944. Thus, on The Final Cut, a child's inability to accept the loss of the father he never knew has become the grown man's refusal to accept the death politics that decimate each succeeding generation and threaten ever more clearly with each passing year to ultimately extinguish us all.

The album is dedicated to the memory of the long-lost Eric Fletcher Waters, and in one of its most memorable moments, his now-middle-aged son bitterly envisions a "Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants and kings," one and all welcome, be they pompous butchers in comic-opera uniforms or smug statesmen in expensive suits. He presents a ghastly processional: "... please welcome Reagan and Haig/Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley/Mr. Brezhnev and party.... And," he coos, "now adding color, a group of anonymous Latin American meat packing glitterati." With these "colonial wasters of life and limb" duly assembled, Waters inquires, with ominous delicacy: "Is everyone in?/Are you having a nice time?/Now the final solution can be applied."

Waters realizes that all the Neanderthals will never be blown away. What concerns him more is the inexplicable extent of fighting in the world when there seems so little left to defend. In "The Gunners Dream," a dying airman hopes to the end that his death will be in the service of "the postwar dream," for which the album stands as a requiem–the hope for a society that offers "a place to stay/enough to eat," where "no one ever disappears ... and maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control." But Waters, looking around him more than thirty-five years after the war's end, can only ask: "Is it for this that daddy died?"

(more)

Genration after generation the Thatchers and Boltons of the world order more Eric Fletcher Waterses off to die. Sure World War II was about Nazis and the Iraq War (and Iran Provocation) is about oil and contracts and petro-dollars. This is a major regression. The postwar dream was that the world could find a way to avoid annihilation even when war is defensive and easily justified. Our leaders are about to piss on the postwar dream over a war that's easy to avoid and difficult to justify.

Hersh is right. It's just games to them.

And by the way something, Jenna Bush, that is why we can't leave your dad alone. Not until his kind leaves the likes of Roger Waters's dad alone.

VIDEO: Pink Floyd - Postwar Dream

TAGS: Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, Iran, Seymour Hersh

I See The Future

Another Dirty Election and a Long Stay in Iraq

It's a lazy Tuesday in the empire. Not much shaking the tree today. Of course, everyone has their eyes on Iraq and Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited from our future colony of Iran. They're not a full fledged client state yet, but you know Connecticut's Joe Lieberman won't rest until that regime is changed. Oh, and Bill O'Reilly is pulling a Jerry McGuire--"I love black pee-pole!"

All of this is in fact, quite riveting--except for the O'Reilly thing, that's just political candy--but in order to stay awake after a long, fitful night (a lingering cold kept me up), I need to look beyond the events of the day. I feel the need to look at the entrails of the news cycle and divine where we, as a society, are going. I'm not talking about long term prognostication, but rather predictions about relatively near-term developments that may shift Jeffersonian Democracy from its stagnant and precarious position on the global stage, or push it off.

I'm talking about the 2008 election.

George W. Bush is talking about it too, by the way. The reason for that is because he knows what the rest of the country recently figured out, like a year or two ago. The troops ain't coming home from Iraq while he's in office. Furthermore, he wants his successor in the White House to keep the war going.

From The Examiner:

President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.

In an interview for the new book “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked in where you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, things could change dramatically.’ ”

(more)

Bush even went so far as to talk a little smack about the 2008 race.

From AFP:

US President George W. Bush, breaking a self-imposed silence on the 2008 race to succeed him, now says Senator Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, according to a new book.

"She's got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary," Bush said in an interview with political journalist Bill Sammon for his tome "The Evangelical President."

"And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated," Bush told Sammon.

(more)

Bush went on to add: "Heh, heh, meh, heh."

He also wouldn't go out on a limb and predict the winner of the GOP's nomination but predicts that any of the candidates would come through and beat Hillary Clinton. They have a good idea of how to do it too--by staying far away from Bush.

That's a good start, but are there other, more nefarious aces up the sleeves of the dirtiest players in the game? Does the GOP plan to steal the 2008 election as they did 2000 and 2004?

Well, Greg Palast has meticulously documented the old tricks of the trade--like egregious tampering with the voter rolls. Bob Herbert of The New York Times updates us on the latest in GOP tricks, the heinous petition drive to launch a ballot initiative that would split the electoral votes of the state of California. A brutally diabolical maneuver that could net them 20 electoral votes, or, as Herbert points out, about the electoral mass of Ohio.

If Bush is right and Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, then it may not matter who wins the election because we may just stay right there in Iraq. It's not that I don't trust Senator Clinton it's just that... Okay, I don't trust Senator Clinton. Figure this one out: She just will not commit to withdrawal while also refusing to fund the war without a withdrawal plan. Huh?

That's enough forward looking. I can't take it. The future looks as bad as the present. I have to get back in the now, for I have more immediate concerns. I'm thirsty, but before I go get my beverage of choice, I have to go consult with Bill O'Reilly on the proper way to ask for an iced tea in a black restaurant.

Cross-posted from: Ice Station Tango

TAGS: Election 2008, Bill O'Reilly, Hillary Clinton, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

When Admirals Attack General Petraeus

Man, they thought that Move.Org ad was bad.

From Think Progress:

In January, President Bush replaced Abizaid and Casey, who were “surge” skeptics, with Adm. William Fallon and Gen. David Petraeus. This week, Petraeus — in the first public hearings since taking on his new role — delivered his Iraq assessment to great media fanfare. But where was his boss, Admiral Fallon? Inter-Press Service suggests animosity between the two might be one reason for Fallon’s absence:

Fallon told Petraeus [in March] that he considered him to be “an ass-kissing little chickensh*t” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

The Washington Post reported this weekend that there is an internal military debate, described as “Armageddon,” brewing between Petraeus and Fallon because the two men have “profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq.”

(more)

Earlier this year, Admiral Fallon helped kill a build up in the Persian Gulf aimed at Iran and has stated that an attack on Iran will not happen on his watch.

On the other hand, when Fallon spoke to Commonwealth Club of California on September 4, 2007, he said the surge was making progress and that Petraeus and his team were "working their heart out".

Of course, that was before he heard what Petreaus said to Congress.

VIDEO: Admiral Fallon speaks to Commonwealth Club of California (from last week).


Crossposted from Ice Station Tango
(featured in Mike's Blog Roundup, C&L)

TAGS: David Petraeus, Iran, Iraq War, William Fallon

Restore Al Gore's Reputation

That sore loser Al Gore is back complaining again.

Just wait. You'll hear this story in Vanity Fair contextualized that way real soon. Don't believe it.

I spoke to a very intelligent libertarian friend of mine over the weekend. The guy is as sharp as our guillotine. We engaged in one of the most intellectually honest conversations about politics I have ever engaged in with someone who's fundamental beliefs directly oppose mine. Seriously, in the hour long debate, we actually went beyond our own agendas and came up with some good policy ideas that synthesized his approach and mine in ways that would, you know, accomplish something.

It was a profound experience that gave me hope that if lobbyists were removed from the equation, hard-edged capitalists like him and avid social democrats like me could make things work better for everyone.

Then he asked me who I thought would be the next President.

I should have just shrugged and asked him what he thought. Instead I answered. "Hillary Clinton."

He went into convulsions.

"Hey man." I said to him, once the color returned to his face, "I don't like it any more than you do." That was the only dishonest thing I said to the guy all night--I'm sure I would be far more comfortable with Hillary as President than my friend would. What I meant was, "I don't like it either," but I was trying to keep us focused and on common ground. We were doing so well.

I quickly changed the subject. "If he runs, Al Gore is my guy."

he didn't like that either. "Gore? He's nuts."

And with that, ideological bipartisanship ended.

"No, sir!" I fired back. I took a deep breath and I went on and on for ten minutes explaining that over the last seven years Gore has been transformed. I implored my friend to listen to the speech Gore gave on Martin Luther King Day in January 2006.



I told him that this Al Gore:



would inspire people like him. This Al Gore:



would win him over. I gave it everything I had.

He didn't believe a word of it.

And you know what, Al Gore's not the least bit surprised that so many people distrust him.

From Vanity Fair:

As he was running for president, Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.

Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that's what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).

(more)

By the way something, the Gore '08 rumors picked up a little momentum when Democratic Rep. Tim Mahoney said that there is "a very good chance" that former vice president Al Gore will run and be "very formidable" because Gore has been "right" about Iraq and global warming. Amen.

But we'll know Al Gore's decision when we know. If Gore doesn't run, I'll be pretty pissed about it. But this isn't about '08. It's about '00. The American people haven't been able to get a straight answer about anything from the media since that ridiculous campaign and it's at the root of all our troubles. The truth has to start at the beginning. The decline of this country starts in '00 with the fundamental debasement of journalism and complete subjugation of the truth. Restoring Al Gore's reputation is a vital step to getting back the America we lost.

AUDIO: There's an MP3 of Gore's MLK Day speech here.

TAGS: Al Gore, Election 2000, Election 2008, Media Bias

When analogies attack.

First, if you have the time, I’ll ask you to read yesterday’s op-ed piece by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and resident war drum beater Jonathan Last. Go ahead. I’ll wait…

So, I’m sure you’ve heard this sort of “argument” before, when it comes to our current wars of empire in Afghanistan and Iraq. Conservative radio talk show hosts and columnists, like, for example, the historically and factually-challenged Michelle Malkin, just love invoking past American wars as a way of saying, “See? Told ya! 3,739 (give or take, plus however many will die this weekend) deaths isn’t so bad! Look how many died on the beaches of Normandy! So there!” And they can just never quite stop themselves from mentioning D-Day as part of this riff.

Now, young Mr. Last (yes, his age is relevant) could have mentioned the fact that approximately 8,000 Americans died in the three days of fighting that took place during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, or the fact that over 3,600 Americans died during a single day of fighting at the Battle of Antietam the year before, making it the single bloodiest day in American history before September 11, 2001. But instead, interestingly enough, Mr. Last chose to focus on The Somme. Why? Well, his point, if I’m reading him correctly, is to say that this battle was the “turning point,” or, to borrow the more popular cliche of the moment, the tipping point, in British history, in terms of Britain being an “empire.” “It was in the aftermath of Somme that the British mind first began to flinch at the price of empire. Within 20 years the British would be actively turning a back on the world, allowing slaughter to bubble forth from Germany again.” That, I guess, would be a not-so veiled reference to Neville Chamberlain, that other name out of history that warmongering conservative commentators like Mr. Last just can’t seem to reference enough. Especially considering that it allows them to ignore inconvenient little tidbits like The Battle of Britain and Britain’s role in the Allied campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and - yes! - the Normandy invasion. You know: battles they won. Is he really trying to tell us that after tallying up the gruesome numbers from this battle, that the Brits just quit? That’s news.

In other words, after losing over 420,000 young men to gain just seven miles of useless French real estate, the Brits lost their stomach for “empire.” That’s what this is about: not deaths, but “empire.” Having one, and keeping one. And so, the analogy goes, Mr. Last wants to know - as is the case in all these so-called arguments - what’s the “big deal” about losing “only 3,800″ Americans in three years of war in Iraq? Besides common sense and morality, I guess. It’s really about America’s “role" in the world. “You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet,” as a guy who was giving me grief over my “Peacemonger” bumpersticker yelled at me once. Yes, 420,000 eggs would be a lot of “eggs” wasted simply to re-establish a stalemate on the Western Front. It’s difficult to imagine the utter bewilderment and total sadness that must have overcome the British population at the news.

“With the Somme in mind, it is interesting to consider Iraq today and wonder if this will be the moment when Americans begin to ponder putting aside the burdens of their empire…” That, of course, assumes that all Americans are enamored of the idea that America should be an empire. Those of us who know our history understand that ever since somebody came up with the notion of Manifest Destiny, America has sought to be - and has succeeded in becoming - an “empire.” Most of our wars have been fought for reasons of “empire.” But empire and democracy cannot coexist. Do we want to be an “empire” and NOT a democracy? Because you really cannot have it both ways. Maintaining empire requires the loss of democratic freedoms and civil liberties. We’re witnessing that right now, and some of us have experienced this first-hand. And one would hope that by now, in light of the collapse of world communism as a threat and the increasing importance of economic power over military might in deciding “who runs the world,” that most Americans would want America to be something other than an “empire,” in the traditional sense that Mr. Last (and others) seems to long for. I’d hope folks would understand that “leadership” involves more than just a head count on the parade ground. And those of us who are old enough to remember KNOW the moment when we as a nation put - or should have put - whatever delusions we had left about “empire” behind: for most of us, it came when we sat in front of our televisions and watched as that last American helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Mr. Last must be too young to remember that. I am old enough. I watched it. And even though I was young at the time, even I knew what it meant.

“One of the many dispiriting exhibitions of the last four years has been the American public’s amnesia concerning the nature of war. Countries that shoulder the load of global leadership must, from time to time, fight wars, and wars are unpleasant things.” Mr. Last obviously isn’t paying attention. Besides having almost 4,000 deaths caused by our invasion of Iraq (600,000+ dead Iraqis don’t factor into Mr. Last’s equation, obviously, just as they are ignored by the rest of the warmongers), we have over 20,000 wounded, many of them having suffered the loss of at least one limb and/or severe and permanent head trauma. These injuries continue to mount, along with untold numbers of cases of post-traumatic stress that will haunt us all - and cost us in many ways - for decades to come. Mr. Last obviously doesn’t know anyone who has suffered this way, and he’s been lucky enough, I guess, to have been able to avoid having to go to any of the funerals many of us have attended. Otherwise, he would have avoided that tired, condescending, insulting old chestnut used by so many who have never seen combat, “… wars are unpleasant things.” (I could further cast aspersions by asking why someone who is obviously so young and fit as Mr. Last’s photo makes him appear hasn’t put down his keyboard and enlisted to fight for the Empire, but I really don’t want to see anyone’s child go off to fight, so I won’t go there.)

But the lines that just slay me are in his closing: “There are honorable, perhaps persuasive, reasons to think our Iraq project wrong-headed, counterproductive, or even deeply, conceptually flawed. But if the public’s sole reason for turning on the war is the cost in lives - as much of the criticism suggests - then America has already fought its Somme, and our fortitude is on the wane.” The war in Iraq is not a bedroom that needs painting or a paper mache volcano, so calling it a “project” is worse than patronizing. The FACTS show that this war is wrong-headed, counter-productive, and deeply flawed. Worse than that - worst of all - are the things he fails to mention: that the reasons for going to war have all been shown to be complete lies, deliberately told, and that the war was and continues to be totally unnecessary. That part of the World War One analogy he actually gets right. The First World War was fought entirely for reasons of empire (read Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece The Guns of August sometime), which means it was fought for bad reasons, and it, too, was a war that could and should have been avoided entirely. The horrific cost of that war, in terms of human life and the economic devastation of much of an entire continent, should have been enough to put the whole planet off war and “empire” for good, but instead, it simply led to another series of stupid mistakes that led to even more slaughter and destruction.

Just as this war is doing and will continue to do.

Mr. Last would do well to avoid such analogies in the future. I’ve read enough of his stuff to know that he supports the war in Iraq without pause or question, but he’s going to have to do better than to defend his reasons for doing so than using the senseless slaughter at The Somme as a useful analogy or point of reference for his cause. Anyone who knows the history of The Great War looks at what happened there and shakes her/his head in horror and disgust. Because that’s really all you can do.

Much as I do now when I read the work of columnists and pundits who continue to defend this utterly indefensible, thoroughly obscene war.

(Cross-posted at The Quaker Agitator.)

TAGS: War, Iraq, History, Media