The friendly fire incident I posted about earlier is, like so many things, a raging controversy overseas while making barely a ripple Stateside. I said in that post that it didn’t really “seem like a ‘careless cowboys’ situation”, and I don’t necessarily know of any reason to revise that opinion of this incident. However, the British Army is telling a much different story, and using almost the same terminology:
As the truth unfolded - that their “brothers in arms” had been attacked by other “brothers in arms”- the soldiers could not contain their fury. “We spend all our money marking out our vehicles so this doesn’t happen,” one said. “If it was the heat of battle, shit happens. But it was clear daylight.”
Another furiously told me: “As far as I am concerned, those two pilots should be done for manslaughter…”
A few weeks ago, I met with some of those I had been embedded with. One told me it haunts him still, “the day the devil roared and Matty died for no real reason except two American pilots cowboying in the sky”.
And apparently this isn’t just an isolated opinion about one tragedy:
Soldiers at the Windsor-based Household Cavalry Regiment yesterday expressed their relief that the video recording of the attack had finally come to light.
Colleagues of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, speaking anonymously as regulations prevent them from commenting publicly, said it would help people understand the difficulties they faced fighting side-by-side with the Americans.
A regimental source said: “People are just happy that it’s come out because it puts a light on what the Americans are like - they’re cowboys.” He said there was a feeling that the regiment had let down L/Cpl Hull’s widow, Susan…
Yesterday other soldiers said the tape may help prevent similar “friendly-fire” incidents. “US [soldiers] have, for a long time, had this attitude that they never have to face up to what they have done on the battlefield because of the protection they get back home. We have seen what that leads to. But this tape may help change that culture.”
If our soldiers are perceived this way by all of the people they are fighting alongside, isn’t that something we should know about? Even if we hew to the ‘few bad apples’ theory, and even if we maintain my belief that this incident was not the fault of the pilots in the field, it does our troops no good to have their allies viewing them with distrust.
I’m not a military person, but isn’t troop behavior related directly to morale, and isn’t morale the responsibility of the upper echelons?
Update:
I wasn’t sure whether to post these or not, so click at your own risk:
part 1
part 2
If I’m not mistaken, and I certainly might be, about halfway through the second video, there is a voice confirming there are no friendlies in the area at the very moment that “Manila Hotel” is reporting the friendly casualties - which seems to confirm that at the very least there’s enough blame to go around, not just for the pilots.
[Never mind. Some sort of weird technical difficulties on my end.]
[By the way, clearly Amanda is ashamed of her church affiliation. Also, the following contains a harrowing tale of political naivete. Read at your own risk.]
“I don’t want to vote for anything, believe anything, or support anything as a career. I don’t want to vote for anything I believe in or support, or believe in anything I support or can vote for, or support anything I vote for, believe in, or support, or stand up for anything I vote for, believe in, or support. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
———
I don’t have to think about Gordon Smith anymore.
A confession to make: I’ve only cast one vote for a national-level Republican candidate in my life, and that was in 1996. I was an idealistic - and by idealistic, I mean poseur - 21-year-old, and after happily voting “Killer Ron” Wyden in to replace Bob “I Say, Priscilla, Why Are Oregonians Such Fucking* Perverts” Packwood, I felt pressured to prove that I was one of those Big Thinkers who voted for the CANDIDATE rather than the PARTY. Gordon “Maverick” Smith seemed like that guy, since he was running against Tom “Slider” Bruggere, a candidate I remember as being about as exciting as an emissions test.
Smith was pro-balanced-budget, opposed the sales tax, and promised to save the Oregon Health Plan. Sounded good to me. Woo! I’m so open-minded. Anyway, time went on, and when Smith came out in favor of stem cell research or hate crimes laws or Medicaid, I was able to say to myself “yep. Yep. Did the right thing.”
But, frankly, I knew I was wrong. I knew that Smith was a typical dyed-in-the-wool social conservative, only able to come to the “right” positions when something touched him directly. “Compassion” wasn’t in his vocabulary, nor, despite the stem-cell stance, was “choice.” For crying out loud, he voted with Bill Frist 82% of the time in 2006. Trouble in paradise.
When Smith voted for the bankruptcy bill, I pretty much washed my hands of him. I even sent him a Dear John letter telling him how hard I was planning to work for his opponent in 2008. Thus divested of the painful monkey on my back, I settled myself into a nice, comfortable Republican-free existence.
But like a spurned lover, Smith tried one last, grandiose gambit to win me back. I won’t say he almost succeeded, but he did start my mental processes a-working. And like a lover spurned for all the right reasons, it wasn’t even a month before he was right back to his old tricks.
So. Thank the Disco Ball he showed his true colors again so quickly. Last thing I would have wanted to do was squire him around town with everyone laughing behind my back at my political cuckoldry.
I can’t wait to find my rebound Democrat.
———
*That’s right, Michelle. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck. Fuuuuuuck.
A cockpit video of a friendly-fire incident, one which the DoD stated did not exist, has been leaked, and the Pentagon is not happy.
The paper has published a transcript of what it says was said by US military personnel on the video and says it will give copies of the video footage to other media organisations later.
Last week, when the existence of the tape came to light, L/Cpl Hull’s widow, Susan, described it as an “absolute disgrace” that she had been assured by the military no such tape existed…
On Friday, Oxfordshire Assistant Deputy Coroner Andrew Walker was forced to adjourn L/Cpl Hull’s hearing because the MoD had failed to provide the inquest with a recording.
He had earlier launched a furious attack on the MoD for refusing to release the tape…
L/Cpl Hull’s family had been told that some classified material has been withheld, “but we did not specify its exact nature”, the statement added.
“There has never been any intention to deliberately deceive or mislead L/Cpl Hull’s family.”
A Pentagon spokeswoman said the US government never released documents that were part of an investigation.
The US government would view whoever leaked the video as “criminally responsible”, the spokeswoman added.
The transcript is here, although it’s not verifiable to the video itself yet, so take it for what it’s worth.
Heart-wrenching, and relatively sympathetic to the A-10 pilots. They wonder aloud about “orange panels” but are assured that there are no friendlies in the area. I’m not an expert at reading transcripts of combat situations, of course, but it doesn’t really seem like a “careless cowboys” situation.
Photo: “Dartmouth Turtle,” by Kiwi Betsy
Don’t be fooled; this turtle is actually standing atop another turtle.
I wandered into an online argument yesterday and I got to thinking, you know, it’s true: The political weblog environment really IS turtles all the way down. Except that these are not ordinary turtles. These are Overton turtles.
For example:
September 2006 Washington Post article/book excerpt:
After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.
Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.
The freaking point: The political affiliations of job applicants were given at least as much consideration as, and perhaps more consideration than, their actual qualifications.
You said the bodacious Simone Ledeen had no accounting background and that is not true, she has an MBA, okay, and while that isn’t exactly the same as having a CPA, I am nonetheless certain math was involved somewhere. Besides, she didn’t manage the budget for the Coalition Provisionial Authority, she executed it. I DEMAND A CORRECTION.
Confederate Yankee:
“Should I endanger another man’s life for no reason? Let’s ask my readers!”
Oh, you vile, worthless splash of vomit:
The Case for Outing Jamil?
I’m presenting working on what will likely be my last post on the Jamil Hussein/Hurriyah mosque attacks debacle. I’ve got some emails out to several sources and the AP itself attempting to tie up loose ends, and I won’t write a final draft until those addressed have a reasonable amount of time to respond.
I did, however, have one question I addressed to all of those I queried, that I’d like to ask my readers as well:
Should I “out” Jamil, revealing his real, full, and complete name?
Short answer: NO.
Long answer:
Jamil Hussein is an Iraqi police officer. If you are unfamiliar with his story you can get a synopsis here (bearing in mind that it’s Wikipedia, where misteaks go to live forever), but as I understand it, it goes something like this:
On November 24, 2006, the Associated Press reported that 21 Shiites had been murdered by insurgents, while Coalition Forces had succeeded in killing 58 insurgents, in Tal Afar. You can read the full report here.
If she doesn’t get patched up fast enough, Fred Barnes will blame her for losing the football game. (Uploaded by traveller2020.)
The thing that distresses me the most about conservative cheerleading for an escalation in Iraq is how cynical it is. You can tell because the punditry is already laying the groundwork to blame the inevitabe failure to achieve “victory” on those of us who oppose the war and want immediate withdrawal. I put “victory” in scare quotes because I’m not convinced that anyone quite knows what “victory” would look like. Nicole at C&L linked an editorial by Fred Barnes where he’s establishing the back story so that he can blame the evil, all-powerful liberals when the President fails yet again to achieve “victory”, and kills god only knows how many troops and Iraqis in the process. The editorial is disrespectful from beginning to end to the troops and the danger they face daily in Iraq. The title and subtitle alone made me cringe.
Not This Time
Don’t give up when victory is at hand.
Who is he accusing of giving up? The people actually fighting the war? Probably not, since you’d be hard-pressed to fault the U.S. troops, even though I suspect that the usual conservative slurs of calling people lazy and no doubt girly will come into play after the war is completely lost and fingers are pointing everywhere. Right now, Barnes is just mixing up war with a football game and he’s accusing us cheerleaders of not cheering loudly enough for our “team”.
What Barnes and everyone else trotting out this stupid line of thought don’t seem to understand is that even Texas cheerleaders of the most dedicated sort would probably put down their pom-poms if there were people getting killed during every play.
His editorial compares Iraq to Vietnam, calling the parallels “uncanny”. I’d agree with him that they’re alike, though the parallels are hardly uncanny. But they’re pretty similiar in that it was stupid to be there in the first place, and subsequently we’re going to fail miserably. As you can imagine, Barnes feels differently about this than I do.
Indeed, they might, for certain parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are uncanny. A new general, David Petraeus, is taking over in Iraq with a credible new strategy, counterinsurgency. Four decades ago, General Creighton Abrams became the American commander in Vietnam, also with a new strategy. It called for taking and holding the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam. In a word, it was counterinsurgency, and it worked. Now in Iraq, Petraeus has as good a chance of success, starting with the pacification of Baghdad, as Abrams had. And the painful lesson of Vietnam applies in Iraq: Don’t give up when victory is at hand.
Those in Congress who advocate retreat in Iraq refuse to acknowledge this lesson. And they may have their way, whatever Petraeus accomplishes. With their calls for troop withdrawals and fund cutoffs and their antiwar resolutions, they have put America on a slippery slope in Iraq. And we know where it leads: to defeat while victory remains quite possible.
Interestingly, Barnes admits that the Tet Offensive was an important factor in turning public opinion against the war. Which means he’s probably all too aware of what’s going to happen after this “surge” when the number of body bags coming home from Iraq also surges. But it’s basically irrelevant, because his editorial is about nothing but seeking a way to blame anyone and everyone but the people who got us into this foolish war for the loss of this foolish war.
This is the ugliness that’s coming out of conservatives and they haven’t even fully admitted that we’ve lost the war yet. (Again, I’m not sure how they thought we could achieve “victory” when there was never a workable definition of what this “victory” would look like.) Wait until we get to a point where even the most ostrich-like hawk has his head forcibly pulled out of the sand and he has to admit that we’re not going to “win” this war. The finger-pointing is going to get ugly.
The Senate should “step back for a moment and give you [Gen. Petraeus] a chance…. Perhaps a last chance, to succeeed in Iraq,” Lieberman said. “If God forbid, you are unable to succeed, then there will be plenty of time for the resolutions of disapproval or the other alternatives that have been contemplated.”
If you’re gung-ho for the war, giving Bush “a chance” to kills some more people and fail miserably to achieve objectives that were never laid out sounds like a great idea, due to the desperate clinging to straws issue. If you were against it from the get-go, as I was, then all you can think is give him another chance to do what exactly? Cindy Sheehan is still waiting for her answer from Bush on what nobel cause her son died for, which is to say that we still have no clue what we’re trying to do there. Maybe a surge will turn up those magical WMDs we heard so much about that no one seems to mention anymore.
But what’s particularly bad politics about this is the entitlement vibes radiating off Lieberman. Another chance? To blow billions of dollars and lives? Most of us don’t get another chance from the cable company when we pay our bill late on the late charges. It isn’t tough to figure out that we’re going to be impatient with the idea that someone deserves another chance when the stakes are much higher than those of the wardens of Time Warner when one person’s check comes in two days late. Language like Lieberman’s sets the price on American lives much lower than your average voter probably takes them, particularly those of us who happen to know people in the military or even have friends or relatives or god forbid children that could be sent off to war.
Can you imagine what a comment like that must sound to a parent or spouse of someone who died in the war? Another chance? I can tell you what those people are asking for in terms of another chance. The only problem is that even if they had a Senator getting up and begging for them to have it, they aren’t getting another chance for the person they’ve buried. Truth told, most of them are so young that they aren’t getting a first chance at most things.
Did you catch this part of the SOTU? Why bother with a skills-based draft when you can start out with a volunteer civilian corps when the warm bodies are dwindling?
One of the first steps we can take together is to add to the ranks of our military - so that the American Armed Forces are ready for all the challenges ahead. Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next 5 years. A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.The fact that he called for it in this speech tells you what shape our military is in.
Does this mean, since volunteers don’t wear the military uniform, that they will be accepting homos into the new program as long as they don’t have to be in contact with the servicemembers? Hmmm…
I think it’s time for the Yellow Elephants to step right up and lead the charge, except that I don’t know any special skills those fine young college Republicans and war-mongering pundits will bring to the table.
Jon at Perrspectives brilliantly helps resolve the rhetorical confusion of the Bush message being used to market his Iraquagmire…
Do you all have other definitions to contribute?
Here’s one from Autumn over at my pad…
Stay The Course.
Has he learned nothing in the last six years? On 60 Minutes last night, our delusional Commander in Chief did the equivalent of grabbing his crotch and swaggering in front of Congress. And if you thought the above statement reflected sanity hanging on by a thread, take a look at this. (CNN):
“It’s my responsibility to put forward the plan that I think will succeed. I believe if they start trying to cut off funds, they better explain to the American people and the soldiers why their plan will succeed…I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I made my decision, and we’re going forward.”
– Bush, asserting that his decision to escalate the military offensive shall continue by royal edict
Asked if he believes that he, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, has the authority to order troops to Iraq in the face of congressional opposition, Bush said, “In this situation, I do, yeah.”What can you say after reading this (other than we’re f*cked)?…He said Iraqis should be thankful for all the United States has done for them since the invasion nearly four years ago. “I think I am proud of the efforts we did,” Bush said.
“We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”
Bush will have his surge even though it’s a stupid idea.
Bush will have his surge even though everyone with two brain cells to rub together opposes it.
Bush will flout the Geneva Convention.
By flouting all common rules of diplomacy and attacking the Iranian consulate in Iraq, BushCo is clearly trying to provoke another terrorist attack or even worse, military retaliation from Iran. There’s a number of reasons this probably seems like a really good idea to them. The primary one that Marc points to is that they quite likely think that this is the only way to stop the terrible, horrible predicament of having to pay the piper in a democracy. Bush barely got elected, acted like a tyrant, and had the American people, in an act of massive ingratitude for his tyranny, vote for the opposing party. How else to undermine the Democrats than to have another terrorist attack or an act from a foreign country to make people rally around Dear Leader?
In addition, this attempt to make war with Iran inevitable demonstrates what true believers the Bushies are. When it turned out that we weren’t being greeted in Iraq with parades and flowers as predicted, the finger-pointing and excuse-seeking began. And one favorite excuse as for why the Iraqi people aren’t behaving as predicted is that the Iranians are a bad influence, pouring impure “terrorist” elements over the border. So, from their perspective, if this is true, the key to getting the parades and flowers from the Iraqis is to stomp out the bad influence of Iran. So, in a weird, simple, sick way, the insistence that we attack Iran that persists in the face of all sane indications that we couldn’t and, more importantly, we shouldn’t, is persisting because it’s the last thread of hope that BushCo has of being right about Iraq.
These two motivations are not mutually exclusive. The Iraq War was cherished from the get-go as the key to securing the oil in the Middle East, the solution to terrorism, a permanent solution to the persistent problem of democracy and particularly of having an oppositional party, and the very thing that would make George Bush feel like he’s got one on his daddy. It’s not beyond reckoning that the magic bullet they thought they’d found in Iraq is what they are hoping is going to be under a pile of corpses in Iran.
George W. Bush is a traitor to our country and should be impeached, and tried for his war crimes and crimes against this nation. People who continue to support this war criminal are either in denial or hate this country. Sorry if y’all thought that your man wasn’t such lowly son of a bitch as to deliberately court violence against this country in a temper tantrum over the Democrats winning. You put your money on a man who hates democracy, and it’s time to wake the fuck up to that.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
—”The Charge of the Light Brigade”, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Apparently, Bush is going on TV tonight to ask for more money and more young lives to waste on his losing proposition of a war. Chickenhawks across the country will wank off and feel brave. Sadly, No caught David Frum jerking off so hard he came in his eye at the idea of Bush playing like he’s in a movie where he plays a badass general. Maybe if the President is feeling especially generous towards Frum, they can dress up like Batman and Robin later.
Sane people wonder how the hell this “surge” could work when our military is underfunded and understaffed as it is. But that’s not Bush’s to worry about. Anyway, if we start a draft, it’s safe to say that anyone too poor to dodge it probably deserves to die anyway, right Mr. President?
I have to admit, I’ve been wondering if there’s many wingnuts stopping and saying, “Did we just get egg on our faces after mounting a paranoid campaign accusing the AP of making up sources to embarrass BushCo?” It’s a rock bottom moment for many, one would think. The whole idea that the AP was making up sources rests on two very insane assumptions: 1) The AP is willing to lie boldly in the worst way possible for hazy “liberal media” reasons and 2) That BushCo needs the media’s help embarrassing themselves. If anything, they need to be licking media asses day and night for being such good sports about helping BushCo disguise for so long what imbeciles they really are. So, if anything, this is the time for those on the right who were pushing this insanity to stop and wonder what kind of monsters they’ve become.
With that in mind, I stopped by Protein Wisdom to entertain myself watching the wingnuts do anything but that. Protein Wisdom is where you go to see people treat an opportunity for self-reflection with the same regard they would reserve for an opportunity to hack your own foot off with a butterknife. The object of hostility today is Glenn Greenwald, who was uncouth enough to do a huge post about this whole thing. The post is by Dan Collins and it’s truly beautiful in its paranoid disregard for the media that seems to stem from an anger at the existence of truth itself.
So, you see, it is mindless tractability to believe what the military tells one, but a sign of good faith to believe uncritically whatever one is told by the AP.
He had two choices: Believe uncritically or assume that AP makes shit up to make him feel stupid.
My question at this point is why do wingnuts admit that a single Iraqi civilian has died at all? No, really. Why accept any casulties? If the military declared tomorrow that this was the Bloodless Invasion and no one had been killed, what would stop the wingnuts from buying that story without hesitation? They must feel terribly torn between their “kill ‘em all” mentality and their need to assist BushCo in covering up what a tragic mistake this war is.
I keep wondering if I missed something. What made the wingnutteria think that the AP would be making up sources? And that accusing them of this is anything in the neighborhood of thinking critically about the media? Basic critical thinking about the media is to look at structural biases (like it being corporate), personal biases (a lot of big media types are in upper tax brackets and have personal reasons to support Republicans, for instance), and unquestioned assumptions. The idea that we have a liberal media used to rest on the third factor. The idea was that media people are all college-educated and run in educated, liberal circles that would incline them to favor liberal viewpoints slightly in their reporting. It always seemed to me there was something to this criticism, if for no other reason than educated people who are real believers in democracy are simply going to lean left more than right, because of the logical aspects of it and all. Journalists more so, because they have an interest in being well-regarded by history and the current trend is for history to look favorably on people who’ve been instrumental in progressive progress, at least in the sense that it’s what’s going to get George Clooney to make a movie about you. Granted, the factors that would insinuate journalists have a liberal bias would also imply that they have a truth bias—you get a movie made about you by speaking truth to power, not bullshit.
But this entire dust-up seems to be based around the insane notion that the AP is trying to sabotage BushCo, and that they are so interested in doing this that they were willling to tell bald-faced lies about sourcing. That’s McCarthy-level paranoia. The only thing I can figure is that since people like Dan are still throwing a fit even after being shown to be paranoid nuts, they are simply angry that the entire media won’t turn into a BushCo propaganda organization. At this point, the right blogosphere has humilitated themselves so much that there’s no real dignity-based reason not to just start demanding that the AP become a propaganda organization. What’s stopping them?
As you all are no doubt aware, the news came out right before the year ended that the number of soliders dead in Iraq crossed 3,000. All so the Boy King could flex his muscles and show up his daddy and get Saddam before age did. There’s nothing I can say right now to convey the depth of sadness I feel when considering what a huge loss this is, but the NY Times has an article by Dana Canedy today about her fiance, who died in Iraq in October, and the book he left behind for his baby son that will never know him.
For our son’s first Christmas, Charles had hoped to take him on a carriage ride through Central Park. Instead, Jordan, now 9 months old, and I snuggled under a blanket in a horse-drawn buggy. The driver seemed puzzled about why I was riding alone with a baby and crying on Christmas Day. I told him.
“No charge,� he said at the end of the ride, an act of kindness in a city that can magnify loneliness.
On paper, Charles revealed himself in a way he rarely did in person. He thought hard about what to say to a son who would have no memory of him. Even if Jordan will never hear the cadence of his father’s voice, he will know the wisdom of his words.
Never be ashamed to cry. No man is too good to get on his knee and humble himself to God. Follow your heart and look for the strength of a woman.
Charles tried to anticipate questions in the years to come. Favorite team? I am a diehard Cleveland Browns fan. Favorite meal? Chicken, fried or baked, candied yams, collard greens and cornbread. Childhood chores? Shoveling snow and cutting grass. First kiss? Eighth grade.
The Little Moron Prince That Could got to kill Saddam. Bully for him. Now bring the troops home.
[10:25 - Iraqi TV says Hussein has been executed (CNN).]
(AP):
With U.S. forces on high alert for a surge in violence, the Iraqi government readied all the necessary documents, including a “red card” - an execution order introduced during Saddam’s dictatorship. As the hour of his death approached, Saddam received two of his half brothers in his cell on Thursday and was said to have given them his personal belongings and a copy of his will.Pulling up my questions from last night’s post on this……An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saddam would be executed before 6 a.m. Saturday, or 10 p.m. Friday EST. Also to be hanged at that time were Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, the adviser said.
[and how about this quote?]
“The Americans want him to be hanged respectfully,” al-Nueimi said. If Saddam is humiliated publicly or his corpse ill-treated “that could cause an uprising and the Americans would be blamed,” he said.
1) how long before regional violence escalates after the former Iraqi dictator swings from the rope?
2) how long before that video of Saddam’s execution hits the internet?
and a third for tonight:
3) how long before the video airs on Faux News?
Not that I have any sympathy for the Iraqi dictator, but the outlandish bloodlust in Freeperland is mind-boggling…
(more…)
If I didn’t use Breck, would I be such a deep thinker?
I’m a little late to this game, but man, this quote from Ann Althouse is pure awesomeness distilled.
A key question — with an unknowable answer — is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?
Scott Lemieux uses a Simpsons quote to demonstrate the power of non-sequitur thinking. Pouty Miss Breck Girl is using the fact that she had a little bit of plausible deniability in this quote in order to defend herself, of course. The good news is she did not liken herself to Jonathan Swift when she did so. But it does make a person wonder…..
- If Bush hadn’t won the election, how many stray cats would be hanging out in the parking lot as we speak?
- If frogs had wings, would they bump their asses just to spite us?
- If I hadn’t graduated college, would Ben Stiller still have made a movie with Robert De Niro?
- And if they hadn’t made that movie, then how much ice cream would be going to waste?
- If people didn’t wear silver jewelry, would they grow a 6th toe to make up for it?
One hypothetical that is worth exploring, due to real world evidence issues, is whether or not BushCo would have started the war with Iraq even if the events on 9/11 didn’t happen. And I think the evidence is clearcut that this was that this was true. And so the other hypothetical to ask yourself is, “How would Ann Althouse be justifying the death of thousands of soliders in Iraq if she didn’t have terrorism to rely on?”
You broke it, you buy it?
EBW at Wampum has posted, with comments, an article by William E. Odom on the six brutal truths about Iraq that we must start facing. I have no way of knowing for sure how true any one of these points really is, but my inclination is to think that whatever we know about Iraq from the media, the truth is much, much worse, due to the way the wingnuts have really cowed the media into thinking it’s being too “liberal” if they are truthful. That said, I found this point to be interesting and quite likely:
Truth No. 3: The theory that “we broke it and therefore we own it,” with all the moral baggage it implies, is simply untrue because it is not within U.S. power to “fix it.”
During the run-up to the war and early parts of the war, when BushCo was trying out different lies about Iraq to see which would take well enough so they could get to have their colonialist adventure, all I could think was how much the mix of egos and unwillingness to see reality reminded me of the book The March of Folly that I had read some time back. The book was basically about how folly tends to have a life of its own, and how people will repeatedly fall into the spell of certain follies, even if they should have the brains and power to stop a folly from getting worse. Her first example is the legend of the Trojans accepting the Trojan Horse inside their gates, even though such a move is self-evidently stupid. She follows the rest up with real world examples of folly, especially the American Revolution (England’s folly) and Vietnam (clearly our folly).
I like the use of the Trojan War as a rhetorical device, though, because it is an amazingly rich legend that does have a lot to say about human nature. It helps that the Trojans are basically the good guys, so their defeat is particularly heart-wrenching. The story of the Trojan Horse has a particularly famous element, which is the problem of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who both had the gift of prophecy and the curse that no one ever believed her. She tells the Trojans that the horse is bad news, they scoff, you know the rest. The few and the proud amongst us who never believed for a moment that there were WMDs in Iraq can relate. And it did us about as much good as it did poor Cassandra.
But what I find interesting about the whole thing is that Colin Powell’s remark about how this is like the Pottery Barn, in that you break it, you buy it, was also a prophecy and, by the magic of folly, it’s somehow morphed into a moral imperative. To my mind, it was more a warning, but this little blurb drove home the point and therefore the way the folly of Iraq is perpetuating itself, with liberal support no less. The faulty assumptions are that we have to buy it for a deep-seated moral reason and that we even have the money to buy it. Which we don’t. But I’m fascinated by the mechanism that turned a warning about going into Iraq into a moral imperative to be in Iraq worked. Very Cassandra for the 21st century.
Of course, people are waking up to a certain, brutal truth that the question isn’t the airy ethical question about our moral obligations towards our victim nation, but whether or not we are, in any pragmatic sense, able to help. If not, then the truth is that our moral obligation is to pack it up and go home, period. Unfortunately, we are in the middle of some deep folly right now and neither major political party is in a place where they can say, “You know what? We aren’t helping. Time to cut our losses.” The Republicans have too much ego invested and the Democrats are too scared to be seen as backing down from our “buying it” moral imperatives. Eventually, we’ll wake up, I’m sure, to the fact that we’re throwing good money after bad. But for now, things are loaded in such a way that the right decision seems like the impossible one to make.
Chickenhawkery: The 19th century version of playing shepherdess
“For the poor citizenship consists of supporting and sustaining the power and idleness of the rich. They must work for those goals before the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” —Anatole France
“When nations decide whether to go to war — or whether to continue an existing war — everyone in a democracy is entitled to a view and everyone is entitled to be taken seriously. But if non-veterans, by virtue of having never served, are denied the moral authority to advocate in favor of war, their views will quite rightfully be entirely marginalized.” —Kevin Drum
Egads, the chickenhawk argument again. Kevin falls directly into the trap of being uncomfortable with the chickenhawk accusation because it gives war opponents an unfair rhetorical advantage buying the two chickenhawk ways to distract from the criticism in order not to answer it: a) Assume that the person claiming you’re a chickenhawk is saying that you don’t have a right to your opinion and b) Pretend that the criticism is based in some ideological view of the importance of military service instead of a very situational criticism of the way that the chickenhawks are behaving.
Basically no one actually says that you have to have military experience to have an opinion on any conflict. In particular, it’s assumed straightaway that someone who won’t join the military and opposes military actions is being consistent, at bare minimum. Even the peabrained chickenhawks get this. The chickenhawk criticism is aimed very specifically at people who act like soliders are toys they can play with and that human life is not an important factor when discussing whether or not to go to war. It’s a way to succiently demonstrate that their support of this war is contigent on their unwillingness to consider the people that it kills real human beings by pointing out the discrepancy between the sacrifice of life they ask from strangers and their own unwillingness to sacrifice themselves.
By definition, if you go to war as a nation, you think the cause is worth dying for. So why are so many of the biggest war supporters unwilling to die for the cause they demand others to die for? Asking this question of them is not depriving them of their right to vote. It is pointing out how they are morally bankrupt assholes who cherish their own lives while pissing away the lives of others for their little war games. They have a right to their morally bankrupt sociopathic attitudes, but they don’t have a right to advocate them free from criticism.
- That I’m alive.
- That I have a reasonable expectation that this will be true tomorrow.
- That my family is safe.
- That I have water to drink when I want it.
- That I can sleep at night in comfort without hearing gunshots or bombs going off.
- That I’m free to go where I want, no “stop loss” or any other pseudo-draft to take my freedom from me.
- That I can safely expect my country not to be torn apart by a civil war in the future.
- That I have plenty to eat.
- That I don’t have to worry about young men in my life joining a violent resistance movement and getting themselves killed.
- That I don’t have to feel like I have to join a violent resistance movement and get myself killed.
- That my job is meaningful and useful, instead of being based on a lie. Also, when I do my assigned duties, I don’t get the impression that my activities are counter-productive.
- That I will see my family for Christmas.
- That I’m not faced with massive moral quandaries and demands to violate basic human rights on a regular basis.
- That there’s a real chance that my country will be able to recover relatively quickly from the things that BushCo has done to it.
I probably won’t blog much for a few days. Wireless is spotty here. I will probably hop online to moderate comments on occasion, but for a couple of days, I may have to relearn my love of the printed page.
“We’ll succeed unless we quit.” That’s what Bush said when asked—while standing in the country where our nation committed atrocities like the one above—about the similiarities between now and then. Not that I wasn’t aware of the revisionist delusion that we could have “won” Vietnam had we just gone balls to the wall and killed every living human being in it. The logic that leads one to think you’ll win over a nation by killing everyone in it sounds roughly like O.J. Simpson’s logic that “if” he’d killed his ex-wife it was an act of love. I have to slice your head off your body, my dear, because I love you that much.
Keith Olbermann’s segment on Bush’s inhuman posturing on this subject says everything anyone needs to know about it. (Via.) We couldn’t have succeeded in Vietnam. I’m not sure what success is supposed to even mean. Oh, but don’t dare tell the chickenhawks out there that we actually lost the fucking war. Oh no, they were so robbed. Sure, they may be a series of nobodies who are scared of their own shadow, who flip out if a woman has a mind of her own or gets cut a break, who piss their pants with fear if they overhear someone conversing in Spanish nearby, who stay up at night tossing and turning with fear that the terrorists are going to bomb the local corn tower, who stock up on a variety of guns to protect them from enemies who are never coming while refusing to enlist in their pet war, who may have even gone so far to buy a Hummer just in case not having one meant the neighbors would think they were coming up short in the crotch department—it’s fun to mock them, but they simply need to believe that we could have won the last quagmire and that we can win this one.
It’s cruel to tell them otherwise! What else do the hawks of America have to live for if they can’t cling tenaciously to the myth that while they personally can’t kick some ass, they damn well can wave a flag at a military that totally could if they wanted to? How could we let them believe that the nation and their beloved President are less than perfect? Take that away from them and what else do they have? They’re not going to fuck Catherine Zeta-Jones. They’re never going to invent something critical and become billionaires. They won’t be Michael Jordan in this lifetime or even John Kerry. They want to believe that Rambo was real and we could have totally won Vietnam and we’re totally going to win Iraq. Why do the meanie ass bully liberals want to take it away from them? Do we enjoy their suffering?
Needless to say, as much as I pity the desperate delusions of mediocre assholes from the flag-waving Freepers to the biggest mediocre asshole of them all, George Bush, my concern about these people:
And these people:
Somehow makes me forget about bolstering the egos of hawkish limpdick war-mongerers.
Who does this? And to little kids, no less.
And for those of you who have slow connections or can’t watch videos for some reason, this is a video of American soliders taunting Iraqi children with a bottle of clean drinking water.
Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: “Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”
Bush was the pacifist’s version of Samson, it seems, and he would have never, ever wanted to go to war if it wasn’t for the machinations of the beautiful war-mongering Delilahs he surrounds himself with. Why’d you do it, Laura? Harriet? What did you ever have against the Iraqis? Must be one of those silly little things that get women all bunched up for no reason.
Reasons Michael Ledeen Thinks The Bush Harem Was Out To Get The Nation of Iraq:
- Iraq totally showed up at the prom wearing the same dress as Laura Bush, even though Iraq knew Laura liked that dress. (Yes, it’s a “90210″ episode.)
- Iraq started a rumor that Harriet Miers wore blue eyeliner because she was “easy”, which meant everyone treated Harriet like the White House slut for an entire year.
- Iraq totally bribed its way into the role of head cheerleader, even though everyone knows that Karen Hughes deserved it because she’s worked for so long for so hard. Plus, she has the most pep, as the entire Presidential team could tell you.
- Iraq should have known that guy was hands-off after he dumped Condi Rice. Everyone knows the “no exes” rule!
- Iraq needed to be taken down a few notches for thinking it’s such hot shit. C’mon, hip hugger jeans are just so last year and Iraq’s still strutting around like they’re the best thing since L’Oreal’s Voluminous mascara.
- And what about that time Iraq had that slumber party and just “forgot” to invite Harriet?
- Anyway, Iraq’s just full of oil and that stuff’s contagious. It’s not like they wanted to invite acne into their lives.
So while it might look for the world like the Iraq War was started mostly by a male President and a predominantly male group of neocons, the fact of the matter is that it’s the fault of frivolous women. Clearly, this is just all the more evidence that women should not be in leadership roles and possibly also banned from speaking until spoken to.
Another important story from Roxanne.
The smiling woman in this picture is Alyssa Peterson, and Army specialist who spoke Arabic and served in Iraq as an interrogator. She passed away on the night of September 15th, 2003 in Iraq. She was not killed by insurgents or friendly fire. She shot herself to death with her own service rife. Thanks to a journalist at KNAU and a FOIA request, we now know what the events were leading up to her death.
Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.
Instead she was assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards. She was sent to suicide prevention training. But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle.
Alyssa Peterson, we have failed you. We failed you when we didn’t provide you the support to complain about the wrongdoing you saw before you and we have failed you 100 times over by passing legislation endorsing the inhumane treatment you rightly protested. We are miserable cowards and utter failures. I can’t know what you were thinking the night you took your own life, but I do know that a nation where people like you lose their lives while people like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld won’t even lose their jobs is a nation that should wallow in shame. It’s grotesque that people wave flags and blather about patriotism and pride when you are dead and the people who put you in your situation are running the country.
We should be ashamed that if it wasn’t for your hometown radio station, we wouldn’t even know.
Every day in Iraq, we devastate more and more families, like this one:
Are they still making up bullshit excuses, or have they given up completely with the charade?
If you haven’t seen the outstanding documentary about the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, check it out. It’s particularly a relief after having to read this dribble that Jonah Goldberg squeezed out today, no doubt congratulating himself for his iconoclastic willingness to take a breath between rounds of licking BushCo asshole.*
Okay, harsh words but seriously, the man nearly gave me a stroke. He’s admitted that the Iraq War was a “mistake”, but the main point he wants to get across is that none of this means you pot-smoking hippies were right. So quit gloating between puffs of your marijuana cigarettes. The notion that we non-dope-smoking, non-hippie liberals might have also seen right through Bush’s bullshit at the beginning is inconceivable to him. No, in Jonah’s world, when Bush ran around the country telling people, “Oh no, don’t believe the experts about whether or not Iraq has WMDs, believe a two bit asshole who you know for a fact will lie his head off it means he gets his way,” the only people who weren’t scared out of their minds must have been too stoned to care. No other explanation. None.
But don’t let the adult sized diapers fool you. Jonah didn’t swallow BushCo’s lies about WMDs because he’s a scaredy pissy-pants. Nope, he just hates hippies.
I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.
Whoops, 655,000 people had to die before it occured to Jonah that pissing off the hippies might not be worth it. What was the magical cut-off number of dead people before he thought, “You know, it might be better for me to chill on the hippie hate a little if so many people have to die?” 400,000 dead too few to make Jonah feel like the hippies have really eaten it? 30,000?
Okay, so the war was wrong. He never really explains why it was a bad idea, but now that he’s “confessed” that he thinks it was a mistake, his solutions are to change nothing, basically. But before he gets to why his entire op-ed is a waste of column inches, he has to spread BushCo lies one more time. For old times’ sake, I guess.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein’s bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do.
Here’s where you can submit complaints to the LA Times if you want to let them know that just because this is the op-ed page is no reason to let people tell blatant fucking lies on it. Let’s unpack the lies in that quote:
Billmon has linked Riverbend’s post on the Lancet study. Riverbend hasn’t been posting out of despondency, really. The Lancet article that estimated the number of Iraqis that are dead from the war at 655,000 has left a lot of us feeling both angry and yet hopeless and Billmon, after reading Riverbend’s post, is feeling that hard.
For someone in my shoes, though, hopelessness can become an excuse for not thinking about unpleasant truths. But there was something about Riverbend’s quiet despair that forced me to think hard about my own moral responsibility as an American for a genocide caused by America — because of a war started in my name, paid for with my taxes.
I’ve opposed this war since it was just a malignant smirk on George Bush’s face. I’ve spoken against it, written against it, marched against it, supported and contributed to politicians I generally despise because I thought (wrongly) that they might do something to stop it. It’s why I took up blogging, why I started this blog.
But the question Riverbend has forced me to ask myself is: Did I do enough? And the only honest answer is no.
I opposed the invasion — and the regime that launched it — but I didn’t do everything I could have done. Very few did. We may have put our words and our wallets on the line, but not our bodies. Not when it might have made a difference. In the end, we were all good little Germans.
My question to myself, in other words, is like Thoreau’s famous question to Ralph Waldo Emerson when Emerson came to visit him in jail after he was arrested for not paying his poll tax as a protest against slavery:
Emerson: What are you doing in there, Henry?Thoreau: No, Waldo, the question is: What are you doing out there?
It’s easy to think up excuses now — we were in the minority, the media was against us, the country was against us. We didn’t know how bad it would be.
But we knew, or should have known, that what Bush was planning was an illegal act of aggression, based on a warmongering campaign of deception and ginned-up hysteria. And we knew, or should have known, what our moral and legal obligations were:
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.
We were all complicit. I was complicit. Because I was afraid — afraid to sacrifice my comfortable middle class lifestyle, afraid to lose my job and my house, afraid of the IRS, afraid to go to jail.
But not nearly as afraid, of course, as the thousands of Iraqis who have been tortured or murdered, or who, like Riverbend, are forced to live in bloody chaos, day after day. Which is why, reading her post today, I couldn’t help but feel deeply, bitterly ashamed — not just of my country, but of myself.
I don’t doubt that most of us are motivated strongly by wanting our houses and jobs and comfort, but I have to ask a very hard question: What good would Billmon do sitting in jail?
Recent number-crunching from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health indicates that the Iraqi death toll directly attributable to the war is 655,000. (Via Liberal Avenger.) Of these deaths, 600,000 are attributable to violence.
Naturally, the chickenhawks are squawking. LGF and Hot Air are already making noise about how this is supposedly unfair to whip out in October. Which just goes to show how screwed up the discourse is in this country if people think it’s appropriate to withhold actual, verifiable, relevant information from the voters before an election, because god forbid people be informed about the issues before they vote.
But more than this, I find myself stunned at what moral monsters people have become in their earnest desire to be right about BushCo and the War on Terra. Brushing off 2.5% of the population dead to war is nothing, done automatically without a moment’s pause to consider what it means to have 655,000 individual, unnecessary, unjust tragedies dealt to a single nation. I wonder, when I read people just brush off 655,000 dead people like this, if they take a moment to remember what it’s like to have someone you love die. And if they’ve even had to deal with something as brutal as a sudden, unexpected death. And if, on top of that, the death was preventable, attributable only to human malfeasance. I’ve never had someone close to me murdered, but I did have a family member murdered when I was a toddler and the psychic damage done to my family is palpable. The human mind is capable of many things, but such unnecessary loss is really beyond what we can square away in our mind. I can’t imagine that sort of tragedy multipled over and over so many times—according to the War Room post, the equivalent for America would be an unimaginable 7.4 million dead. For no reason.
They blow off the lies that got us into the war. They blow off the fact that their beloved BushCo is dissolving our basic civil liberties. They blow off torture in the prisons. Now they blow off 655,000 dead, and indeed seem incapable of understanding that each of these dead was loved by someone, that each one is not just the loss of a human life, but the ruin to other human lives. It’s not that they blow it off, but they blow it off so quickly, so thoughtlessly. 655,000 dead people isn’t 655,000 dead people to the hive of wingnuts, it’s a low blow to Dear Leader, it’s mere pandering to people who still have a moral compass.
They didn’t even pause. They just wondered if this was good for their beloved masters or not.
Not that this country’s hands are clean. They’re soaked with blood. But to the yapping jaws of the moral monsters amongst us, they never have enough blood. I got nothing else to say, I’m pissed. For which I feel sort of weak and inept, so I’ll leave you with Billie Holiday’s anger, since mine’s left me floundering.
Though of course our thugs are too prissy to actually do the dirty work themselves. So I guess in one way we’ve “progressed”.
Via Angelica, a couple of articles from Nir Rosen on the Iraqi occupation. The first describes his unique insights into Iraq as someone who, due to his middle-eastern complexion, can pass as an Iraqi.
My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the “gook� of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, “That’s the biggest fuckin’ Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw.� A soldier by the gun said, “I don’t care how big he is, if he doesn’t stop movin’ I’m gonna shoot him.�
I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!â€? It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints. […]
Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.
The latest from the Democrats on Iraq:
Leading Senate Democrats called Monday for a “phased withdrawal” of U.S. forces from Iraq, outlining what they hope will become a consensus position on the war that will help their party speak with a more unified voice.
….The new Democratic proposal sets a starting point for withdrawing troops but does not set an end date or demand a particular pace for the redeployment, said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee….”Our amendment does not establish a timetable for redeployment,” Levin said. “It does urge that a phased redeployment begin this year, partly as a way of moving away from an open-ended commitment and a way of avoiding Iraqi dependency on a U.S. security blanket.”
Does this even mean anything? “Urge” a phased redeployment, but “does not set a timetable or establish a pace.” Kevin Drum thinks the “substance” of this “plan” “probably isn’t bad” because “the key issue isn’t really setting some precise date for redeployment. It’s making clear that an open-ended commitment is a dumb policy.”
Huh?
I’m sorry but I’m not following… Did we change the meaning of the word “substance?” Is “making clear that an open-ended commitment is a dumb policy” a substantive Iraq policy?
I think there really are some substantive problems with setting a firm date for withdrawal. I can appreciate that. But I don’t understand how substantively this proposal is any different from an open-ended committment. The commitment is still completely open-ended, it’s just that a little noise has been made about “redeployment.” It’s a characterization. Nothing more. Maybe if this redeployment were tied to concrete benchmarks, but I don’t see anything to indicate that it is.
Obviously this isn’t a political winner either. It’s the worst of all possible worlds that I can see. The Republicans will still call it “cutting and running,” just because they can. And, sorry Mr. Drum, but a glass eye in a duck’s ass can see that there’s no real substance to this. I don’t know who this is supposed to make happy. The idea that this will resonate with the public is ludicrous. What, do you think the American public has really suddenly become enamored with nonsensical dithering?
There are two answers to the Iraq question, and only two. Either commit to an indefinite stay, or figure out how to get out. You have to pick one or the other. There are relatively nuanced ways of figuring out how to get out. But this plan isn’t one. And, politically, if that latter option is chosen, you need to face the fact that no one is really going to hear the nuance anyway. It’ll be called “cutting and running” regardless. I nevertheless doubt that any substantive approach to getting out of Iraq is actually a political loser, despite what epithets may be hurled.
Update: Turns out Yglesias thinks it’s a good idea too. I’m thinking pity for the Democrats is affecting their judgement.
