As President of the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, I submitted this response to Obama's speech as a letter-to-the-editor to the Sacramento Bee.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The President announced the end of "combat" operations in Iraq, but there really haven’t been many real combat operations for U. S. Soldiers this whole year - and we still lost more than 40 soldiers in 2010. The remaining 49,700 troops are supposed to be in non-combat roles, but as Veterans For Peace President Michael Ferner points out, "Non-combat troops is simply the latest in a long line of military euphemisms meant to obscure painful reality."
Meanwhile the pointless death, injury, and maiming of American soldiers continue in Afghanistan, and it gets worse every year. And for what? To prop up a corrupt government in a place with no strategic importance to America? Afghans have resisted outside interference for thousands of years. Our efforts will be no more successful than the Russians, the British, the Persians, the Greeks... Time to end the pointless sacrifice of young American lives.
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... They are now termed "advise and assist brigades" by the administration, and the press dutifully reported this new term in their stories.
No wonder the press missed it. They can’t be expected to take dictation and fact-check it too.
Normally, misleading text and headlines are so commonplace they just don’t bother one like they used to. But this is Iraq. And I’m worried that the American public may be misled into thinking that all we’ll have over there a month from now are a few clerks and supply officers. The public might wrongly perceive from a false-fact like "all combat troops gone" that the light they’re seeing at the end of this horrific tunnel is fairly strong, when maybe it’s not that strong and it’s pretty far away.
What the administration has done (and the press would know this if they’d simply do their collective job) is rebrand the Iraqi mission with an new tag-line (“New Dawn”), and re-label six fully-combat-capable brigades with new, kinder and gentler titles. That’s basically the story. Here’s the February memo from Gates to CENTCOM giving the go-ahead to roll-out the kinder/gentler new mission tag-line that we’ll all going to hear so much about.
The New Dawn mission tagline and associated public relations effort doesn’t fit well with the word “combat”–and actually the American people have had their fill of the term too. So no accident that the administration has simply renamed six (or so) brigade combat teams as “advise and assist” brigades. The units may have received minor personnel changes, but otherwise are in no way different from existing combat brigades in Iraq. Indeed, some or maybe all of them are already deployed and functional under our current “Operation Iraqi Freedom” mission. The only thing that has changed is the name.
“When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001.”
He goes on to point out:
“Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.”
[snip]
“Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn't Washington bombed those countries?”
Blum takes on the “safe haven” rationale:
“Indeed, what actually is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.”
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 08/07/2010 - 8:13pm
Yo, head-buried-in-sand Americans!!! The Iraq War is over!!!! Let yourselves enjoy a long-awaited exhalation.
Well, half of one. There is still that other war.
However, this sure sounds like a big deal. Obama is telling us in that deliberate, endearingly self-effacing (i.e., slickly cautious and calculating) way of his that he has fulfilled a great promise.
What a relief! The news media can pump up the national esteem a bit on this one to help compete with the insanely irrational tea party and racist right drumbeats. As we round the corner to midterms, Dem government officials, military operatives and pundits can posture "Iraq victory" before the BP- and war-battered vast, struggling, myopic majority of citizens.
Are you beginning to feel the election term climate change? I know I am. The ever increasing and novel sunlight of attention from Obama and the Dem politicians as we enter another teasing and ultimately cruel "Lucy and the football" season? Why, the House Reps are willing to come galloping back from their summer vacations to vote funding for cop and teacher jobs! Fancy that? How absolutely swell of them!
This is the time when our Dem leadership will pretend it seriously cares about us. Will point out to us what rabid rat bastards the Republicans have been (no argument from me), and try to convince us that their being non-rabid rat bastards is so much better than the alternative.
As if obscene amounts of corporate-lobbied bribe money poking out of their briefcases, pockets of phenomenally expensive suits or up from bra cleavages did not long ago cause our real needs to be planted somewhere on Pluto. (You know, like single payer, Medicare-for-All health care. Like a non-bonus baby, big enough stimulus for real Main Street people.) Pluto I say, ... which is appropriate. Not even taken seriously as a planet any more.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Mon, 08/02/2010 - 9:26pm
I wonder if Bradley Manning knows that after his enormous sacrifice the national conversation last week was about whether Barack Obama -- while visiting the View -- really didn't know who "Snookie" was. My bet is he did and he was lying. I don't know Snookie, but I know Barack Obama. He lies.
I guess Oprah was on break from helping Obama convince America that we need a president of style not substance, amiability not honor. The girls on the View filled in just fine. Once again our media snatched political propaganda from the jaws of collective critical thinking.
Of course, Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates did manage to address the Wikileaks' issue from their bully pulpits before Obama this week began a masterful shell game of distracting from the horrors in Afghanistan with Iraq faux-success. But last week, Obama and Gates couldn't say enough in their righteously performed sound bites about how concerned they are that innocent Afghans may NOW be in jeopardy as well as our poor troops from the leaked disclosures.
How many million are dead from our wars? How many troops by now are dead or are doomed to lives of physical and mental debilitation? I wonder how Obama and Gates et al. look at themselves in the mirror every morning? I wonder if there is still a reflection that appears to them?
What was Bradley Manning thinking? That a release of thousands and thousands of documents proving overwhelming U.S. war criminal activity and what should be a horrifying video of army soldiers callously treating innocent foreign civilians like targets in a video game (apparently S.O.P.) would break the moral coma that America exists in? That the blowback from the perpetrators of evil would not reach Orwellian dimensions of crazymaking projection of their own crimes onto the whistleblowers?
369,256 People Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR 13,314 Police or Sheriff's Patrol Officers for One Year OR 16,317 Firefighters for One Year OR 148,755 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR 223,882 Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550 OR 656,044 Children Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR 141,455 Head Start Slots for Children for One Year OR 440,995 Households with Renewable Electricity - Solar Photovoltaic for One Year OR 16,140 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR 1,175,986 Households with Renewable Electricity-Wind Power for One Year
Will House Democrats Oppose a Jobless War Supplemental?
Sunday 25 July 2010
by: Robert Naiman, t r u t h o u t | Report
The war supplemental for Afghanistan is expected to come back from the Senate to the House this week - without any kind of timetable for military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and without money to save teachers' jobs attached.
AP reports:
In a take-it-or-leave-it gesture, the Senate voted Thursday night to reject more than $20 billion in domestic spending the House had tacked on to its $60 billion bill to fund President Barack Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan.
The moves repel a long-shot bid by House Democrats earlier this month to resurrect their faltering jobs agenda with $10 billion in grants to school districts to avoid teacher layoffs, $5 billion for Pell Grants to low-income college students, $1 billion for a summer jobs program and $700 million to improve security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Labor unions had strongly backed the House Democratic effort to attach money to the supplemental, to boost employment and avoid teacher layoffs. Will these unions now urge House Democrats to vote no on any jobless war supplemental?
Few expect that the House, in a freestanding vote this week, will reject the $33 billion request for the Afghanistan war, since until now there has been a solid block of more than 90 percent of House Republicans committed to voting yes on what they would consider a "relatively clean" war supplemental.
But what is in serious dispute is how many House Democrats will vote no on a jobless war supplemental. A large Democratic no vote would send a strong signal to the White House of House Democratic impatience with a blank checkbook for endless and fruitless war, while the administration insists that there is no money to save jobs at home, at a time of nearly 10 percent measured unemployment. A large Democratic no vote would also send a powerful signal of Democratic "no confidence" in the Pentagon's war plans, increasing pressure on the administration to vigorously pursue a political resolution to the conflict and to establish a timetable for military withdrawal - as desired by the majority of Americans and three-quarters of Democrats, according to a recent CBS poll.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Mon, 07/26/2010 - 8:16pm
From Campaign for Peace and Democracy in an email:
Dear friend of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy,
U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is facing increasing challenge, and this week's dramatic Wikileaks revelations -- the biggest U.S. war expose since Dan Ellsberg's Pentagon papers -- make it all the more difficult for Congress to keep funding this horrific war. It is an important moment for all of us who want immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to raise our voices.
It looks like there will be an up-and-down House vote this week on the Afghan war supplemental funding. The Senate has stripped the bill of all unrelated issues such as funding for teachers, so the meaning of the vote will be clear: there will be no excuses for voting "Yes" or abstaining (not that such excuses were ever legitimate.)
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sun, 07/18/2010 - 9:10pm
Troops ream Afghan elders,
“Stop Taliban-money kills!"
OUR soldiers kill, why?
We never find out from this movie. We never hear any of them ask, either.
Fly-on-the-wall, or rather, on-the-craggy-rock-surface reality.
I appreciated this film. The filmmakers risked their lives, the same way the soldiers were risking theirs. I can understand the risk, admittedly monstrously awesome, the movie makers took for their art. As for the soldiers risking their lives over there? I have more trouble fathoming the soldiers’ risk (aside from authoritarian-following, trapped within the military matrix, betrayed by the ruling class rat bastards of the United States reasons. Excuse my French.).
Dropped into an insane, PTSD-creating environment, not for a minute but for 15 long months for the soldiers. A psyche-altering, along with possibly, even probably, life-ending, predicament. (One soldier said into the camera early on, “I’m gonna die here!”)
If you manage to escape with your life, what has it done to your sanity?
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 07/17/2010 - 12:57pm
Tom Engelhardt in an introduction to Nick Turse’s blunt and moving commentary of Sebastian Junger’s new film Restrepo:
Left screen center was usually the American platoon, a kind of “lost patrol” in an alien land, part of what, even during the war, was regularly referred to as an American -- but not a Vietnamese -- “tragedy.” From Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, Vietnamese suffering became, at best, a distant backdrop for American suffering, and the war’s conflicts essentially took place among Americans within that platoon. (A rare exception was Good Morning, Vietnam, but you would never again, in all those post-war years, see a scene like the first one in Peter Davis’s Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, which opens on a Vietnamese village, quiet and peaceful, before you notice the silhouettes of soldiers entering -- intruding on an emerald green land, really -- from the edge of the screen.)
Turse points out that what we call the Vietnam War, to the Vietnamese is the “American War.” Think about it. Turse summarizes the proverbial “collateral damage” of that war.
About two million of those dead were Vietnamese civilians. They were blown to pieces by artillery, blasted by bombs, and massacred in hamlets and villages like My Lai, Son Thang, Thanh Phong, and Le Bac, in huge swaths of the Mekong Delta, and in little unnamed enclaves like one in Quang Nam Province.
Turse writes of the movie, “Only during wide shots in Restrepo do we catch fleeting glimpses of that real war.” Turse points out a persistent and pervasive, pathological narcissism among most Americans. This narcissism includes the very writers and directors (Junger and Hetherington, in this case) who congratulate themselves and are celebrated by rapturous American critics for capturing the essence of war. They profoundly do not, declares Turse. The omission of empathy for the reality of the foreign citizenries is profound and systemic in our culture.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Thu, 07/08/2010 - 2:58am
Yemen. Where the US is NOT even “illegally” and “pre-emptively” at war! 35 women and children were killed during a US attack on an alleged al Qaeda hideout on December 17th Amnesty International revealed. According to Ramzy Baroud attempts were made to hide the story but the high number of casualties made that impossible for the Yemen government. It is the highest loss of human life from a single attack in this country thus far. (Does Ripley's have a "collateral damage" category? Anyone know?)
Cluster munitions, especially in civilian areas, are an atrocity, whether Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon or Afghanistan!
According to Bazoud:
According to the group Handicap International, a third of cluster-bomb victims are children.
Equally alarming, 98 per cent of the weapon’s overall victims are civilians. The group estimates that about 100,000 people have been maimed or killed by cluster bombs around the world since 1965.
Unlike conventional weapons, cluster bomblets survive for many years, luring little children with their attractive appearance. Children often mistake the bomblets for candy or toys.
But we must remember, the production of cluster bombs is, though psychopathic in intent, a very lucrative product Bazoud reveals for the US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan, the biggest makers and users of the weapon. Which is why when international meetings on banning cluster bombs were held first in Ireland in May 2008 and then in Oslo in December 2008, they were ignored by the super-powers. Bazoud writes:
Submitted by libbyliberal on Fri, 07/02/2010 - 4:10am
They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.
(They also don’t commit suicide, desert, suffer PTSD, become conscientious objectors, protest, talk to Rolling Stone or send embarrassing videos to Wikileaks!)
The above non-parenthetical remarks were made by Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon Joint Forces Command bragging about America’s efficient, stealthy and deadly “wonder weapon”, the drone. I came across a troubling and enlightening article about drones by Tom Engelhardt. Engelhardt observes:
After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.
Engelhardt shares an image from Christopher Drew of the New York Times of a "video warrior" before a console, as if accessing his or her PlayStation (remember Matthew Broderick's inadvertent unleashing of imminent global disaster in War Games?), casually armed with coffee or Red Bull to help him or her endure a 12-hour shift, sitting 7,000 miles away from the soon-to-be targets of horrifying, burn-to-ash annihilation.
Engelhardt explains that an entire drone “crew” is comprised of the young pilot (this is his or her generation’s forte, after all), the cameraperson and the intelligence analyst. He goes on:
