"Soon come, soon come the day this tinderbox is gonna blow in your face"

punditman says...

Scanning the news lately, punditman is beginning to wonder if things aren't starting to come apart at the seams. It's not quite 1968,[1]  but you never know where things are going to end up, especially in Europe. Government austerity packages being implemented across the board in Europe should be viewed for what they are: class warfare aimed at making the middle and lower classes pay for the unpunished corruption and incompetence of an unregulated financial class.

Thanks to the meltdown of 2008, and the criminal greed of Wall Street and their cohorts and minions abroad, citizens of the world have been left with a sputtering "recovery" whose salient features include massive unemployment, deep cuts to pensions, and social services—all overseen by the same political class who oversaw the disaster in the first place. Apparently they have no proper ideas of how to fix things. Time for a change.

Moving on to free speech and government transparency, the so-called hallmarks of democracy; those freedoms we are told that our soldiers are fighting and dying to uphold in Afghanistan, it's now official: the emperors truly have no clothes. Thanks to Wikileaks, and the dumping of just a fraction of 250,000 diplomatic cables and the earlier spilling of  hundreds of thousands of files from the Iraq and Afghan Wars, the world is being exposed to a good sampling of some of official duplicity, hypocrisy and state crimes behind American diplomacy and warcraft. To list just a smidgen: the unaffordable, depressing Iraq and Afghan wars with their massive collateral killings and the actual thoughts of cynical state apologists and propagandists who often know a war is hopeless but pretend otherwise; gossipy diplomatic spats between so-called mature nations; and, of course, the attempt to kill the messenger Julian Assange (figuratively in some quarters, literally in others) and those who do business with Wikileaks. Assange, for his part, recently wrote the following:

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

Do governments have a legitimate concern to protect sensitive diplomatic information and lives, when it comes to matters of diplomacy and security? As a general principle, most would say of course they do. But what we have seen from Wikileaks ranges from bland and embarassing to revealing and disturbing, rather than endangering. Indeed Assange recently pointed out the following:

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting...

Punditman says going after Assange rather looks and feels like it is part of the more generalized trend to intimidate citizens and squash free speech by going after the messenger, rather than genuine concern for safety and security. Punditman reserves judgement regarding the allegations of sex crimes against Assange.

It comes as no surprise that we are being lied to or misled, but the extent of manipulation, intrigue, and "things not being as they appear" is startling. They would have us all played for fools. But a pox on all their houses, because it matters not what country we cite, be it "free" or unfree. Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran; Sweden is a secret NATO member and US intelligence sharing is kept from their Parliament; Britain's so-called Iraq War inquiry was fixed to protect US interests. Fifteen thousand more Iraqis have been killed than was publicly acknowledged. The list goes on and on.

As for US foreign policy, with its murderous drone strikes, torture chambers, secret prisons, and GIs who shoot innocent civilians from helicopters like fish in a barrel, we can now add to these the fact that the US "asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties." The descending superpower's paranoia astounds. Decades of supposed multilateralism and this is what we get?

Modern statecraft laid bare. Time for a change.

And what of Canada? Well, as revealed by the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, back in 2009, Jim Judd, the former director of the CSIS, met with senior advisor to US Secretary of State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, Eliot Cohen and discussed security matters. He said that Canadians had an "Alice in Wonderland" worldview and Canadian judges, "have tied CSIS in knots, making it ever more difficult to detect and prevent terror attacks in Canada and abroad." Judd doesn't seem to have much time for civil rights. Nor did the Toronto police force or the Ontario government during the G20 back in June.

Actually, the civil liberties file is in deep trouble across the Western world, with routine violations of basic human rights, police brutality, and taser deaths occurring on a regular basis. With repression on the rise, there's bound to be some payback from those with nothing left to lose.

As punditman says, things may take a turn off the rails hither and yon. At the core of all this is a profound distrust of the will of the people on the part of elites.

Precient lyrics come to punditman's mind as we see the massive injustices that dominate our age:

"One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast, 
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast, 
They call the revolution."[2]

Hear, hear, Bruce Cockburn. Now there's a great Canadian. Or this portentous passage from the American singer-song writer Natalie Merchant:

"Soon come, soon come the day, this tinderbox 
Is gonna blow in your face, 
I don't have the gift of the prophecy, 
Telling everybody how it's gonna be, 
But you go passing wrong for right and right for wrong, 
People only stand for that for just so long."[3]

Indeed. Indications are that people will only stand for this for "just so long." For students in London facing a tripling in tuition fees (see video below), the pot has officially boiled over. Where it all goes from here is anybody's guess. Time for a change.

1. At around 3:04 of the video, Professor Chris Knight of the University of East London is introduced. He says it's just like 1968, noting that back then it started with the students. Time will tell.
2. Bruce Cockburn. "Call it Democracy." World of Wonders. True North Records, 1986.
3. Natalie Merchant. "This House is on Fire." Motherland. Elektra, 2001.

Wikileaks Files Show 'Truth' On Iraq: Assange

Well the Wikileaks files on Iraq are getting some media attention. But between NFL football, MLB playoffs and the start of the NHL season Peacenik hasn't noticed much coverage on the television. And of course the corrupt CNN would rather talk about false charges against Julian Assange than actually discuss the files. Move along, nothing to see here. Just a few thousand war crimes. And a bunch of propaganda.>

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks during a news conference about the internet release of secret documents about the Iraq War, in London October 23, 2010. Wikileaks released nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war on Friday, some detailing gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the U.S. military knew about but did not seem to investigate.

LONDON -- WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said Saturday that hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents leaked by the website showed the 'truth' on the Iraq war.

"This disclosure is about the truth," Assange told a news conference in London after WikiLeaks released 400,000 documents which give a grim snapshot of the Iraq war, including showing the abuse of Iraqi civilians by Iraqi security forces.

"The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends," Assange added. Profile of the WikiLeaks founder

"We hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded."
Read on....

False Reality vs. Iraq and Afghan Facts

punditman says...

According to Richard Gwyn, in today's Toronto Star, the Americans have "gone" from Iraq. This of course is wrong; Gwyn surely knows it and Punditman will email him and ask why he planted this falsehood in an otherwise insightful piece about how insiders blabbed to Bob Woodward about Afghanistan in Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars.

We are led to believe that Iraq, while perhaps not Disneyland (for example, torture continues unabated), is a much better place now that Saddam is dead and the Americans have gone stayed on in large numbers and are still participating in combat. Of course they have not gone. Just as there is no way that they intend on leaving Afghanistan. As an example of how false reality becomes news, journalist John Pilger recently wrote a revealing article entitled Flying the Flag, Faking the News. He cites the Iraq example as follows:

False reality: The last US combat troops have left Iraq "as promised, on schedule", according to President Barack Obama. TV screens have filled with cinematic images of the "last US soldiers" silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.

Fact: They are still there. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces’ assassinations. The number of "military contractors" is currently 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control. 

The difference is that with Afghanistan, at least for the time being, the US and NATO are publicly stating they have no way of leaving and no intention of doing so. Quoting from Woodward's book, Gwyn notes that General David Patreus certainly isn't anticipating some near time exit, “I don't think you win this war...You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives, and probably our kids' lives.”

But look for that storyline to change. Punditman says that at some point, for political reasons, the propagandists of our era will decide to "engineer public consent" for the greater good by creating yet another "false reality," which will then become a "news event" (i.e., "we are now leaving Afghanistan"). Will a reality-TV, celebrity-obsessed, distracted populace believe them? Punditman won't. Peacenik won't. Stay tuned.

Postscipt:

Punditman's email to Mr. Gwyn has gone unanswered. Meanwhile, for an army that has "gone" from Iraq, the US military sure continues to do a lot of damage: US Combat Continues in ‘Post-Combat’ Iraq Despite Claims of 'End of Combat' in Iraq, Rules of Engagement Never Changed.

Obama Wants Us To Forget the Lessons of Iraq

Peacenik couldn't even bring Peacenik to watch Obama's speech last night. This overview of the debacle is ok.....but no overview can really capture the folly of the Iraq war. It was/is a waste of lives, money and honour. And to suggest that it is over is simply bullshit.

by Andrew Bacevich

The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. "Now, it is time to turn the page." So advises the commander-in-chief at least. "[T]he bottom line is this," President Obama remarked last Saturday, "the war is ending." Alas, it's not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page-something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do-common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.

For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let's provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq's unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam's war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.

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Don’t Call It Combat: US Troops Still Fighting Iraq War in Everything But Name

punditman says...If all you watched was mainstream news you may think US combat operations were over in Iraq. "They came, They surged, They Withdrew" is their tagline. Ah...not quite. Here's the skinny: 50,000 American troops will stay another year (at least) in what is being called a "noncombat role." Noncombat involves carrying weapons to defend themselves and accompanying Iraqi troops on missions (but only if asked). Meanwhile, US Special forces will continue to help Iraqis hunt for "terrorists" (read: anyone who opposes them). Sounds like war to me. Just don't mention the war.

By Jason Ditz 
www.antiwar.com

It was business as usual in Iraq today for 56,000 US troops, despite the canned “victory” celebration yesterday the troops, though by and large redefined as something, anything, other than “combat troops” were still out and about, doing the exact same things they were doing when they were still engaging in combat.

Just pretend the guns aren't there

It's just that its called “counter-terrorism operations” instead of combat now. The “last brigade” may have left yesterday, but six more brigades are still there, wondering when or even if it will be their turn to be the “last” to leave.

And while the celebration must have been thrilling for that “last” brigade, it must be somewhat bittersweet for the troops still there, who as far as the media are concerned are an afterthought, probably doing training or some such.

In fact even if we were to ignore the 50,000 renamed troops the claim of an end to combat operations yesterday wasn’t true, as some 6,000 troops which are still designated as combat troops still haven’t left, though they are scheduled to do so at some point in the future.

Still these 6,000 combat troops leave one wondering why yesterday of all days was selected as the official “end of the war” day, and makes the date seem even more arbitrary than it already was.

Serial Denial and the Permanent War System

by Gareth Porter

Two months ago, I wrote that the Obama administration and the U.S. command in Afghanistan faced an "Iraq 2006 moment" in the second half of 2010 - a collapse of domestic political support for a failed war paralleling the political crisis in Bush's Iraq War in 2006. Now comes Republican Congressman Frank Wolf to make that parallel with 2006 eerily precise.

Wolf published a letter to President Obama last week calling for the immediate establishment of an "Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group". It would be the son of the Iraq Study Group. Wolf is the Congressman who authored the legislation in 2005 creating the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group to come up with fresh ideas for that failing war. The Wolf proposal came nearly a year after American public had turned against the war decisively in January 2005, when support for the war fell to 39 percent.

The U.S. public had withdrawn its support because it had become obvious that the war was a failure. The Bush administration had overthrown the Saddam Hussein regime only to unleash a violent Sunni-Shi'a sectarian power struggle that the U.S. military couldn't control. Even worse, the U.S. military presence was objectively supporting one side in that power struggle by building up a clearly sectarian military and police sector, even as it pretended by the honest broker between Sunni and Shi'a.

Read on...

When the history is written about the Iraq/Afghan wars, Peacenik doesn't think anyone is going to look good. No one looks good now. Bring the troops home now.

A 9/11 Reality Check

punditman says...9-11. It is unlikely that this blog, and thousands like it, would even exist if not for that fateful day 8 years ago. Eight years ago, everyone was discussing what the Bush administration was going to do in the wake of the attacks on New York's Twin Towers. Anyone with a driblet of political instinct knew there would be war in Afghanistan. So how is that working out? If someone went to sleep eight years ago and woke up today, they may have trouble believing that the Afghan War is escalating as I write this.

Eight years ago, some of us predicted there would be an assualt on liberty and a crackdown on dissent. And excuses and lies for more war too, in Iraq, or anywhere deemed necessary to go after those "with global reach." 9-11 offered little Hitlers everywhere international carte blanche to forego civil rights in the name of security. It gave us a permanent warfare state that shows no signs of abating. It gave us torture without accountability. 9-11 dumbed us down so that those who never ask the right questions and always avoid the real issues were alloted permanent prime time coverage, while anyone with a lick of common sense went scrambling off to the blogosphere attempting to make sense of planet weird. 9-11 was the perfect gift to the forces of stupidity and reaction. Too perfect, almost.

by Robert Scheer

What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?

As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.

Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”

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America's Wars: How Serial War Became the American Way of Life

punditman says...The thing that got punditman to start his website and to later morph it into this blog was the impending and subsequent American invasion of Iraq. Think about it: Punditman predates blogs.

The start of the Iraq War is beginning to feel like a long time ago. I think. And yet Iraq is far from resolved or peaceful. Think about it: What has changed in your life since 2003? Most of you will point to many things. But the problem is that not much has changed in terms of American foreign policy. As this cogent article points out, each new president is now expected to never give up one war without taking on another. Welcome to the age of perpetual warfare. It behooves us all to ask, "What is to be done about it?" Have a peaceful weekend.

By David Bromwich | TomDispatch.com

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the “central question” for the defense of the United States was how the military should be “organized, equipped — and funded — in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon.” The phrase beyond the horizon ought to sound ominous. Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a palpable memory. After all, the menace of the Axis powers, whose state apparatus was fed by wars, had been stopped definitively by the concerted action of Soviet Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. The founding of the United Nations extended a larger hope for a general peace. Organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Union of Concerned Scientists reminded people in the West, as well as in the Communist bloc, of a truth that everyone knew already: the world had to advance beyond war. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called this brief interval "the Second Enlightenment" partly because of the unity of desire for a world at peace. And the name Second Enlightenment is far from absurd. The years after the worst of wars were marked by a sentiment of universal disgust with the very idea of war.

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The myth of the "surge"

punditman says...Oh yeah, Iraq. All is not well. As this article points out, the surge always had that obvious propaganda value attached to it.

With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 "surge" in Iraq was a success?

The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. force levels in key areas, forging a tactical alliance with cooperative Sunni groups, and shifting to a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized population protection. This aspect of the surge succeeded, though it is still hard to know how much of the progress was due to increased force levels and improved tactics and how much was due to other developments, such as the prior "ethnic cleansing" that had separated the contending groups.

The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded -- that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam's regime -- and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

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Iraq a failed imperialist venture

punditman says...On this 4th of July, it seems appropriate to pierce through all the nonsense on TV about spreading freedom around the world and reflect on what the US has wrought in its criminal invasion of Iraq. Is anyone ever going to be held accountable?

Still, all the evidence in the world that this war was a deception turned dissaster will not convince some. When you click through this link and read all the comments associated with the article, it is clear there are still a lot of wingnuts out there who remain incapable of putting aside their biases and seeing things from the point of view of the victims of US aggression. They flounder around looking for excuses, they criticize author Haroon Siddiqui, they rewrite history. They look for goodness in the American invasion because they are incapable of seeing its essential evil.

by Haroon Siddiqui

American troops were not welcomed with flowers in Iraq but their departure from cities and towns has been.

Iraqis celebrated National Sovereignty Day Tuesday as U.S. troops were yanked out of populated centres and put into remote bases.

In time, even that hidden presence will begin to grate on the Iraqis, just as a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia had spurred Osama bin Laden and others.

Yet this limited troop pullout is being hailed as a triumph. One is reminded of Richard Nixon's 1973 boast of "peace with honour" in Vietnam. The 1973 Paris treaty that led to the U.S. troop withdrawal was a face-saving formula.

In Iraq, too, the U.S. has little choice but to get out.

Not only did the Iraqi invasion and occupation prove the limits of military power, it also exposed how incapable America has become at nation-building. Its postwar incompetence was stunning.

America plunged Iraq into chaos, shattered the infrastructure and destroyed the society, reducing human beings to their basest instincts. They turned on each other and found safety only in family, tribe, clan and sect. Shiites and Sunnis, who had lived together for ages, ethnically cleansed each other's neighbourhoods, which to this day remain separated by barricades, walls and checkpoints.

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Iraq: The final countdown

Peacenik thought this report by Patrick Cockburn was kind of benign. It documents the travails and travesties of the Iraq war but there doesn't seem to be a sense of outrage. Sort of, "oh well, that's done, on to the next adventure." Peacenik doesn't have the same sense that things are 'winding down".

What about all the war crimes, past present and future. And whose responsibility is it to help Iraq achieve some sort of functionality? Peacenik thinks any U.S. person in Iraq, or British, won't be feeling comfortable for a very long time. Peacenik doubts that the Sunnis won't be settling scores for a very long time. And Peacenik says again: Prosecute the war criminals.

Next week, US troops will begin to pull out of Iraq. Where does that leave the country's people, who are still reeling from decades of war? In Baghdad, Patrick Cockburn finds a nation facing drought, sectarian conflict and the scramble for oil riches.

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

On 30 June the last US troops will pull out of the Iraqi cities. America's great adventure in Iraq is ending. Already there are few US military patrols in Baghdad. The American-held area of the Green Zone, for long a forbidden city in the middle of the capital, has been squeezed in size. The hotel that Baghdad taxi drivers fondly believed was the headquarters of the CIA has removed the concrete wall protecting it and reopened for public business. The knowledge that all US military forces will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011 immediately reduces American influence in Iraq. No Iraqi wants to nail his flag to the mast of a departing ship, which is one reason why Washington for so long resisted setting a timetable for a US troop withdrawal.

Read on...

The Return of the Resistance

by Dahr Jamail

At least 20 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq in May, the most since last September, along with more than 50 wounded. Iraqi casualties are, as usual - and in both categories - at least ten times that number.

Attacks against US forces are once again on the rise in places like Baghdad and Fallujah, where the Iraqi resistance was fiercest before so many of them joined the Sahwa (Sons of Iraq, also referred to as Awakening Councils), and began taking payments from the US military in exchange for halting attacks against the occupiers and agreeing to join the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. In early April I wrote a column for this website that illustrated how ongoing Iraqi government and US military attacks against the Sahwa, coupled with broken promises of the Sahwa being incorporated into the government security apparatus or given civilian jobs, would likely lead to an exodus from the Sahwa and a return to the resistance.

Slowly, but surely, we are seeing that occur. While US liaison Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer has called this idea, along with the ongoing controversy from the Iraqi government - led by US-pawn Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - not paying most of the Sahwa members, while continuing government arrests of and attacks on Sahwa members "overblown," this does not change reality. Let us recall the telling words of the reporter Caud Cockburn, father of journalist Patrick Cockburn, "Never believe anything until it's officially denied."

Keep Reading...

punditman says... Where there is foreign occupation, there will always be resistance—a rather obvious point lost within the propaganda matrix of the Iraq War. To put this in an Iraqi context, the "Sawa" are turning back into insurgents for a variety of reasons. What happens if all 100,000 of these fighters turn back against Iraqi and US forces? Still, most of the media continue to parrot the line that the "surge was a success," "General Petraeus is a hero," and "Iraq's security situation is improving." Clearly, Iraq remains a multi-faceted, multi-sided mess. Violence may be cyclical but there is no peace in sight.

One Ricks Makes a Wrong

by Jeff Huber
www.antiwar.com

Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.

Ricks’ most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a FireDogLake.com book forum. In reply to a commenter who asked if "more deaths in Iraq are worth it," Ricks said, "I think staying in Iraq is immoral. But I think that leaving Iraq is even more immoral." In a nutshell, Ricks framed the core fallacy in the long-war philosophy: that two wrongs can make a right. This theme dominates Ricks’ work these days. The Gamble and the media blitz that accompanied its debut were dazzling examples of what Voltaire was talking about when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Ricks continues to exalt Gen. David Petraeus, who he has known since Petraeus was a colonel or a light colonel (Ricks says he can’t remember which). Ricks became King David’s chief legend-maker when the Iraq surge began in January 2007. In a radio interview that month on WNYC in New York, Ricks described Petraeus as a "fascinating character" and "just about the best general in the Army." He specifically cited Petraeus’ "very successful first tour" as commander in Mosul after the fall of Baghdad, but he made little mention of the fact that the general tamed the city by handing out guns and bribes, and that months after Petraeus left Mosul the chief of police defected and the place went up for grabs again. (Mosul remains a major trouble spot to this day, and Petraeus is still arming and bribing militants.)

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punditman says...

Some people will believe anything the mainstream media tells them. It is like they worship "important" or "prestigious" institutions. Thomas E. Ricks is a military correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the tricky kind that a lot of liberals fall for, because he appears critical of the establishment but in fact is far from from it. A brief search reveals that besides the book mentioned in the intro of the above article, he also wrote a book called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Even to come up with a name like that is automatically suspect; of course everyone knows it has been a freakin' fiasco! But the problem is that Ricks thinks the war was just a question of mismanagement instead of recognizing it for the moral and legal atrocity and imperial hubris that it is.

Ricks therefore functions as a Pentagon shill, or more specifically as General Petraeus' personal propaganda machine. Punditman finds the worshipping of any General to be a rather worrisome activity. Thankfully, there are internet journalists like Jeff Huber and Gareth Porter to set the record straight.

McChrystal's Rise: More Secrets, Less Daylight

by Tom Hayden

www.thenation.com

All along there were two US wars in Iraq. There was the public war, in which the Pentagon tried to manipulate the mainstream media into being a "message amplifier," while some intrepid reporters and bloggers fought back. Then there was the secret war carried out by the Special Operations forces, whose existence was denied even by the Pentagon.

Now the secret operations threaten to completely compromise what remains of the public war in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the ascension of Gen. Stanley McChrystal to top commander from his classified role in running Special Ops in Iraq for five years.

When questioned by the media or senators presiding at his confirmation hearing in a few weeks, Gen. McChrystal may have a simple answer to anything troubling: sorry, that is classified.

The mystique of secrecy may come to shroud all public inquiry about Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are questions to be answered, however.

One is framed on page 380 of Bob Woodward's book The War Within, in which the author describes a top-secret operation in 2006 that targeted and killed insurgents with such effectiveness that it gave "orgasms" to Derek Harvey, a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus and longtime tracker of Iraqi dissidents. The secret program was led by McChrystal, then a lieutenant general, using signals intercepts, informants and other tools of what McChrystal calls "collaborative warfare" through Special Access Programs (SAPS) and Special Compartmented Information (SCI.) McChrystal, according to the New York Times, conducted and commanded most of his secret missions at night. These missions were consistent with the proposals of Petraeus's top counterinsurgency adviser at the time, David Kilcullen, to revive the discredited Phoenix Program used in South Vietnam.

Keep Reading...

punditman says...

Who is this General Stanley McChrystal dude? Turns out he's the guy the Pentagon found guilty of fabricating false information in the 2004 death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman. Readers may recall the Arizona Cardinals football player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. McChrystal is the guy they held accountable for a newspeak story that claimed Tillman died from "devastating enemy fire." Tillman was an interesting guy. He despised Bush and thought the Iraq War was illegal and had arranged for a meeting with Noam Chomsky to take place after his return from Afghanistan.

Obama's ability to wage aggressive war "with a human face" is no doubt making Dickhead Cheney jealous. Punditman unhappily concludes that the Obama administration is quickly becoming exactly what Punditman expected: a wolf in sheep's clothing, with the sheep quickly losing its' wooly fluff on all fronts. It appears the metamorphosis is nearly complete.

Robert Fisk’s World: Right to the very end in Iraq, our masters denied us the truth

The sentence ‘millions of Iraqis now live free of oppression’ is pure public relations

We acknowledge," the letter says, "that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous."

This quotation comes from the Ministry of Defence's "Iraq Operations Team, Directorate of Operations" and is signed by someone whose initials may be "SM" or "SW" or even "SWe". Unusually (but understandably), it does not carry a typed version of the author's name. Its obvious anonymity – given the fact that not a single reference is made to the civilians slaughtered by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq – is no surprise. I, too, would not want to be personally associated with such Blair-like mendacity. What is astonishing, however, is that this outrageous letter should have been written this year.

I should say at once that I owe this revelatory text (actually dated 20 January) to a very un-anonymous Independent reader, Tom Geddes, who thought I would find its "economy with the truth" interesting. I certainly do. We are now, are we not, supposed to be in the age of Brown-like truth, as we finally haul down the flag in Basra, of near-certainty of an official inquiry into the whole Iraq catastrophe, a time of reckoning for the men who sent us off to war under false pretences. I suspect that this – like the Obama pretensions to change – is a falsehood. Well, we shall see.

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punditman says...

Robert Fisk surveys ongoing British government propaganda regarding the Iraq war and counters it with this rather important rejoinder: contrary to official claims, Saddam Hussein did not "refuse to co-operate" with the UN weapons inspectors. He actually was co-operating, and the UN weapons team under Hans Blix was about to prove those mythical weapons of mass destruction were non-existent. Hence the US forced Blix and his team to leave Iraq. Punditman wonders how many people actually know that. The lies about Iraq continue. The revisionist history has begun; it is important to guard the truth.

The Next Forgotten War

By Ryan McCarl
www.antiwar.com

Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: "The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."

Likewise, the histories of our time might say: there was an American invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that amounts to a crime, but it was quickly followed by other wars, a financial crisis, and an economic depression – and we found that we had enough problems on our plate without worrying too much about the past.

Americans are leaving the Iraq War behind; it is seen as an embarrassing episode, best unmentioned in polite company. The Obama administration is stacked with liberal hawks who supported the Iraq War, and figures from the former Bush administration are signing book deals and making the rounds of press conferences and interviews, propagating meae culpae of the "mistakes were made" sort. A war of choice is being quietly transformed into an unfortunate but ultimately unavoidable mistake, one caused not by politicians and public intellectuals cocooned in their hubris and their reckless ideologies, but by an "intelligence failure."

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punditman says...
Punditman realizes that there are those out there who have bought the media nonsense that the "surge" in Iraq has been a "success," and because that same media now conveniently turns its gaze elsewhere, then the war itself must be a "success." But it isn't. The tragedy that is Iraq will continue to play out one way or another whether or not the world pays attention. And if all its victims on all sides are forgotten, then repeating unjust wars will happen over and over. This article challenges peaceniks everywhere to show that the Iraq war would have been a mistake even if it were a "success."

Report: US Air Strikes in Iraq Kill Mostly Women, Children

39 Percent of Those Killed Were Children

www.antiwar.com

In a report to be published in tomorrow’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have concluded that air strikes by US-led coalition forces have killed mostly women and children. 39 percent were children, while 46 percent were women.

Interestingly enough, though the high-tech weaponry used by the invading forces killed a disproportionately large number of (presumably mostly non-combatant) women and children, it showed that among victims of suicide bombings only 12 percent were children.

The researchers used a database of 60,481 civilians violently killed during the first five years of the war, which was compiled by Iraq Body Count. They say that the shocking number of women and children killed are a function of using air strikes in urban combat settings, and the report may have policy implications elsewhere, where US air strikes seem to be killing large numbers of innocent civilians as well.

punditman says...

A reminder of what modern warfare is all about. How can it not be considered a crime when a powerful state undertakes military aggression with full knowledge that the death, maiming and terrorizing of innocent people will result? Hey, punditman is no international law scholar, but it stands to reason that it no longer becomes an accident when such foreknowledge is involved. Instead, we get doublespeak about "collateral damage" and wingnuts throughout media and government defending the perpetrators. It's an unjust world...

Scott Horton Interviews Gareth Porter

www.antiwar.com

Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Inter Press Service News Agency, discusses Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s persecution of, the U.S. military’s cooperation with Iraq’s government in quelling a Sunni “Sons of Iraq” uprising and how a new outbreak of sectarian violence could give the U.S. occupation a new lease on life.

MP3 here. (20:05)

Gareth Porter’s articles appear on the Huffington Post, Inter Press Service News Agency and on Antiwar.com.

punditman says...

The Iraq cauldron continues to boil. Seems there were a few "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" left over in Iraq. That is to say, there are things that they know they didn't know. But there were also unknown unknowns. There are things they didn't know they didn't know.

And they still don't know squat.

Another War Lost?

By William S. Lind
www.antiwar.com

With the usual fanfare, the Obama administration has proclaimed a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. On the surface, it does not amount to much. But if a story by Bill Gertz in the March 26 Washington Times is correct, there is more to it than meets the eye. Gertz reported:

"The Obama administration has conducted a vigorous internal debate over its new strategy for Afghanistan….

"According to two U.S. government sources close to the issue, senior policymakers were divided over how comprehensive to make the strategy….

"On the one side were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, who argued in closed-door meetings for a minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan….

"The goal of these advocates was to limit civilian and other nonmilitary efforts in Afghanistan and focus on a main military objective of denying safe haven to the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists.

"The other side of the debate was led by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy for the region, who along with U.S. Central Command leader Gen. David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for a major nation-building effort.

"The Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton faction, according to the sources, prevailed. The result is expected to be a major, long-term military and civilian program to reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least developed nations to a relatively prosperous democratic state."

I have not seen similar stories in other papers, so it is possible Gertz is not correct. But if he is, the Obama administration has just made the Afghan war its own, and lost it.

Ironically, the reported decision duplicates the Bush administration’s error in Iraq, another lost war (the next phase in Iraq’s Sunni-Shi’ite civil war is now ramping up). The error, one that no tactical or operational successes can overcome, is setting unattainable strategic objectives.

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Punditman says...

Since the end of the so-called "surge" in Iraq, the bubbleheads who inhabit TV news land have been either hinting at, or directly referring to, Iraq as a "success story." A country where, hmm, let's see...on a fairly typical day, yesterday, 15 Iraqis were killed and 19 were wounded in political/criminal violence; a country where occupation by US troops continues; where 40 American soldiers have died so far this year; a country where increased sectarian violence looms, where...(okay, so there's a few minor problems left, but let's move on where the White House wants us to go, okay? - mainstream media minder).

I suppose if our kindergarten quality media can call the Iraq War a success, then the definition of "success" in Afghanistan can be equally misappropriated. Look for it as this new strategy unfolds...

GAO: More Expensive to Leave Iraq Than to Stay

Even Ending a War Can't Be Done on the Cheap, GAO Warns

Posted March 24, 2009
www.antiwar.com

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report today (PDF) examining the ongoing costs of the Iraq war. The report concludes that despite the enormous costs associated with fighting the Iraq war over the past six years, Congress should expect costs to actually increase as the Obama Administration moves through its so-called pullout plan.

The Obama plan would reduce the current troop commitment from 138,000 to roughly 50,000, who would remain indefinitely. Yet the costs associated with withdrawing the troops and turning over the hundreds of American bases to the Iraqi government would be “significant,” the report concludes.

The report will likely shoot enormous holes in the Obama Administration’s budget, as they had projected enormous savings over the next few years and were budgeting $50 billion, roughly a third of what it will be this year, past fiscal 2010. The report indicates that this is beyond wishful thinking.

punditman says... This is what happens when you have a "withdrawal plan" that is not really a withdrawal plan. An analogy: when you decide to not go out to restaurants and pubs as often and stay home instead, you don't expect it to cost you more--unless of course you train and pay someone to work in your kitchen and pay someone else to deliver beer to your door.

Maybe Obama has to rethink his Iraq strategy? Maybe he should make it a real withdrawal plan? Maybe the Congress of the United States should do what they did during the Vietnam era and finally decide to cut off funding for this sucky war? It may not be a pretty scene when the last helicopters leave the Green zone, but leave they will. It is only a question of how much more money is first thrown into yet another black hole.