Tag Archives: Iraq

Boots on the ground.

I won’t waste any breath on much of what’s happened in politics this week … that Hobby Lobby suit before the Supreme Court has got me hopping mad, but I’ll hold that for another week while I take the President to task for his speech to “European youth” about the Crimean crisis. One particular passage is very worthy of attention:

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq War was a subject of vigorous debate not just around the world, but in the United States as well. I participated in that debate and I opposed our military intervention there. But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state that could make decisions about its own future.

Laugh away.

Here, Barry seems to be saying that it’s all right to ignore the clear will of the UN Security Council (and General Assembly) and invade another country, so long as eight years later you leave what’s left of them to sort out their political future ( this after their refusing to sign off on a status of forces agreement we were pushing for). It’s as if the dubious notion that we had a “vigorous debate” (perhaps in the street, but certainly not in the mass media) prior to starting the Iraq War somehow makes up for the fact that we went into that country on obviously false pretenses, over the objections of major allies and partners, including Russia.

That was bad enough. But just the fact that we are comparing Russia’s incursion into Crimea (death toll: less than ten, to greatly exaggerate the actual number) unfavorably with our attack on Iraq (death toll: hundreds of thousands, with fratricidal violence still killing thousands a year long after our exist) is craven beyond belief. He didn’t even mention the continuing conflict in Afghanistan. Small omission.

Finally, the resource point is a red herring. We didn’t go into Iraq to “grab its resources for our own gain”, though how that fact makes us virtuous is beyond me. Still, if Iraq’s main export was chicken wings, we would never have been there. It isn’t about stealing the oil; it’s about having a say in where it goes and where it doesn’t go. That’s as old as the American empire, and twice as thick.

Russia is a bad actor, no denying it, but we are far worse. Before we start condemning them for mustering their soldiers within their own borders, we might consider pulling ours out of the scores of countries where they are stationed, all around the world.

luv u,

jp

Taking sides.

If anything, the crisis in Ukraine grew hotter this week, and it’s getting kind of scary. Through it all, though, there has been a persistent tendency in the media to support the maximalist position of the U.S. government and our European allies – namely, that the Ukrainian opposition is fully legitimate and essentially beyond any critical scrutiny, that the Russians are engaging in bald aggression of a kind not witnessed in decades (!), and that the violators of human rights in Ukraine are all on the pro-Russian side.

Okay, well … a few points that probably need addressing:

Coup or no coup. Russia calls what happened in Kiev a few weeks ago a coup; Washington does not. In the United States, labeling something a coup triggers legislation designed to impede the delivery of U.S. aid to coup regimes. Our administrations of both Sensitivity training, American style.parties typically do an end-run around this by simply avoiding the word when it’s inconvenient. We’ve done this with Egypt and with Honduras. When it’s someone we don’t like, it’s a coup, plain and simple. In Kiev, the elected leader of the country was ousted without due process, in the midst of a negotiation over rebalancing of political authority and early elections. It’s not outlandish to call that a coup, regardless of how kleptocratic the old regime may have been.

Who killed who? The killing of oppositionists by sniper fire on February 26 has often been cited as a primary rationale for the ouster of the Ukrainian leader. Those killings were chalked up to the regime. However, this past week, The Guardian and others have reported on claims by the Estonian Foreign Minister that the shooters were hired by the opposition. The new Ukrainian government is reluctant to open an investigation into this.

Atypical aggression. Really? This can be reported with a straight face from a country that invaded Iraq ten years ago? In this category, we haven’t a leg to stand on.

My point is, before we rush in to aid this new government, let’s be honest about what our interests are in that region. And let’s not paint one side virtuous and the other evil before we know the facts.

luv u,

jp

New year, old news (part 2).

Some more thoughts about issues of the day that seem very much like those of yesteryear (2013, that is).

The last battle of Fallujah.Iraq revised (again). After an absolutely awful year of conflict, fueled by the ongoing civil war on its northern border in Syria, Iraq has been back in the news this past couple of weeks – more specifically, the Iraq war and the battle of Fallujah. There has been the predictable discussion of, was the battle (actually, two battles) worth it, have the sacrifices our troops made been in vain, should we have left a residual force in place?  In the process, though, the picture that emerges of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is, frankly, hard to recognize.

Just one example: when network regular General Barry McCaffery was on MSNBC this weekend weighing in on the capture of Fallujah and Ramadi by al Qaeda linked elements, he opined that, if Saddam Hussein hadn’t been removed by the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq, he would have had a nuclear arsenal by now. The lie that wouldn’t die, right? Somehow, no matter how thoroughly it is debunked and disproven, it always rises to live again. Does anyone wish American troops were still in Iraq? Does anyone still think that invasion was a good idea? Let’s see a show of hands.

Gates. Note to Obama: this is what you get when you retain a Republican cabinet member and give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Robert Gates was appointed to oversee the last two years of the W. Bush administration, since the first six had so seriously driven the American empire off the rails. He was billed as a steady hand on the tiller, and I think Obama bought that as well. Gates reportedly criticizes Biden for being wrong on every foreign policy issue for decades – this, of course, coming from the man who, as deputy director of the CIA in 1984, wanted to initiate a bombing campaign in support of his agency’s terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua. He was close to the Iran Contra operation, though managed to escape prosecution (like his boss and good friend, George H.W. Bush).  So … people who live in glass houses.

As it happened, Biden took a pass on voting to confirm Gates as Defense Secretary in 2006 (he didn’t vote). Probably the start of a beautiful friendship. As faithful stewards of the empire, you’d think they’d be nicer to one another.

More next week.  luv u,

jp

Exceptionalism.

When people consider themselves exceptional, they make themselves potentially dangerous. That’s the gist of what Vladmir Putin had to say in his N.Y.Times op-ed piece, and people of many different political stripes here in the United States seem to have taken exception to this. I happened to be at the dentist the morning of its publication; the flat-screen t.v. above my dental couch was playing Fox & Friends, and they were throwing Stalin in Putin’s face. No surprise there. (What else can you expect from a clown parade headed by Michele Malkin?) A lot of t.v. liberals didn’t like it either. Frankly, though, for all of his failings as a leader, it’s not hard to see what Putin was getting at.

Funny story...We have, under the banner of American Exceptionalism, invaded any number of third-world countries over the past century and a quarter. The results have not been positive. (Just ask them.) Putin and others are approaching us as if conducting an intervention; trying to keep us from repeating the same bad behavior, over and over again. You know you have a problem when it takes Russia and China to talk you down. One can only hope that they succeed. This Syria intervention is just a crazy, bad idea, and one that the president seems very attached to. It’s a kind of madness, executive power, and it’s long since taken hold of old Barry-O.

What is kind of amazing is that the notion of striking Syria is really deeply unpopular from the get-go. This is so clearly the case that many conservative Republicans in congress really don’t know whether to shit or wind their watches. I heard one dancing around like a little wind-up toy on the radio a few days ago; they sooooo want to support an attack, but they sooooo need to undermine Obama, and their constituents are pushing them hard. This is the new pacifism: 20-25% of the country is opposed to war with Syria because they are against anything Obama wants, no matter what it is. Half of the centrist-liberal-left spectrum is firmly against it. That leaves neocon Republicans, “muscular” interventionist liberals, and other armchair bombardiers. I guess that means having a Democratic president makes us less likely to intervene in these polarized times.

Whatever keeps this disaster from happening can’t be all bad.

luv u,

jp

Justice in America.

Bradley Manning is guilty, per his military proceeding. That’s the way it’s going to be. The government did not manage to pin the “aiding the enemy” charge on him, but because we live in the era of massive prosecutorial over-charging, he was convicted on about 20 other counts. It’s likely that, on top of abusive pre-trial detention amounting to at least psychological torture (and probably physical torture as well – exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, etc.) Manning will be treated to decades in prison for the crime he committed; that dastardly crime for which there can be no excuses given, no quarter offered. “Justice” has been served.

Guilty of telling us the truth about us.What was the crime again? Oh, yes. Exposing the sprawling criminality of our foreign policy, namely the Iraq war and the Afghan war, plus releasing a raft of diplomatic cables relating to prosecution of the global war on tactics … I mean, terror. Heinous indeed. Perhaps someone needs to remind me again why the man who informed us of the war’s true impact is going to jail while the men who started the war are living a comfortable – and loudly opinionated – retirement. Rank has its privileges, to be sure.

One thing Manning reminded us of was the fact that, to the federal government – the permanent national security state that persists through administrations of both parties – we are the enemy. Manning was accused of aiding the enemy, and that’s what he did. He gave us the information we need to fully understand the global war being fought in our names. Armed with that knowledge, we could compell our government to stop the killing, the torturing, the endless detentions, etc., because we live in a formal democracy. That makes us a threat to the persistence of the national security state. That makes us the “enemy”.

I know a medical professional whose son is in the military. He had four tours in Iraq, was knocked around by IED explosions. He lives in pain. He’s had his neck operated on, the doctors fusing his vertebrae together. He’s losing his sight. Worse yet, he can’t work but he can’t get decent disability benefits unless he stays in the Army for another 150 days. He’s a very young man with two young children, and his life is ruined. I hear about him, the many thousands like him, the many, many more thousands killed, and I see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of them, and their comfortable retirements.

That’s justice? Not quite.

luv u,

jp

Into the fray.

The Bush… I mean, Obama administration announced today that it would be providing arms to the Syrian opposition, whoever that may be. Not too hard to see that coming, I suppose. When a man draws a red line, it’s because he’s already all too eager to step across it. The Syrian conflict is like that shiny new car our government and our corporate media (including its NPR/PBS sidecar) just want, want, WANT more than anything. They’re ready to let the old Afghan clunker go, were able to pawn off their Iraqi wreck, and they just keep driving by that showroom lot, looking at that awesome Syrian number.

Already, I have heard more about the numbers of killed in Syrian than I ever heard about the Iraq catastrophe. Again, no surprise. The government and the press meticulously count the victims of official enemies, but when it comes to the corpses generated by our misguided policies, we don’t do body counts. They still won’t put a realistic number on the lives lost in Iraq, hovering around the casual 30K guess Bush made in 2007 or so. I suppose once we have both legs in the mire of this conflict they will stop counting again. But for now, the statistics are useful – they are trying to push the American people closer to intervention, and it’s evident that the effort isn’t working very well. Less than one in four is in favor of intervention.

Not hard to see why. Two wars over the past twelve years, with more than 6,700 Americans killed. The very real probability that our sophisticated and destructive weapons will wind up in the hands of fanatical militants. Skepticism over the case for chemical weapon use by the regime. Who can blame us, right? The scare talk about Hezbollah is probably a bridge too far for most, as well. Frankly, they are engaged in something close to an existential struggle. If their patron Assad falls and is replaced by a Sunni-dominated regime, that puts an enemy on their eastern flank. They already have Israel to their south. Forget religion, politics, propaganda for a minute – if you were one of their strategists, what would you do?

Then there’s the small matter of the overwhelming majority of Americans being against this. But then, we were in favor of background checks, too. So long as McCain is happy, we can pound salt, apparently.

luv u,

jp

 

On serving.

This is one for the veterans. I felt I had to write about this because of a story I heard on DemocracyNow! this week about wounded and PTSD soldiers receiving less-than-honorable discharges based on behavior attributable to their injuries … and in some cases, based on virtually nothing at all. This is one of the most maddening stories I have heard this year, but I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. It’s pretty much a given in this country that many of the people who fight our wars will be discarded after they’ve sacrificed dearly on our behalf. These past twelve years have brought us back to a place we hadn’t been since the end of the execrable Vietnam war – dealing with the aftermath of a prolonged, highly destructive conflict, and doing a very poor job of it.

Why do we – in the age of magnetic yellow ribbons – still suck so badly at this? A couple of things come to mind. First, this war is not broadly shared, so any improvement in our basic humanity since the end of the last war (and I like to think there has been some) is offset by the fact that, in the absence of conscription, only a tiny fraction of American families have any skin in this fight. 

The second is an institutional/political reason. When a large institution like the United States military, as an instrument of American power, is very good at something, that’s usually because it’s deemed of great importance to those in power. The opposite is true of things they are really bad at. Our leaders look bad when many Americans are killed on the battlefield, so we’re really good at getting soldiers out alive. Once they’re out of the action, they become statistically insignificant to those in power. If they suffer, it doesn’t cost our leaders anything. If they die, no one is counting the way they do when soldiers die overseas.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to this bogus war. When my dad returned from World War II and the occupation of Europe, he evidently had PTSD – nightmares, sleeping with a gun under his pillow, etc. There was no help for him, just as there was none for those returning from Korea and Vietnam. The philosophy was, suck it up. It’s up to us to say that this is as unacceptable today as it was then.

Raise your voice about this. These people deserve better.

luv u,

jp

Ten years after.

It’s been a decade since the start of a war that never should have happened, and we are still waiting for some accountability. More than 4,400 Americans killed – more than the number killed on Sept. 11 2001 by 19 individuals from countries other than Iraq. (Mostly from Saudi, but you get the point.) Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands for Iraqi deaths related to the conflict – Les Roberts’ Iraq Study Group had it well north of 600,000 back in 2006, and that was adjusting for concentrated areas of losses like Fallujah. That puts us in Milosovic territory for sure, and more like Suharto-land. The Serbian leader was brought to justice; not so much Indonesia’s dictator. The difference between those two cases have less to do with the magnitude of the crimes, more to do with the magnitude of their geopolitical allies.

Mistakes were madeThat’s why I have long been a skeptic of the International Criminal Court. I have said this before, shouted it on the podcast, and I will say it again here: until they haul someone from a powerful country to The Hague, the effort will be a meaningless exercise. Iraq is an excellent test case. Given the number of deaths, given the destruction of a society, given the craven nature of the attack and the fact that it was an aggressive war – the most serious category of crime – our leaders should have been indicted at the very least. Nothing. Freaking. Useless.

Not only are the architects of the disastrous Iraq war not being held accountable, they are in fact skating from television program to television program, attempting to rewrite Iraq into a screaming success. They are, in effect, flaunting the law, daring it to come after them because they know it won’t, taunting the cowardly administration that shields them. Even worse, they are working to get us into the next conflict, in Iran, Syria, wherever. Not only aren’t they sorry about the catastrophe they brought upon Iraq and ourselves, they are only too eager to repeat the crime.

To paraphrase the president, are we really powerless in the face of such carnage? I think perhaps, but only by design. American political life demonstrates again and again how powerful the will of the people can be. Look at gay rights. Look at immigration. Our government has worked to insulate us from the experience of war by canceling the draft, borrowing the funds to keep the fighting going, etc. Perhaps we are simply not connected enough to act dramatically.

Perhaps. But nothing ever changes unless we do.

luv u,

jp

On accountability.

I suppose I’m old enough to grumble about stuff I can’t control. And right now I’m irritated enough to take a personal swipe at some of the old white men running the country from their comfy chairs in the United States Congress. But rather than sound like John McCain, I’m going to limit myself to saying that the Senate confirmation hearing for Chuck Hagel was pretty disgraceful for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the simple fact that the man was being criticized for the high points in his career – the stuff he got right, for chrissake. The Republicans on the panel hate their old colleague because he’s not bug-fuck nuts enough.

See, this is what happens when you don’t hold people accountable. If someone had paid some kind of price for driving us into the Iraq war, maybe John McCain and others wouldn’t feel so confident about grilling Hagel on a marginal point like the “surge” strategy. Republican House Caucus (Visual Approximation)Even by their reading of it as being an indisputable success (which killed about 1,200 Americans, b.t.w.), it could only possibly be seen as a minor corrective to one of the most heinous strategic blunders in the history of the American empire, as well as a major international crime of aggression that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and massive displacement. If Hagel was against the “surge”, it’s only because their war had gone so badly and that they had proven themselves incapable of managing the conflict.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a huge fan of Hagel. He did the right thing by being outspoken about the war in the middle of the last decade, and I respected him greatly for it. But he will no doubt be a reliable steward of the imperial project, just as Obama has proven himself to be. People have short memories – not so very long ago, when Bush II was in his prime, American power was shaken to its very foundation by their insane foreign policy gambles. McCain himself was right on board with it all. It has taken years to emerge from the hole they dug us into, and yet because they haven’t been held accountable, they behave as though they were right all along. Again … disgraceful.

So, who’s more bug-fuck nuts, McCain or the yargle-bargle caucus in the House? The answer may surprise you.

luv u,

jp

Never forget.

Anniversaries of 9/11 come and go, it seems, and like most days of remembrance they are not all that memorable in themselves. This past Tuesday (I believe the event actually occurred on a Tuesday, if memory serves) I was up at Syracuse University, walking past a sidewalk medium that held a field of  mini-flags, one for each of the victims of the terrorist attacks. A large sign at one end admonished us to “Never Forget.” Not a very unusual experience on such an anniversary. I’m sure there are fields of flags all across the country at this time of year. Walking past it, though, it seemed like there were so few of them. They were arranged in a big rectangle, with a large space in the middle, and it looked kind of sparse. Is this what more than 3,000 flags looks like?

I think the reason it looked so empty was that there were no flags to represent the hundreds of thousands that have died since that day, and in large part because of that day. The cautionary “Never Forget” is more of a challenge to Americans than its author likely supposed. I can tell you, I will never forget September 11, 2001 – probably the most deeply horrifying day of my life. Remembering that has never been a challenge. What I think we as Americans need to work on remembering is the fact that our political leaders used that atrocity to commit other atrocities in our names. If there is any slippage of memory, it is on that particular slope.

Just remember – by the time September 11, 2001 arrived, the Bush administration was already resolved to invade Iraq and complete the project of regime change that its top foreign policy advisers had signed onto years before. There was plenty of buzz about it in the months leading up to 9/11, and when Al Qaeda struck, the Bush team didn’t miss a beat in commandeering Americans’ shock and outrage towards support of their disastrous invasion and destruction of Iraq. Seeing how easy it was to get people behind the invasion of Afghanistan, they engaged in a full-court press that we would all do well to remember.

There is a complementary notion to “Never Forget;” that is “Never Again.” In complying with the former, we must also embrace the latter.

luv u,

jp