Tag Archives: Iraq

Political Rants

War’s end.

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President Obama delivered his second address to the nation this past Tuesday, this time on the subject of the “end of combat operations” in Iraq. Here – unsolicited by anyone – are my comments:

Turn the page. President Obama said it was time to “turn the page” on the War in Iraq. Um… not so fast, Mr. President. I know you are obsessed with looking ahead rather than behind, but if everyone took that attitude (say, local law enforcement), no one would be held accountable for anything. This war was caused by people in our own country – people in positions of authority. Your administration has neglected to even examine the record of those responsible for this disaster. This has emboldened them to the point where they regularly flaunt their guilt in public, secure in the knowledge that they will never pay a price for what they did.

Good intentions? At one point, the president said this:

This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.

I won’t address the “patriot” issue, since that is such a loaded term. But I can most certainly doubt President Bush’s “support for our troops” without any resort to imagination. He sent them into Iraq to die by the thousand, for no legitimate reason, in pursuit of an illegal and immoral war – a war of choice, no less. He shipped National Guard troops overseas in the ramshackle vehicles they used back home, with no armor, no protection. He is no friend of our soldiers or military families. To suggest otherwise is simply obscene.

Dark creations. The president went on:

Along with nearly 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq, they fought in a faraway place for people they never knew.  They stared into the darkest of human creations — war — and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.

This passage is worthy of his predecessor. Reading it, one would think we invade Iraq to help the Iraqis.  It also, like so much of Bush’s prose, seeks to cloud the notion of agency behind the initiation of the war itself, as if to suggest that our troops went to Iraq on their own initiative to do good works, as if they were Peace Corps volunteers. This is just a rhetorical cop-out, a between-the-lines attempt to deflect criticism away from those who plan the wars by keeping the focus on those sent to fight them.

His call to Bush reminds me of that closing scene in Animal Farm, when Napoleon the pig was having dinner with the farmer and the other barnyard characters, looking on, couldn’t tell one from the other. Such is our ruling class, I suppose.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Jihad-jitsu.

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How are we our own worst enemy? So many ways, it seems. 9/11 – much referenced by conservative politicians – can be seen as an example of extremists using our own flawed technology and screwed up national infrastructure against us. (And with national assets like the Minerals Management Service and a toothless Securities and Exchange Commission, we hardly need Al Qaeda… As Richard Pryor might have put it, we’re kicking our own ass.) 

 Here are, it seems to me, a few obvious ways we facilitate those we are supposedly fighting:

The “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy. This is an unexpected bonanza for jihadi recruitment. It validates much of the propaganda about an America at war with Islam. It demonstrates the depth of our political pathology and our willingness to scapegoat more than 1 billion people because of the actions of a handful of criminally insane zealots. And it does so at the worst possible time, when expectations in the Islamic world are already being deflated by Obama’s Bush-like foreign policy. Jihadi leaders hope that this controversy will drag on, I’m sure, or that the Park 51 center will be forced to relocate in Staten Island so that its detractors, flush with victory, will expand their campaign against Muslims.   

Drone Strikes in Pakistan. Let me set aside, for a moment, the notion that extrajudicial murder, domestic or foreign, is just plain wrong and criminal. This CIA and private paramilitary-driven effort should be named the “Hothead Jihadi Promotion Program.” Every time we kill some functionary in the Taliban, he (and it likely is a he) is most likely replaced by someone younger, more zealous, and less open to compromise. Killing senior leadership means that inexperienced hotheads straight out of Kill! Kill! camp will be making all the decisions. Add to that the fact that we’re also killing hundreds of civilians, thereby generating more and more young people who hate us like fire… enough to, I don’t know, join the Taliban?   

Iraq’s Forgotten Refugees. There are still millions of disaffected Iraqis living in squalid conditions in Jordan and Syria, two of the poorest nations in the Middle East. Their homes have been destroyed, their country is a bloody mess, and their future is grim. We are doing next to nothing to recompense these folks in some way. Where do you think this is headed?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The week that was.

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Well, what did we learn this week, girls and boys?

We learned that the Afghan war is more pointless and destructive than many of us had given it credit for, thanks to the wikileaks papers. We also learned that the Iraq war is – very much like its predecessor, the Gulf War – leaving a trail of grave illness and lingering death years after the height of our attack. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent of London reports that cancer and infant mortality rates in Fallujah have reached ridiculously high levels in the wake of the U.S. assault, very likely the result of our use of depleted uranium munitions. The casing materials from these armor-piercing shells caused untold misery in Iraq in the years following the Gulf War, during which time essential medical supplies were being withheld from them by virtue of U.S. /U.K. sanctions. (Cockburn’s colleague Robert Fisk tells the story in his book The Great War for Civilization.)

This is a vastly underreported impact of war and its aftermath, at least in this country. During the twelve years of sanctions against Iraq Americans heard very little from their media or their politicians about what was happening to the general population. During the Gulf War, we attacked Iraq’s infrastructure, not sparing its water treatment and distribution facilities. The sanctions that followed that war disallowed the requisite technology to repair that infrastructure. In a country such as Iraq, this is tantamount to biological warfare. Literally hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, died of preventable water-born diseases because of this, according to the U.N. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State during much of that time, said the policy was worth the cost. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus there.

As an imperial power, we make these cost-benefit calculations all of the time. Our estimates always seem to devalue the lives of those we invade and occupy, however. It isn’t that life is cheap – it’s more specific than that. Their lives are cheap, not ours. (Though with respect to our military, ours, too.) I’m sure there are many who feel that the human costs of the most recent Iraq war were worth the benefit of removing Saddam Hussein from power. I cannot agree. This war resulted in the deaths of upwards of a million people and generated something like 4 million refugees, 2.5 million of whom landed in squalor in Jordan and Syria. There is no political end that can justify that much suffering, not in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other country we’ve been targeting.

So what did we learn, after all? Not much, it appears. Let’s keep trying.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

War dead.

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Just a few random thoughts in the wake of this grim Memorial Day week, with many young people still staked out in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’ll start with the way our public figures memorialize dead servicepeople. They employ verbal false limbs, as Orwell called them, that are almost as autonomic as that ubiquitous closing remark Reagan added to every succeeding president’s speech – “God bless you, and God bless the United States of America”. But embedded in these solemn pronouncements, mouthed in large part by people who have never heard a shot fired in anger, are implicit endorsements of some very bad policy. Politicians of both parties have a sickening tendency to hide the moral bankruptcy of their foreign adventures behind praise for the valor of those who carry them out. Conversely, any attack on the policy is treated by them as an attack on the troops.

Such obfuscation is more effective with today’s all-volunteer military, but back when the draft was running at full steam, it was a much harder sell. When you are literally forcing people to go to war, your praise tends to ring a bit hollow. Of course, our volunteer military is forced, technically speaking – they have no choice but to go, even if they merely joined up for the promise of college tuition. But unlike the 60s and prior, this is not a broadly-experienced phenomenon. Back then, masses of young people were threatened with deployment and particularly in the case of Vietnam, many were sent against their will. In that circumstance, there’s a strong incentive to examine the policy very closely. Many did, and didn’t like what they found.

When we praise our war dead, let’s think about what they were asked to do and why. When we thank them for “protecting our freedom,” let’s acknowledge the fact that not a single war this nation has fought since World War II was about protecting our freedom; that in fact none of them should have been fought in the first place. That’s no reflection on the troops – volunteers and draftees – sent to die in distant lands; that’s just reality. You can fight bravely, protect your buddies with great valor and distinction, and be worthy of every medal. But that doesn’t make the invasion and destruction of Indochina, or Iraq, right. And it didn’t keep us free. It just killed a bunch of us. And a larger bunch of them. And let us face it – today they are just fighting, as the Tidy Bowl man used to say, “so we don’t have to.”

So I say to all veterans, living and dead – thanks, and sorry… so sorry.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Killing machine.

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Just a short number again. Just flew in from tuckered-town. Man, my arms are tired!

Kopassus redux. Looks like Obama is seriously considering restoring funding to the Indonesian armed forces, including the notorious Kopassus organization, renowned for human rights violations in Aceh, East Timor, and elsewhere in and around the archipelago. The indefatigable journalist Allen Nairn has been reporting on this consistently for decades, and was recently interviewed on Democracy Now! about the administration’s flirtation with these pirates. Restoration of aid to Kopassus and other elements of the Indonesian military – responsible for killing hundreds of thousands – would not be good news, and it would be truly unforgivable for someone like Obama, who is not stupid and who spent some part of his youth in that country. There is no way that Obama doesn’t know what these people are about. And yet, he appears to be on the verge of going there anyway. What’s the excuse?

In a way, the U.S. empire is like this enormous killing machine. It’s got a thousand arms, colossal legs, and it moves across the face of the earth, crushing, grabbing, burning everything in its path. The president sits in a cockpit in its forehead and works the controls. Bush had a great time with it – invited his friends on board, and took it for a tear through Iraq. Then Obama took the helm. He promised to be more responsible. But … it’s still a killing machine, built to do only one thing. No matter what lever you pull, what button you press, it kills. So … he starts pulling, pressing, etc. Kopassus is on the other end of one of those levers, and he’s thinking seriously about pulling that one.

That’s one of our indirect wars. Then there’s the direct kind – Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t hear any reaction from anyone in the Obama administration to the footage released over the past week of civilians being mowed down by U.S. forces in Iraq. Pretty chilling stuff, in the sense that it gives you an idea of the rules of engagement our forces are (or were) operating under. We don’t see much of this kind of footage from these wars – once in a while, something slips out – but this is pretty horrendous. It’s ironic as hell – I read Krauthammer’s screed this week about Obama’s abandonment of America’s allies, complaining that he’s insulted the British, snubbed India, supported the wrong side in Honduras, and so on. Calm down, Chuck. He’s maintaining the empire just fine, trust me on this. He’s prolonging our pointless wars. He’s letting the Indians keep their bogus nuclear deal. And contrary to what you suggest, he certainly did not defend Manuel Zalaya in Honduras – the administration made some disapproving noises about the coup, but in essence accommodated it and its bogus election, and has since encouraged Latin American leaders to accept the successor government.

Killing machine forward, right? It’s the only direction it knows.

luv u,

jp