Tag Archives: Rumsfeld

Political Rants

Wearing out our welcome in iraq

Leave a comment

Biden dropped bombs on Iraq and Syria again this week, this time using F-15s and F-16s. This is the president’s second large action against what the administration describes as Iranian-backed groups. They claim this action is in self-defense, invoking the U.N. Charter (presumably article 51). Nancy Pelosi piped up with her own cry of support for the attack, stating that “protecting the military heroes who defend our freedoms is a sacred priority.”

Now, what the fuck freedoms are these heroes defending? And how is it self-defense to hit back against local forces that are resisting our presence in their own country? A country, mind you, that didn’t ask us to invade in the first place and that has explicitly asked us to leave. Like all empires, we have an expansive sense of our own sovereignty. We feel put upon when the locals rise against us.

What’s different is lesser than what’s the same

I know, we were all happy when Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes taken away from him. And his assassination of Soleimani was an obvious and reckless provocation coming from an administration that put Iran on notice in its first week and tore up the JCPOA. That said, they still stride around the Middle East like they own the place, and that should be just as unacceptable to us as when Trump did it.

Even worse, the Biden foreign policy team is leaving bad policies in place from the previous regime. They are essentially in agreement with much of it, and because they are generally more competent than the last crew, they in some ways may pose an even greater threat to the cause of peace.

And again, what the hell are we doing in Iraq, anyway? Our troops should leave now. In fact, they should never have been there in the first place.

Death of a Salesman

Of course, there was a reason why they went there in the first place. The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq to the American people – or at least to enough of them for the tanks to start rolling. An important part of that sales effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died this week.

I’ve never made a habit of dancing on people’s graves, and I’m not about to start now. Suffice to say that this man did a lot of damage in his life. He helped to push two disastrous wars that resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people. Simply put, he was a horrible man in many respects.

Of course, he had a lot of help in this sales job. The mainstream press was a tremendous help. At the height of Rumsfeld and Bush’s popularity, before the Iraq war went predictably down the drain, the press was even painting Rumsfeld as some kind of warped sex symbol. I remember having a hard time with that as I waited in supermarket checkout lines, looking at People magazine or Us or whoever was blowing Rumsfeld that week. Jesus, how nauseating can you get?

Anyway, one of the main architects is now gone. Time to stop this stupid ass war, once and for all.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Dodging bullets.

Leave a comment

Fuck all, what a week this has been. The Suleimani assassination has turned Trump’s disastrous approach to foreign policy up past eleven, and that is a positive danger to organized society. Domestic president Bam-Bam is dangerous enough, but give him a war that he has started himself and god only knows where the hell we’ll end up. It’s like someone let a chimp loose in the oval office, and after months on the job he’s going stir crazy, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and randomly throwing feces at his political enemies. Does this kind of governance really work for anyone? It’s like living on a very active volcano. We may have temporarily dodged a bullet this time, but nothing has fundamentally changed.

Times like these I am grateful for podcasters, bloggers, and independent journalists. The mainstream press have been of very little use through this recent crisis. There is this insistence, for instance, on calling Suleimani a terrorist or a bad guy, over and over like a mantra. Usually tagged on to that is the claim that he was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Americans – I’ve heard talking heads put the number around 700 – during a certain phase of the Iraq war. This is total shit. I remember those days pretty well, as does the Progressive’s Stephen Zunes, who wrote a good treatment of this claim this past week. It is well to remember that the Bush administration, even in the face of their disastrous invasion of Iraq, still had Iran in the cross hairs and were working to build a public case for yet another regime change enterprise. They didn’t succeed, but what they did manage was to plant this notion in the heads of journalists and commentators that Iran was responsible for every EFP roadside bomb planted in southern Iraq, a vacuous claim that assumes every Shi’ite resistance fighter is subject to mind control by the Ayatollah.

Once again, let’s be clear – the people responsible for the deaths of the more than 4,500 U.S. service members killed in Iraq are named Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. We can try to blame the people we invade for resisting our armed forces, but doing so doesn’t hold a lot of water. We should never have been in Iraq in the first place; anything that proceeded from that criminal decision is the responsibility of our own decision-makers. It took virtually no time for the same crop of insane leaders to exploit the deaths of the people they sent over there and attempt to utilize them as a means of starting yet another needless war. And now the current incarnation of the Republican regime change machine is working overtime to make war with Iran inevitable. That includes most prominently that overstuffed geiser of pig shit – a veritable Old Faithful of rancid manure – Mike Pompeo, who is in many ways worse than Trump.

Arrgh. I could go on, but my main point is, agitate for peace. Make your voice heard. Don’t think someone else will do it. This is like the election – you need to participate and encourage others to do the same. That’s the only way out of this shithole.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Ten years after.

Leave a comment

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

Political Rants

Winding it down.

Leave a comment

Obama announced his plans to reverse the Afghan “surge” over the next year and a half – news that appears to have pleased no one in the political world. I guess he shares the Alan Simpson belief that if you piss everyone – everyone – off, you must be doing something right. It just makes me wonder if the guy ever considered trying to please somebody, sometime. A very typical Obama approach, this withdrawal strategy – right down the muddle in the middle. It’s a lot like his solution to health care reform, Wall Street reform, etc. Basically half-measures where double-sized efforts are necessary. Putting a bandaid on a compound fracture. Cured!

This line kind of sums up my own personal frustration with the president:

“Thanks to our intelligence professionals and Special Forces, we killed Osama bin Laden, the only leader that al Qaeda had ever known. This was a victory for all who have served since 9/11. One soldier summed it up well. “The message,” he said, “is we don’t forget. You will be held accountable, no matter how long it takes.”

Yep, well… that memory / accountability argument is a bit flawed. When it comes to our own bona fide war criminals – people who smashed a country to pieces, killing hundreds of thousands, causing millions of refugees, many of whom will never again see home, etc., we need to “look forward” and not engage in settling scores. Theirs? They pay. Bin Laden had much, much to answer for, no question. But so do George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Douglas Feith, and others in the last administration. They cooked up a case for a war that killed more Americans than Bin Laden killed on 9/11. So what if it looks politically awkward; did they do it or not? If they did the crime, they should do the time. It’s a venerable conservative position.

Of course, Obama’s got blood on his hands now, as well. In politics there’s an old saying about not breaking the other guys’ rice bowl. With someone as cautious as this president, rice bowls have never been safer.

luv u,

jp