What am I missing here?

Boortz...
THE U.S.EXAMPLE

Barack Obama finally came around on Russia, scolding the nation for invading a sovereign nation (Georgia). However, now he has thrown a new caveat into the mix: the United States should set a better example on that front, too. He says, "We've got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies ... They can't charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point."

So finally, Barack Obama comes out and directly compares Russia's military invasion of Georgia to our own efforts in Iraq. Way to go Big O.

Does anyone remember Georgia being a threat to Russia? Did Georgia have a weapons program? Was Georgia in violation of multiple UN Resolutions ... violations that authorized any UN member to go in and remove their leader? Just wondering.

What am I missing?

Does anyone remember Iraq being a threat to the their neighbors let alone the United States? Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction?--and weren't the U.N. weapons inspectors, as well as many allies, and anti-war activists here at home pointing to the holes in that idea? Wasn't the US in violation of UN Resolutions when it preemptively attacked with no authorization from the Security Council?--the answer is yes if you weren't aware.

The lack of awareness about the facts during the war... and the rewriting of history afterwards has been an amazing and shockingly successful feat by conservatives.

And if you were wondering how laughable the idea that Iraq was a threat... think back to Iraq I. Where Arab countries were calling for us to beat back the preemptive attack by Iraq which lacked authorization from the security council. Thats why we fought with a HUGE coalition, and the war was paid for--mostly by Saudi Arabia if my memory serves me.

Agree or disagree with how it went down... we--Republican and Democrat alike--knew how to win wars, effectively, and at as little cost to our soldiers and our citizens wallets. Republicans were taken over by the conservative wing and all of a sudden the ability to win a war becomes this great quandary. As if military strategy was back to the rock, bigger rock, spear, club... of our ancestors days in the caves.

sigh... what a waste of lives, money, and our national security...

Obama 2008. The lesser of two evils...

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Reason #567745 to vote against McCain

My congressman Lynn Westmoreland is a huge supporter of Blackwater...

Bellum omnium contra omnes... reminds us why he should not take pride in this fact.

Security firms in particular, such as Blackwater, compete with the U.S. military for resources. Former soldiers can make much more by leaving military life behind and working for private military firms. This drives up the cost to the U.S. taxpayer. Not only do we lose needed personnel, but we also wind up paying almost six times as much for private security vs. military personnel, according to the House Committee on Government Oversight.

Voting for John McCain empowers people like Lynn Westmoreland to continue to hurt our troops, their families, and our national security. Obama 2008.


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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Let the swiftboating begin...

Listen to Republican Chuck Hegal mid-way in who was dead on in regards to how innappropriate John McCain's recent attack on Obama was. 

Here is the real story via MSNBC

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports that there was never a plan for Obama to take the press to Landstuhl, despite the claim by McCain folks and others. The plan was to go with his military aide, retired General Scott Gration. The Pentagon said Gration was off-limits because he had joined the campaign -- violating rules that it not be a political stop.

Obama had gone to see wounded troops in Iraq earlier in the week, without even confirming he'd been there. No press, no pictures. He has done the same when he goes to Walter Reed -- never any press.

Imagine if McCain hadn't voted against the New GI Bill?  Instead he stated that he was against it because it created incentives for soldiers to leave after one tour.

He could have said thank you for one tour of service! Which is above and beyond in its honor and valor.  He decided the paying for college for young men and women was too much to ask of tax payers.  Some of us believe one tour of duty earns them a good education and quality health care.  Imagine if John McCain did as well... 

Imagine if McCain was not still supporting a failed Iraq policy that was underfunded, poorly planned, and has only created a larger terrorist threat? 

What if he took the postion held by most forigen policy experts that the past 8 years of go it alone has harmed our national security, weakend our security across the globe, and left our troops to fight--with no sacrifice called for from the citizens at home. 

Taxcuts in a time of war is unprecedented... that is John McCain... that is what he should be talking about.  But when you are on the wrong side of issues it always good to throw mud...

Thats why he's attacking Obama...

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

something to reflect on now that we are in the midst of Iraq 2008

Media Coverage: A View from the Ground

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

No one flew over the nest...

If you've spent any time in a psychiatric hosptial you know the other end of this statement from a social worker in Baghdad

“Sometimes we are talking to them and trying to comfort them, but inside our hearts we feel pain because we also face the same problems,” she said. “We also have lost people, but we must pretend to be another person, to hide our real feelings and our real suffering.”

The perspective is so much broader and the chaos far more extreme but the fictions of "its okay" ring so hallow and don't really help no matter your geographic location or circumstances. Maybe thats why people who have been in similar situations are more effective than those who haven't.

I mean but go figure. The average Iraqi would probably get a short term stint in the hospital here in the U.S. just from the chaos and death and destruction they have seen in the past 5 years.

go read the rest: War Takes Toll on Baghdad Psychiatric Hospital

tax's cut that go to the top 1%... no kidding

It is no accident that the President managed to use the t-word at least twenty and as many as 36 times in each of his post-9/11 State of the Union addresses (as opposed to only once in January 2001).

--John Mueller Terrorphobia

update: I need to give you more of the juicy quotes from this one...

Since when does it take political courage to defend a rational approach to public policy against an hysterical one?

Once again, the parallel with the post-World War II Red Scare is instructive. In that atmosphere politicians scurried to support spending billions upon billions of dollars to surveil, screen and protect, and to spy on an ever-expanding array of individuals who had aroused suspicion for one reason or another. Organizations were infiltrated, phones were tapped (each tap can require the full-time services of a dozen agents and support personnel), letters were intercepted, people were followed, loyalty oaths were required, endless leads (almost all to nowhere) were pursued, defense plants were hardened, concentration camps for prospective emergency use were established (an idea desperately proposed by Senate liberals in 1950), and garbage was meticulously sifted in the hope of unearthing scraps of incriminating information.


[credit: Associated Press] At the time, critics of this process focused almost entirely on the potential for civil liberties violations. This is a worthy concern, but hardly the only one. As far as I know, at no point during the Cold War did anyone say: “Yes, many domestic Communists adhere to a foreign ideology that ultimately has as its goal the destruction of capitalism and democracy by violence if necessary, but they’re so pathetic they couldn’t subvert their way out of a wet paper bag. So why are we expending so much time, effort and treasure over this issue?” It is astounding to me that this plausible, if admittedly debatable, point of view seems never to have been publicly expressed by any politician, pundit, professor or editorialist (although some may have believed it privately). On Stouffer’s survey, only a lonely and obviously politically insignificant share of the population (about 2 percent) professed to believe that domestic Communists presented no danger at all.....

Criticisms of the Patriot Act and of the Bush Administration’s efforts to apprehend prospective terrorists focus almost entirely on concerns about civil liberties, worrying that the rights of innocent Americans might be trampled in the rush to pursue terrorists. This is a perfectly valid concern, but from time to time someone might wonder a bit in public about how much the quest to ferret out terrorists and to protect ourselves is costing, as well as about how meager the results have been. In their valuable recent book, Less Safe, Less Free (2007), David Cole and Jules Lobel ably detail and critique the process. As their title implies, they suggest that we are less safe in part because the FBI and other agencies have failed in their well-funded quest to uncover the enemy within. There’s an alternative explanation, however: They have not failed, and we are not less safe; investigators haven’t found much of anything because there isn’t much of anything to find... All this may help to explain why there have been no al-Qaeda attacks in the United States for so many years, contrary to almost all anticipations. Perhaps the group’s goal is not to destroy the United States with explosions, but to have the Americans destroy themselves by wallowing in fear and by engaging in counterproductive policy overreaction. Thus, shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden happily crowed that “America is full of fear, from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.” And in 2004 he proclaimed his policy to be “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”, noting with consummate glee that, “It is easy for us to provoke and bait. . . . All that we have to do is . . . raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.” The 9/11 attacks, he calculated, cost only $500,000 to carry out, “while the attack and its aftermath inflicted a cost of more than $500 billion on the United States.”

Bush blunder...

Krugman citing Juan Cole on recent Iraq news

The entire episode underlines how powerful Iran has become in Iraq. The Iranian government had called on Saturday for the fighting to stop. And by Sunday evening it had negotiated at least a similar call from Sadr (whether the fighting actually stops remains to be seen and depends on local commanders and on whether al-Maliki meets Sadr’s conditions).

Notes the very cold reality of our Foreign Policy blunder

So America is spending $12 billion a month to sustain what has, in practice, become an Iranian sphere of influence.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Iraq

The Smart Way Out of a Foolish War

The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for "staying the course" draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of "falling dominoes" that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.

I missed it...

Friday's numbers from One Pissed Off Veteran

Friday by the Numbers
Total American dead in the Iraq Illegal Occupation: 2500 2513 2532 2540 2546 2558 2571 2585 2597 2605 2619 2641 2710 2737 2758 2788 2809 2826 2865 2888 2906 2959 3006 3018 3025 3067 3087 3118 3132 3151 3166 3189 3210 3233 3245 3266 3299 3316 3337 3358 3387 3409 3444 3504 3519 3546 3577 3592 3611 3631 3683 3705 3725 3738 3760 3780 3795 3823 3830 3838 3845 3866 3875 3881 3886 3891 3896 3908 3921 3932 3943 3952

Total coalition forces dead: 307
Total Iraqi Dead: 700,000+

Number of days since Baby Doc said he'd get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive": 2340
Number of days since the illegal occupation of Iraq began: 1801
Number of days since "Mission Accomplished": 1743
Number of days between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII: Only 1347

bad move... again... redux...

From TPM: The hysterical party heads for the fainting couch

A month ago, congressional Republicans were so desperate to avoid discussing the substance of U.S. policy towards Iraq, they decided a newspaper ad from MoveOn.org was the single biggest threat to Western Civilization in recent history. The coordinated hissy fit was a transparent effort to distract attention from the issue at hand, but it was also a largely successful sham -- Republicans stopped talking about Bush's failed policy and started talking about the NYT's ad rates.

This month, those same congressional Republicans are so desperate to avoid discussing the substance of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), they've decided Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) has replaced MoveOn as Public Enemy #1. (For reasons that defy logic, CNN has decided that the GOP's feigned outrage is a really important story.)

Far be it for me to give Republicans advice, but I don't think they've thought this one through.

For the record, what did Stark say to send the right into high dudgeon? During the debate on overriding the president's veto for children's healthcare, Stark said, "You don't have money to fund the war or children, but you're gonna spend it blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their head blown off for the president's amusement."

Intemperate? Sure. But the coordinated hysteria we've seen over the last few days is more than misguided; it's silly.

There's just no reason for apoplexy here. Stark said something mean about Bush during a congressional debate. The president is a big boy; I think he can handle it. But by throwing a tantrum, congressional Republicans are suggesting that they can't handle it. They're not grown-ups. Random, intemperate criticism of Bush is just too much for the fragile, virgin ears.

In other words, by throwing a fit, Republicans end up looking weak and hysterical. Indeed, it reinforces the least flattering GOP caricature of all -- these guys can't govern, but they can fall onto a fainting couch like nobody's business.

For years, Republicans worked to create the opposite reputation. They're tough. This is the macho "daddy party." They don't care about "political correctness" and wussies who cry over words that rub people the wrong way. This is a crowd that calls it like they see it, and doesn't look bad or apologize.

And yet, they've now spent the better part of a year trembling over mild rebukes from liberals. If Democrats were smart, they'd look at this as an opportunity to rebrand the GOP as pathetic cry-babies who can barely go a week without throwing a hissy fit over one manufactured outrage or another. Alas, it doesn't look like Dems are smart at all.

on war

From Tim O'Brian's vietnam memoir The Things They Carried via Brad Delong

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl, He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He’s nineteen years old—it’s too much for him—so he looks at you with those big gentle, killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it’s so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back. You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty...

Not looking good...

Iraqi government unraveling as more ministers boycott

Iraq's government, already unable to reconcile rival Sunni and Shiite Muslim factions, seemed headed for complete paralysis Monday as five more Cabinet ministers announced that they'd boycott government meetings.

Ron Pauls debate response came right on the tails of this

yesterday over at Ezra Klien's blog on the "Genocide dodge" triangulation of many war supporters.

This is one of those "Still True Today" things where plenty of blog posts have been written, but it deserves repeating: asking withdrawal supporters, as Matt Bai did to Bill Richardson, "What about the genocide that will follow American withdrawal from Iraq", is what Mitt Romney might call a "null set". Political support for daily US casualties cannot continue indefinitely. At some point in the future, and probably within the next decade, US troops will either leave Iraq, or at the least scale back their day-to-day peacekeeping actions; there is no precedent for having an occupying force endlessly conduct regular patrols in a foreign land. At that point, given the current level of ethnic strife and civil unrest in Iraq, the level of violence will increase whether it occurs six months from now or sixteen years from now. The burden needs to be on occupation supporters to explain how they will reduce the level of violence while grinding through US military equipment and personnel. Otherwise, we're just postponing the inveitable, and at an enormous cost, and we would be better off negotiating away as much violence as possible while withdrawing.

All of this, of course, takes as a given the idea that a US withdrawal is certain lead to genocide, something that hasn't received any real scrutiny and might not hold up under closer examination.

Since one of the refrains from print journalists is that the blogosphere gets too "personal", and I can empathize with that, let me say that none of this carping is really Matt Bai-specific; the "withdrawal will lead to genocide and it will be America's fault" frame of reporting about Iraq has dominated the Beltway discourse since at least 2005.

Didn't see this yesterday...

But the New York Times editorial board is finally openly calling for the withdrawal of US Troops. THey've beat around the bush(sic) for a while.
The Road Home

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

This is all good to see but the stunning inability to take responsibility and leadership that has shown through from the New York Times Editorial board since this all began pops up again...

There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country.....

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors’ conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.

No mention of reparations for violating international law. No mention to the world while we call for their action--out of "global responsibility" and self-interest.

IMPEACH DICK CHENEY

pssst... do something.

Impeach Cheney

A good question....

via TPM

Question: How may Arabic speakers with 3/3 levels of proficiency are currently serving at Embassy Baghdad?

Answer: We currently have ten Foreign Service Officers (including the Ambassador) at Embassy Baghdad at or above the 3 reading / 3 speaking level in Arabic. An additional five personnel at Embassy Baghdad have tested at or above the 3 level in speaking. A 3/3 indicates a general professional fluency level.

Who needs to keep up with the private sector anyways!

White House: 3.5 percent pay hike unnecessary

Troops don’t need bigger pay raises, White House budget officials said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy laying out objections to the House version of the 2008 defense authorization bill.

The Bush administration had asked for a 3 percent military raise for Jan. 1, 2008, enough to match last year’s average pay increase in the private sector. The House Armed Services Committee recommends a 3.5 percent pay increase for 2008, and increases in 2009 through 2012 that also are 0.5 percentage point greater than private-sector pay raises.

The slightly bigger military raises are intended to reduce the gap between military and civilian pay that stands at about 3.9 percent today. Under the bill, HR 1585, the pay gap would be reduced to 1.4 percent after the Jan. 1, 2012, pay increase.

on an Orwellian note....

Iraq bars photographers from scenes of bomb attacks.

BarbinMD:

Toss in the U.S. policy of not including the victims of bomb attacks in casualty counts, and soon we will all be able to pretend that there is progress in Iraq.

News

General says he needs more troops

The commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq said Friday that he did not have enough troops to deal with the escalating violence in Iraq's Diyala province, an unusually frank assertion for a top officer and a sign that American military officials might be starting to offer more candid and blunt assessments of the war

Major General John Batiste (ret) Talks to Keith Olbermann

update on the Batiste Ad... he gets canned by CBS! Watch the interview with Olbermann. This guy is very well spoken and he comes from the ranks of those who would and should know