August 30
We're soon to mark the fourth anniversary of 911. I personally marked the first anniversary by writing an essay on how 911 would be a day the world changed, which I published on my personal site, not yet starting a blog. I suppose I can't know with certainty that a book called "The Days the World Changed" written 200 years hence will include 911, but I feel reasonably sure. Where I was particularly prescient, if I may blow my own horn even though I did that once already in an update I added on the second anniversary, was this bit:
"The point isn't to guess at alternative histories. The point is one simple lesson: the effects of 911 will grow over time, even when we no longer realize the connection. We have to consider that when deciding our own reactions. Probably Britain considered the possibilities of its options in America, but they probably didn't include a loss of a chunk of empire and a multi-national war. When Admiral Yamamoto said, "I fear that all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant, and fill it with a desire for vengeance," there must have some Japanese who felt like saying, "Great, NOW you think of that!" Long term consequences can't be seen with complete clarity, but responsibility for those who must live in the future we build requires that we at least try to think through all possibilities.For those of you not clear on the timeline, I just want to point out that this was September 2002, six months before Bush invaded Iraq, well before we found out there was no postwar plan except an addition to the canon of fantasy literature. It was just after Congress voted to authorize the invasion leaving Bush to pretend he was trying to avoid it as he planned it. And oh yes, it was just when the issue of the midterm election was the corporate scandals, to which Bush and Cheney were personally tied you may recall. This issue was promptly forgotten when the issue became a test of patriotism consisting of beating the war drums loud enough to avoid hearing anyone pointing out there was no proof Iraq was tied to Al Qaida. Can't vote against the president in wartime after all.The Bush administration shows little sense of this, a circumstance would should frighten all Americans as it seems to frighten the rest of the world."
With that said, watch now for the acting president to see the anniversary as an opportunity to salvage his declining approval ratings. He will pull the usual trick of not saying directly Iraq was behind 911, but he will mention the two in consecutive sentences over and over. He will talk up Iraq at every 911 commemoration, and there will be plenty of those.
And maybe, just maybe, someone will get a chance to ask a question, and will ask just what was the real reason for invading Iraq. And maybe the acting president's fumbling answer will convince some more people that this lying buffoon has to be removed if we're to have any chance to win this war --- make that either war (there's still fighting in Afghanistan, in case anyone forgot) --- or to get out without disaster striking as the case may be.
Thinking long term, in hopes someone able to start the next war will think a bit harder, Bush has prove a marvelous example of a historical rule. I have observed that those who start wars are rarely right about how they will go. Bush got Iraq War II wrong. Saddam got a surprise in both Iraq War I and his invasion of Iran. Go back to the world wars go back to the middle ages if you want to. Pick a war, any war, and you'll be surprised at how frequently that rule is applied.
August 27
Following up on a couple things:
On Tuesday I suggested Venezuela is possibly the next target in the Bush shooting gallery. Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive has compiled a bunch of examples of the antipathy of the acting president's minions towards Hugo Chavez.
The fundamentalist loonies who protested at Sgt. Bryan Opskar's memorial in Princeton, MN, are at it again. This time they're striking in Tennesee.
August 26
The subject came up in a recent conversation whether we really get the truth about all that is going on in Iraq. My suggestion was that we do, a suggestion which I imagine causes choking all along the political spectrum. However, and surely you knew a big however was coming, it's not tied up in a neat package. Maybe an historian will manage that task in the next century. For now though, there is no single source that filters out all the lies and mistakes while putting everything in the right priority with full context. We certainly don't see the future repercussions. I suppose that's why every time I think clarity on our best options in Iraq War II is becoming apparent, I learn something new that muddies things. More information, less certainty, which may explain why no one is so clear as the arrogantly ignorant. You probably know by now who I might have in mind, though it's become a mantra among conservatives that the good news gets ignored, as if some schools opening is bigger than religious militias taking over Iraqi cities and battling each other (by the way, when conservatives go on like that about the Tet offensive being a victory, they forget that the government had been insisting the Viet Cong was about done -- gee, why does that sound familiar?). It's why with everything I say about Iraq, there is the context that while I may not know exactly the right strategy, I know we must remove the corrupt government the Supreme Court and election rigging foisted upon us.
Speaking of new information, a bit of spin even I fell for is the notion that the violence is confined to just three or four majority Sunni provinces. That might be true if "violence" referred to just the Sunni insurgency. Unfortunately there is plenty of violence in the Kurdish and Sunni areas. Kurdish militias have been imprisoning ethnic minorities and intimidating political opponents. Shiite militias have been assassinating political rivals, including other members of other Shiite groups. I mentioned above that recently they broke into open fighting with each other. The militias are attached to religious leaders and have largely taken over the police in the Shiite areas, not the sort of state any Sunni will want to belong too. Hindsight is 20-20 of course, and no one foresaw anything like this. Oh wait, they did, and warned Bush and the neocons, who didn't listen. And these guys are expected to solve the problem, bring democracy to the Middle East and all that? Maybe if they left and let some honest people with brains run things. Personally, I'd rather not wait for the midterm elections to replace them, especially not since campaigning and vote rigging are the only two things they've skill at.
August 23
I've avoided up until now giving Take the Red Pill awards to religious leaders since you never know if they really believe it or are just misleading believers, and this story has been amply covered already. In fact, the link is to Media Matters. But this is too good to resist, and since Pat Robertson has grown filthy rich I suspect he's just joining the right wing propaganda corps so I award this not just to him, but to the fools who believe him. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. I won't repeat the statement since you can visit the link and see both the video and the transcript. I just point up that he said of Chavez, "...he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent." Not only is Robertson leading the gullible back to the Cold War, but Venezuela has what, eight Muslims? This Catholic country is going to make itself a haven for people who hate Christians? To the drumbeat for the next war, along with propaganda to gin up a war against Syria or Iran, add Venezuela. Until they can answer the question "Who would Jesus assassinate?", Robertson and anyone who believes him deserves a Take the Red Pill award.
While on the subject of the next war, like I alluded to above, Venezuela is not the only target of the neocons' hunt for the next war (two aren't enough, and they've gone so well). There's more to the possibility of attacking Iran than just the acting president's refusal to rule out force, but rather that force is closer to the top of the option list than he lets on. In a recent article, Scott Ritter charged that the US has already begun the war against Iran. Neocons will want to write off his charges on the grounds the article is in Aljazeera, but I hasten to point out a couple things. First, what he said about the war against Iraq starting back in 2002 had already come out in other media. Second, he criticized the war against Iraq before the invasion, and he turned out to be right. His assertions therefore ought to lead us to ask some questions, and Bush's record of lying should make us suspicious of the answers.
It isn't just Ritter. The American Conservative made the same charge. They didn't give a source, so it's OK to be suspicious of that, but see if this quote is cause for concern: "As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." Maybe war supporters won't like this source either because The American Conservative is part of the isolationist wing of conservatism rather than the dominant unilateralists, and opposed Iraq War II.
So here's a source that might be the most chilling, because the charge is quite specific and completely echoes the faulty gathering of intelligence for Iraq, where unreliable sources were trusted over the assessments of our own and foreign intelligence because they told the government what it wanted to believe. According to Knight-Ridder, neocon Republican congressmen on the House Intelligence Committee have been meeting with "Ali", the Iranian answer to "Curveball". They're relying on his information even though the CIA has said he's worthless, because Ali is telling them of the plots these congressmen want to believe in. The congressmen are Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the committee, and Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA. Weldon was recently in the news for promoting the story that Mohammed Atta was identified by military intelligence back in 2000, even though the 911 commission decided there wasn't enough evidence. So here we have the far right believing unreliable intelligence that supports what they want to believe so as to promote another war. What should we call this, "faith-based intelligence"?
August 21
I was a child of an age in the single digits during the Vietnam War, and during an idle moment the other day I remembered asking my parents what "wounded" was. It was on the news every night that so many were "wounded" and I had no idea what that referred to. I knew a war was going on, but I hardly understood what that meant or the explanation of the mysterious word. For all I knew, the war had gone on forever. A couple days after that recollection, while I was playing nineteenth century soldier at Historic Fort Snelling, a boy of the same age I was when I asked my question back in the late 60's asked me a question that took a couple repeatings between the background noise, a child's awkward speech, and a context that at first was lacking for me. He asked if this was where we got on the planes for Iraq. Despite my blue coat, flintlock musket, and Napoleonic looking cap, so far as he knew all soldiers go to Iraq. Though the war is only two and a half years old, it's still true that to a child, that is forever. Soldiers go to Iraq, always have and presumably always will, just as I thought the numbers of wounded being announced was what was always on the news and always would be. I wish I could tell you what that means in a grander sense but I'm not sure I can. I imagine all children two years into a war assume it's always gone on and always will. Maybe it means wars have effects we can't see from adult perspectives and don't know the future ramifications.
I added a quote to the right column today that should disappoint everyone who hopes for a political settlement in Iraq leading to something verging on democracy. An individual identified only as a secular Kurdish politician said, "We understand the Americans have sided with the Shi'ites. It's shocking. It doesn't fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state. I can't believe that's what the Americans really want or what the American people want." The US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has apparently decided, presumably with his boss's approval, that an Islamic government is all right as long as it meets the deadline chosen for no particularly good deadline. The article in The Sunday Herald reminds readers that the ambassador oversaw the similar establishment of Islamic law in Afghanistan. In Iraq, apparently liberty and equality matter less than punctuality. It puts me in mind of a recent conversation with someone who suggested it might be necessary to accept an Islamic government in order to get out. Later that day I heard it suggested that despite the democratic rhetoric of our government and the Iraqi government, women's rights seem easily dismissed. I'm wondering if our incompetent acting president has placed us in a position where the price of getting out of Iraq will be the sacrifice of Iraq's women. The Kurds seem to still be holding out for a secular government, while the Sunnis and Shiites seem divided over which of them will rule the theocracy.
Maybe it's the consistent short-sightedness of the Bush administration at work here. A Kurdish member of the constitutional committee, Mahmoud Othman, said, "Really, we are disappointed with that. It seems like the Americans want to have a constitution at any cost. These things are not good -- giving the constitution an Islamic face. It is not good to have a constitution that would limit the liberties of people, the human rights, the freedoms." It's like they thought capturing Baghdad would be a panacea for all that ails Iraq, and again with capturing Saddam, the transfer of sovereignty, the elections, and now the constitution. If they can just get that far, everything will be all right. The scary thing is these fools remain in charge until Bush is removed.
August 18
I didn't have a chance to make a sign for last night's vigil, but if I did, this is what I would have liked to have made, except for the URL for this site. That's just in case the image gets picked up anywhere, I might as well get credit:
And to think, the one who hasn't told lies and gotten tens of thousands of people killed is the one who has to keep justifying her actions. The acting president is obviously a tough person to talk to, but I hope some brave journalist will speak up at a press conference and straightforwardly ask, "what was the real reason for the war?" I suspect Bush doesn't know. I have this hypothesis that the obsession with Iraq was so long held, that he just jumped at the chance 911 offered to attack and never considered why beyond how to sell it.
While we're on the subject of incompetent leadership, remember the war in Afghanistan, which was not actually over when Bush decided to move resources to invade Iraq? The Taliban survived and are making a comeback.
August 17
Tonight I was at one of the vigils held around the country in support of Cindy Sheehan. There were several in Minneapolis. These are photos I took tonight at the connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Well, I never claimed to be a photographer, but the top photo gives an idea of the size. My best guess is there were 300-400 people stretched along the sidewalks. The signs aren't readable in the photos, but if I recall correctly the sign a little left of center in the bottom photo said, "Roses are for everyone, especially military families". There were signs calling for the troops to be brought home, denunciations of Bush for lying, references to the cost of the war and the profits made by a favored few, and signs declaring the support of veterans and military families. There was a scroll of paper on the ground in the photo for participants to to write messages to Sheehan though it's not terribly visible. Many drivers honked as they drove over the bridge. There were many peace signs flashed, and I heard of just one single finger displayed.
There were American flags on display too of course. In a way it's sad that war opponents have to make such a point of flag waving to reassure onlookers that our side is patriotic too. Despite the questioning of another's patriotism for political disagreement being a loathsome thing, conservatives have nonetheless succeeded in stamping their brand on patriotism, and love of country has always been synonomous with love of war. Does it not seem backwards that those who oppose slaughtering other people are the ones who have to defend their motives?
The overwhelming sentiment was against continuing the war. Like I've said previously, I'm not sure I agree with that. There is a case to be made that our presence in Iraq is fueling the insurgency and obviously there would be no war if Bush hadn't invaded. But withdrawal could mean a full scale civil war breaking out. There's only one way to find out of course, and we will indeed find out the result of one course of action. Whatever course is followed, we know the Bush government is going to screw it up, and there's the rub. There seems little point in pushing the acting president to follow a course of action when he's too incompetent to carry it out, and he doesn't listen to anyone outside his little circle of sycophants anyway. We would be better served to focus on Bush's removal. If public support for his removal grows, the congressional Democrats will grow bolder and their Republican colleagues will discover their instinct for self-preservation. It's dreadfully difficult, but not impossible. At the very least, if we can hobble Bush, then even without his removal we can mitigate the damage he can do.
See the archives for earlier entries.
