Nuclear KnuckleBall in the LoC

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Wikipedia: knuckleball

A knuckleball (or “knuckler” for short) is a baseball pitch with an erratic, unpredictable motion.
The pitch is thrown so as to minimize the spin of the ball in flight. This causes vortices over the stitched seams of the baseball during its trajectory, which can cause the pitch to change direction, including corkscrew, mid-flight.
This makes the pitch difficult for batters to hit, but also difficult for pitchers to control. The challenge also extends to the catcher — who must at least attempt to catch the pitch — and the umpire, who must determine whether the pitch was a strike or ball.

The pitcher is current affairs already-tainted with nuclear waste.
And the batter is everybody on the planet.
The catcher and the umpire?
Multi-bodies guess.

India and Pakistan have never been the best of neighbors, even at the best of times.
And now this on Tuesday from the Christian Science Monitor:

  • A series of deadly skirmishes along the India-Pakistan border are endangering the official cease-fire between the two nations, increasing tensions already sparked by a lethal series of terrorist bombings in India last weekend.
    The Hindu newspaper reports that Indian military along the Line of Control (LoC), the border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, claimed that they were shelled by Pakistani forces on Wednesday, though no one was injured.
    …
    The Telegraph of Calcutta writes that the shelling, the latest in a string of attacks that began earlier this week, has increased pressure on India to respond to Pakistan in kind. Pakistan is also accused of involvement in a series of bombings last weekend in the western city of Ahmedabad.

This entire area — a kind of DMZ — along the above-mentioned LoC has seen all kinds of bloody shit between India and Pakistan since 1947, when they cut loose from the-then defunct UK Empire.
Both sides claim all of Kashmir.
India and Pakistan have been under a cease-fire agreement since 2003 and reportedly gradually been renewing diplomatic ties.
But not really.
According to the CSM piece, on Monday an Indian soldier was killed when some Pakistani GIs crossed over this LoC and got into a verbal disagreement with Indian troops.
India says Pakistan has violated the 2003 cease-fire 20 times without some kind of Indian retaliation.

Although these two nations seem to hate each other and are grappling about all the time, the really big difference here is “the bomb.”
And as just as India and the US is about to finalize a nuclear agreement, Pakistan has popped up wanting the same atomic deal.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has been Washington this week meeting with Decider George, but instead of any niceties, it was an ass chewing.
First, Decider George was annoyed with Gilani about Pakistan’s security apparatus, the dreaded and notorious ISI — Inter Services Intelligence — and how the organization was leaking intell to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, all kinds of other insurgent and nasty groups.
Pakistan’s Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar, who was with Gilani, siphoned out some leaks of his own.
From the Australian News:

  • Providing details of the tense White House encounter that seems certain to further inflame relations between Islamabad and Washington, Mr Mukhtar said Mr Bush was aware of the “fiasco” surrounding the new Pakistani government’s abortive attempt to assert control over the spy agency.
    Pakistan has persistently argued it cannot take effective action against al-Qa’ida and the Taliban unless the US shares with it “actionable intelligence”.
    But according to Mr Mukhtar, Mr Bush told the Pakistani Prime Minister that this could not be provided “because certain elements of the ISI are leaking information to the terrorists before they could be hit by the US or Pakistani forces”.
    A senior diplomat in Islamabad said yesterday the US president’s comments reinforced what was known to be true.
    “Now you have it. No less than the President of the United States saying what we all know, namely, that the ISI is as leaky as a sieve and that its links with the jihadists are such that anything we discuss with them goes straight to al-Qa’ida & co.”

And on the nuclear issue?
No. Negative. Never.
Despite what PM Gilani desires:

  • There should be no discrimination. If they want to give such nuclear status to India, we expect the same for Pakistan,” Gilani said in a conversation with Richard N Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, at a meeting jointly organised with the Middle East Institute.
    Gilani — who responded to a number of questions from the audience — spoke at length on a variety of issues including terrorism and extremism, Pak-US relations, the economy and the scope of democracy in the country.

According to the Press Trust of India, the US retorted:

  • Nicholas Burns, one of the architects of the the Indo-US nuclear deal, feels that Pakistan cannot expect a similar pact, a day after its Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani openly demanded from the US such a deal.
    Burns also pressed for the speedy approval of the nuke deal ahead of the IAEA taking up the India-specific safeguards pact tomorrow for approval saying it was “good” for both the countries besides helping strengthen the non-proliferation regime.
    …
    “India’s trust, its credibility, the fact that it has promised to create a state-of-the art facility, monitored by the IAEA, to begin a new export control regime in place, because it has not proliferated the nuclear technology, we can’t say that about Pakistan.” said Burns when asked whether the US will offer a nuclear deal with Pakistan on the lines of the Indo-US nuke deal during a panel debate on nuclear agreement at the Brookings Institution.

Neither India or Pakistan will back off each other.
The serious threat here is nuclear.
The two countries have waged three, full-scale wars since 1947, but none have yet to go nuclear.
And they both have the power.
According to the environmental action group, Natural Resources Defense Council, India and Pakistan have the hardware to make an absolute difference in the world:

  • It is difficult to determine the actual size and composition of India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals, but NRDC estimates that both countries have a total of 50 to 75 weapons.
    Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we believe India has about 30 to 35 nuclear warheads, slightly fewer than Pakistan, which may have as many as 48.
    …
    Both countries have fission weapons, similar to the early designs developed by the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
    NRDC estimates their explosive yields are 5 to 25 kilotons (1 kiloton is equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT). By comparison, the yield of the weapon the United States exploded over Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, while the bomb exploded over Nagasaki was 21 kilotons.
    According to a recent NRDC discussion with a senior Pakistani military official, Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons are mounted on missiles. India’s nuclear weapons are reportedly gravity bombs deployed on fighter aircraft.
    …
    Unlike the U.S.-Soviet experience, these two countries have a deep-seated hatred of one another and have fought three wars since both countries became independent.
    At least part of the current crisis may be seen as Hindu nationalism versus Muslim fundamentalism.

And on that note, we switch to western Pakistan on its border with Afghanistan, where some bad shit has been waging out of control for some time.
The near-seven-year-long stay of US forces in Afghanistan has amounted to just about nothing.
On Thursday from Reuters:

  • More foreign fighters are joining the ranks of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan as militants increasingly cross the border from Pakistan to attack Afghan and Western troops, the Afghan Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.
    Afghanistan has kept up a barrage of criticism against neighbour Pakistan in the last three months, accusing Pakistani agents of being behind a string of high-profile attacks and allowing militants sanctuary along the long and porous border.
    “The presence of foreign fighters is increasing, and increasingly the operations of the terrorists are led by foreigners,” Defence Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zaher Azimi told a news conference.
    Afghan, NATO and U.S.-led coalition forces are struggling to contain a sharp surge in violence as the traditional summer fighting season gets into full swing.
    Already more U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in May and June than in Iraq, where there are some four times more American soldiers.
    …
    Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, said this month there were indications that al Qaeda was switching its focus from Iraq back to Afghanistan.

On that, from the Washington Post today comes word Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the supposedly leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and several of his minions recently booked for Afghanistan.
And why not?

General David McKiernan, commander of Nato’s International Assistance Security Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan, in an interview with Al Jazeera, expressed frustration at not being able to hit the Taliban in Pakistan.

  • “[Violence] largely emanates from tribal sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan that allow the freedom of movement of insurgents into Afghanistan.
    “My mandate as a Nato commander stops at the border. … You asked me, is it frustrating that organisations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda exist in sanctuaries across the border? – Absolutely frustrating.”
    “It’s a regional problem. It is a problem for Pakistan and the leadership for Pakistan and it’s a problem for Afghanistan.”

Just like a knuckleball pitch, it will take more than just muscles to connect bat to ball.
Despite military commanders and US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, both wanting to create another “surge” of GIs into Afghanistan, the tactic might backfire.
Maybe what’s needed is a new set of operational plans:

  • “The war in Afghanistan is irregular warfare,” said the officer, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press. “This requires unconventional forces. As soon as conventional forces greatly outnumber Special Forces in theater, resources are diverted to conventional forces that have the greater need per capita.”
    …
    Richard Holbrooke, a top State Department official and ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, said he supported an infusion of troops into southern and eastern Afghanistan to deal with the immediate Taliban threat.
    “But I would not like to see us take over this war,” Mr. Holbrooke said, because it would retard the development of Afghanistan’s own security forces and spark a hostile reaction among ordinary Afghans.
    “We run the real risk of triggering a xenophobic reaction from a people that has resisted outside forces dating back to Alexander the Great.”

Oh-freakin’-dog-shit!
Hoyt Wilhelm on the mound in the damn-ass bottom of the ninth.
We be fucked!

Boot the Surge

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One of the most-marvelous and near-enigmatic of military operations in the Iraqi war was the famous “surge,” — Decider George’s answer to the fratricide-like butchery shop he’d created with his invasion and subsequent dumb-ass, greed-obsessive policies.

In January 2007, he ordered a big chunk of US GIs gushed into certain parts of Iraq for a short-shot, hit-’em-hard maneuver aimed at reducing the killing between Iraqis.
Coupled onto a chain of half-dozen interwoven events and situations over a near-two year period, the surge most likely helped calm the ferocious Iraqi countryside a little bit — but direct results of Decider George’s up-tick of boots on-the-ground-decision are so ambiguous the operation comes off now as some sort of mysterious, near-iconic military miracle.
Even use of the actual word ‘surge‘ to indicate rapid increases, i.e., ‘gas prices surge,’ ‘milk prices surge,’ and so forth, has popped up in newspaper headlines, indicating there’s a public that much-so grasps the significance of its meaning.

And the military-term use of “surge” and its implications has become political football.

Barack Obama, fresh from a strange, much-glorious trip across the known universe, seems to have supported the “surge” as he told Tom Brokaw Sunday morning on Meet the Press:

  • “If we want to look at the question of judgment, which is the one that John McCain makes, John McCain essential focus has been on the tactical issue of sending more troops.
    He’s made his entire approach to foreign policy rest on that support of Bush’s decision to send more troops in.
    But we can have a whole range of arguments about bad decisions — the decision to go into Iraq in the first place and whether that was a good strategic decision.”

No matter the conclusion: Iraq is still a crazy place.
In a Sunni town south of Baghdad, seven Shiite pilgrims were ambushed and killed Sunday while enroute to a local shrine.
The incident revealed a tear in the fabled fabric of the so-called “surge.”
One of the ingredients figured in the reduction of overall violence the past few months has been the Awakening movement, whose members are mostly Sunni Arabs, former insurgents/fighters for al-Qaeda or members of criminal gangs, now paid about $300 a month by the US to help keep the peace.
And like a kind of indigenous mercenaries, they want more money.
These are the same guys Jackboot John McCain gets confused about with the US GI surge, then again maybe he’s not, but yet…

And we used “was” as to describe Decider George’s so-called “surge.”
Supposedly the operation is over, now in the past, although more troops are in Iraq than were before the surge started last year.
Voice of America checked the numbers this week:

  • Before the surge, there were about 132,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
    Now the Pentagon says there are 148,000. That’s a substantial increase, more than 12 percent. Pentagon Spokesman Bryan Whitman was asked to explain.
    “We’ve always said that we know there are certain capabilities that the United States military is going to have to continue to provide until the Iraqis can establish their own organic ability to do those things – medical, logistics, maintenance, air support,” he responded.
    …
    But there are 16,000 more U.S. troops in Iraq than before the surge. The Pentagon says some of the other 6,000 extra U.S. troops are in the process of taking over for departing troops, so the overall number should go down by a few thousand in the coming weeks. But that still leaves at least a couple of thousand troops not exactly accounted for.
    …
    The Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, says some may be leaving in the coming weeks, if their services are not needed by the Iraqis.
    In addition, he says U.S. commanders routinely request additional capabilities, such as bomb squads and intelligence units, which results in the deployment of small groups, or even individuals, which can add up over time.
    “The onesies and twosies become dozens, and the dozens become a few hundred, and a few hundred become a thousand sometimes,” Whitman said. “It’s just the way it does. Commanders have appetites for capabilities.”
    The number crunching this week over the post-surge U.S. troop numbers in Iraq, raises a question – when Iraqi leaders call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2010, are they talking about all the troops or just the combat troops?
    Or put another way, if the end of the surge left 16,000 troops behind, how many troops would a so-called complete U.S. withdrawal leave behind?

And what has the “surge” has really done?
Maybe the political-military move destroyed the US Army.
According to The American Conservative, the “surge” changed the face of the Army’s future, aided and abetted in escalating the disintegration of the Armed Forces.

  • In January 2007, the Bush administration announced a new strategy, a “surge” of troops into Iraq, following a well-circulated counterinsurgency template by American Enterprise Institute fellow Frederick Kagan and now-retired Army Gen. Jack Keane. There were assurances that more “boots on the ground” would lead to some stability in insurgent enclaves, an independent Iraqi national defense, and new legitimacy for the central government—at least enough to justify the phased withdrawal of combat brigades all but mandated by American voters in the 2006 midterm elections.
    …
    Lawrence J. Korb, former Reagan defense official and retired Navy captain, is less diplomatic. “[Petraeus’s] main concern is his strategy,” he told TAC. “He is putting his interest, which is the battlefield, before the long-term interest of the Army and of the country.”
    …
    There is little or no flexibility in today’s operational force, which leads many to question what would happen if the global war on terror really went global. At Slate, Fred Kaplan recently took inventory of the Army’s 43 combat brigades. He counted 16 currently in Iraq and Afghanistan, 20 in “dwell time” between deployments, one in Korea, one in transit, another doing global defense, one for “homeland defense,” and the rest unavailable.
    …
    “The Army is in a zero-sum state: No more soldiers can be sent to Afghanistan without a one-for-one reduction in Iraq,” Kaplan wrote last month. He was responding to talk about sending more troops to Afghanistan to help beat back the Taliban—an idea the Pentagon swiftly kyboshed. (Some 3,200 Iraq-weathered Marines were sent this spring, bringing the total American forces in Afghanistan to 35,000.)

No matter what future President Obama holds, the US military has been purged in the surge.

‘Sledgehammer’ Terror War

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Definition from Merriam-Webster online for terror.

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French terrour, from Latin terror, from terrēre to frighten; akin to Greek trein to be afraid, flee, tremein to tremble — more at tremble
Date:14th century
1: a state of intense fear
2 a: one that inspires fear — scourge; b: a frightening aspect — the terrors of invasion; c: a cause of anxiety — worry; d: an appalling person or thing; especially — brat
3: reign of terror
4: violent or destructive acts (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands — insurrection and revolutionary terror

synonyms: see fear

On that fateful Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001, a couple of seemingly unrelated people collided in violent contact.
One of those guys is Osama bin Laden.
The other — Decider George.
Of course, it wasn’t actually them, but their henchmen/cronies, and above all, it was in reality their dangerous philosophies which impacted together.

Despite all said about Osama and his boys, one has to give the cave-dwelling sonofabitch credit for anticipation — the US would come to him instead of the other way around.
Decider George’s Wide World of War on Terror has been a total disaster, an incompetent, politically-motivated product that has mangled life not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the US and the rest of the whole, wide world.

Osama says he wants the West out of the Middle East, under which the world’s energy source lies, and that’s why there is now two major conflicts there amid multi-billion US weapons-deals to Persian Gulf countries –Decider George says to Osama, Yeah, so what? Bring ‘em on!

And the US right now is embroiled in disaster — all for politics geared to program of oil for war.

A case in point appeared in this morning’s New York Times under the head, ‘Plan Would Use Antiterror Aid on Pakistani Jets,’ and reported that Decider George and his band of wingnuts want to divert “nearly $230 million in aid to Pakistan from counter-terrorism programs to upgrading that country’s aging F-16 attack planes, which Pakistan prizes more for their contribution to its military rivalry with India than for fighting insurgents along its Afghan border.”

  • The timing of the action caught lawmakers off guard, prompting some of them to suspect that the deal was meant to curry favor with the new Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, who will meet with President Bush in Washington next week, and to ease tensions over the 11 members of the Pakistani paramilitary forces killed in an American airstrike along the Afghan border last month.
    The financing for the F-16s would represent more than two-thirds of the $300 million that Pakistan will receive this year in American military financing for equipment and training.
    Last year, Congress specified that those funds be used for law enforcement or counterterrorism. Pakistan’s military has rarely used its current fleet of F-16s, which were built in the 1980s, for close-air support of counterterrorism missions, largely because the risks of civilian casualties would inflame anti-government sentiments in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

And this, buried in the story with absolute-no further explanation:

  • State Department officials say the upgrades would greatly enhance the F-16s’ ability to strike insurgents accurately, while reducing the risk to civilians.
    The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Congress was weighing the plan, said the timing was driven by deadlines of the American contractor, Lockheed Martin.

What the hell?
What’s Lockheed Martin have to do with all this?
Maybe, just maybe — Lockheed Martin is making money hand-over-jack-off-fist.
On Tuesday, the stupendously-behemoth-like defense contractor announced a profit of $882 million:

  • …or $2.15 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2008, a 12 percent increase from the second quarter of 2007 when the company recorded a profit of $778 million, or $1.82 per diluted share.
    Lockheed (NYSE: LMT), which has facilities in Dallas and Horizon City, Texas, attributes its solid performance in the quarter to strong activity in its aeronautics, electronic systems and information and global services sectors.
    Despite aeronautics sales falling 8 percent because of a drop in aircraft sales, the company’s overall net sales increased 4 percent from $10.6 billion in the second quarter of 2007 to $11 billion in the most recent quarter.

Although some might bluster a bit, the bottom line Decider George will get his shit.
Also from the Times report:

  • Many Congressional officials remain unconvinced. “Using F-16s this way is like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said one senior Senate Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the current negotiations.
    It remains unclear whether any lawmaker will block or postpone the financing, and risk harming relations with Pakistan any further.

Decider George has gotten the US into some bad, rotten water — the river of terror of no return.

Insolent Idiot: ‘It got drunk’

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During a crisis, or some calamity, under pressure to solve problems, a nation’s leader should be able to help, to solve and put together resources in efforts to figure out the next course of action.
Unless, of course, you’re an inbred, insolent idiot who knows no other life, but an existence of absolute elitism.

Decider George just may not only be by far the worst president in US history, but also an all-around shit-Head of a person.
According to HuffingtonPost, and later the New York Times, Decider George displayed the upper-class snob-life to a bunch of other upper-class snob-lives during a fund raiser in Houston.
Not knowing a sight-and-sound recording was being made, he laughingly blubbered a truth about himself and those who laugh with him in an attempt to explain away the approaching-catastrophic financial woes in the US.
According to the Times:

  • “Wall Street got drunk — that’s one reason I asked you to turn off your TV cameras,” the president said at the fund-raiser, held at a private home on Friday to benefit Pete Olson, the Republican who is challenging Representative Nick Lampson.
    “It got drunk, and now it’s got a hangover. The question is, How long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?”
    Despite the president’s request that those present turn their cameras off, his comments were captured on videotape that made its way into the hands of Miya Shay, a reporter at the Houston television affiliate of ABC.
    The video, which also included the newsy tidbit that Laura Bush had begun shopping for houses in Dallas, was broadcast by the station, and by Tuesday it was appearing as well on the Web site of The Houston Chronicle.
    …
    Mr. Bush, for one, might be expected to benefit from the buyers’ market, though he seemed to lament a belief that he would not.
    “And then we got a housing issue,” he said, “not in Houston — evidently not in Dallas, because Laura’s over there trying to buy a house today.”

Decider George really doesn’t make much sense.
Continuing from HuffingtonPost:

  • The crowd laughed, and Mr. Bush went on to explain that Mrs. Bush had drawn the line against living at the couple’s Crawford ranch.
    “I like Crawford,” he said. “Unfortunately, after eight years of asking her to sacrifice, I am no longer the decision maker. She’ll be deciding.”
    There was no word from the White House on Tuesday about what kind of home the Bushes had their eyes on. But in Houston, Mr. Bush said he had offered his wife some guidance: “I did tell her, I said: ‘Honey, we’ve been on government pay now for 14 years. Go slow.’ ”

Reportedly, the YouTube version of the event has been shut down, but one can get a look-see at the ABC News site here.

Watching it, however, can be tedious.
Decider George and all those assholes around him create one of those rare, but unfortunate incidents in which someone can hurt your feelings and really piss-you-off, both at the same time — ex-wives can do such.
The horror of watching an elite pack of people laughing, and even snickering, at such cruel, sarcastic asides like, ‘Honey, we’ve been on government pay now for 14 years. Go slow,’ is that it tends to make one’s skin crawl — creates an image that one would never before imagine originating from the US back when it could claim to be America.
Sort of like watching those old color home movies made of Hitler and his Sunny days in the gardens, playing with dogs, children — life seemed sweet and swell.

Speaking of which, and although one would doubt the situation will emerge, Decider George and his cronies, including even those laughing with him at that creepy Houston fund-raiser, could have committed crimes against humanity.

Last week, the International Criminal Court in the Hague indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The oddly-correct historian Mark A. LeVine has a good take on the comparisons between our own Decider George and Sudan’s al-Bashir.
Bad tiding on boots on the ground:

  • When I was in Iraq in the late winter and early spring of 2004 I saw this clearly, and saw the already huge scale of the war crimes being committed systematically by US forces across the country.
    It was clear to most every Iraqi I know that the chaos being reaped by the US in Iraq was in fact deliberately sown by the US in order to create a situation that would make any US withdrawal almost impossible to pull off.
    As bad as the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths for which Bush—and along with him, the American people who elected him twice—are responsible is the fact that the invasion itself was a crime against humanity as it was a clear breach of the UN Charter, which prohibits invading other countries except when an attack on one’s sovereign territory is about to occur or has just occurred.
    Indeed, they, along with our torturing of prisoners, illegal secret renditions, and a host of other abuses, are also against US Federal Law.
    …
    At least in this imperfect world, Bush and the architects and executioners of the Iraq war can join Sudanese President Bashir in suffering the ignominy of being at-large international criminals.

Read all of LeVine’s most-excellent commentary here.

Insolence might have its just ends.

‘An Iraqi Vision’ — Obama on the Euphrates

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This sad, ugly Wide World of War on Terror has gone from real bad to a mounting realization of a coming catastrophic turn for the worse, even as Barack Obama trips through Afghanistan and Iraq, gaining seemingly popular support, as US warfare tactics cause more and more civilian deaths.

After all this at the pad of Iraq Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s:

  • In Baghdad, a red carpet with yellow trim was unfurled at 1:50 p.m. outside Maliki’s residence, located in a part of the residential compound of former president Saddam Hussein that was dubbed “Little Venice” because of its lush gardens and abundant canals, complete with paddling ducks.

Maliki’s shitstorm Saturday that Democrat presidential hopeful Obama had the plan for getting the US military out of the country, and even despite a kind of non-step-back step back Sunday on his comments, continued today.
From the Washington Post:

  • Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama conferred with senior Iraqi leaders, U.S. officials and military commanders Monday, as a spokesman for the Iraqi government declared that it would like U.S. combat forces to complete their withdrawal in 2010.
    The comments by spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh mark the second time in recent days that a senior Iraqi has endorsed a timetable for U.S. withdrawal that is roughly similar to the one advocated by Obama. Dabbagh suggested a combat force pull-out could be completed by the end of 2010, which would be about seven months longer than Obama’s 16-month formulation.
    Dabbagh made the statement following Obama’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has faced pressure from the White House in recent days to clarify published comments that he supported Obama’s 16-month plan.
    Dabbagh declared that his government was working “on a real timetable which Iraqis set” and the 2010 deadline was “an Iraqi vision.”
    “We can’t give any schedules or dates, but the Iraqi government sees the suitable date for withdrawal of the U.S. forces is by the end of 2010,” Dabbagh told reporters.

Of course, Decider George’s White House had to respond:

  • “We don’t think that talking about specific negotiating tactics or your negotiating position in the press is the best way to negotiate a deal,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, suggesting that Dabbagh was reponding to domestic pressure.

Dana, old gal, we’re not talking about “a deal,” but about the Iraqis giving your asshole of a boss the classic middle finger.
The Iraqis want the US military out and apparently the only way to do it is to perform a sort of speed-up-the-process act by bringing US politics into the picture.
Decider George, Jackboot John McCain, the Republican Party — all in one hellva mess.
And it couldn’t happen to a nicer-bunch-of-assholes.

The problem now is both conflicts — the fatal, dangerous and dumb-ass invasion of Iraq, and the original terror-war in Afghanistan — are going tube city mainly because of the collateral damage to civilians.
In Afghanistan, it’s the war from the air.
From the Air Force Times:

  • Air Force and allied warplanes are dropping a record number of bombs on Afghanistan targets.
    For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs — more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total — 3,572 bombs.
    …
    Information from the Air Force shows that in June warplanes released 646 bombs — the second-highest monthly total for Afghanistan or Iraq. The record was set in August 2007, when 670 bombs fell on Afghanistan.
    As high as those numbers are, they may understate the intensity of the combat.
    The statistics do not include cannon rounds shot by fighters or AC-130 gunships, Hellfire and other small rockets launched by warplanes, and assaults by helicopters.
    In close-quarter firefights where friendly soldiers could be wounded if bombs are used, cannon fire and missiles are often the preferred alternative.
    Inside Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, the Air Force keeps a squadron each of A-10 Thunderbolts and F-15E Strike Eagles. From outside of Afghanistan, the Air Force launches B-1B Lancers.
    Also flying over Afghanistan are remote-controlled MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, both able to attack targets, and AC-130 gunships.
    Foreign warplanes dropping bombs include French Mirage 2000 fighters and British Royal Air Force Harriers, typically flying out of Kandahar Airfield.
    For Air Force jets, the preferred bombs are laser-guided bombs and satellite-controlled Joint Direct Attack Munitions.
    The most frequently used bombs are the 500- and 2,000-pound satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions and 500-pound laser-guided Paveway bombs.
    Unguided bombs sometimes are used, typically when the target is a safe distance from coalition troops and civilians.

And with all that killing pieces of metal flying and bombing and scattering all over the place, a lot of regular-kind-of-people are going to get killed.

  • U.S.-led troops and Afghan forces killed nine Afghan police Sunday, calling in air strikes and fighting on the ground for four hours after both sides mistook the other for militants, Afghan officials said.
    In a separate incident, NATO said it accidentally killed at least four Afghan civilians Saturday night.
    A NATO soldier also was killed in the east.
    The two cases of accidental killings could further undercut popular support for the government and foreign forces operating here.
    President Hamid Karzai has pleaded with the U.S. and other nations fighting resurgent militants to avoid civilian casualties.
    In the western province of Farah near the Iranian border, a convoy of foreign forces showed up in Anar Dara district and clashed with Afghan police, killing nine of them, said provincial Deputy Governor Younus Rasuli.
    …
    In eastern Paktika province, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said it killed at least four civilians Saturday night when its troops fired two mortar rounds that landed nearly half a mile short of their target.
    NATO said it was investigating whether three other civilians also were killed in the Barmal district.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Iraq:

  • The US military said it shot two armed men and later found out they were both related to the governor.
    Governor Hamad al-Qaisi’s brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Saad al-Qaisi, said American troops stormed a family house in the town of Beiji, where the governor’s son Hussam and his cousin were staying.
    “They shot dead Hussam and wounded three others. This is barbaric and inhuman,” he said.
    …
    A statement from the US military said its forces had wounded and captured an al-Qaeda financer in the house.
    “As they entered the target building, coalition forces encountered two armed men. Perceiving hostile intent … they shot and killed the men. It was subsequently determined that the two … were related to the governor,” the statement said.
    Local officials said Governor al-Qaisi had cut short a visit to Turkey because of the shooting.

As the US crawls out of Iraq, troops will be slowly be transferred to Afghanistan, but it may be too little too late.

Unraveling: ‘We’re Coitus’

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An impatient sun is setting on the deeds and life of the US of A.

In the September of his reign as leader of the whole, wide world, Decider George’s antics have begun to catch up with reality and it scares the shit out of even little kids.
He will carry a legacy of fear — pissed-off fear — far into whatever kind of future is out there.

Last Wednesday, during one of Decider George’s T-ball games at the White House, a little girl became so frightened in getting so near this social-cretin of a president, she ran away.

  • As Bush attempted to offer Emily a baseball, she became spooked by either the president or the chipmunk mascot that was standing several feet away on the other side of the president.
    Emily, who appeared to be crying, first attempted to hang back and hide behind the brim of her baseball cap, then succeeded in pulling her hand out of the grasp of the man who was leading her forward and dashed away through a gap in the fence and lost herself in the audience.

A lot of US peoples are like Emily — they would like to run away from what Decider George has done this past near-eight years and lose themselves in the audience.

And now the horrible mis-adventures in the Middle East are coming to an anti-conclusion for this administration.
In reports yesterday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told German magazine Der Spiegel the US needs to leave Iraq now, if not sooner.
Nouri also mentioned that someone has the best plan to do just that: “US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time-frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

What the livin’ hell?
What’s Decider George to do?
First and foremost is incompetence, according to ABC News, as a West Wing staffer alerted reporters to Maliki’s statement:

  • The White House this afternoon accidentally sent to its extensive distribution list a Reuters story headlined “Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan – magazine.”
    …
    The White House employee had intended to send the article to an internal distribution list, ABC News’ Martha Raddatz reports, but hit the wrong button.
    The misfire comes at an odd time for Bush foreign policy, at a time when Obama’s campaign alleges the president is moving closer toward Obama’s recommendations about international relations — sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, discussing a “general time horizon” for U.S. troop withdrawal and launching talks with Iran.

And Jackboot John McCain?
If Arizona senator ever had a brain he left it in Hanoi.

This from Marc Ambinder at Atlantic magazine:

  • “His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out,” said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The military says ‘conditions based’ and Maliki said ‘conditions based’ yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.”
    An Obama official, also speaking on background, asks:
    “So given that al-Maliki said today that it’s time for an official timetable and that Obama “is right when he talks about 16 months,” will McCain honor that commitment and call for withdrawal or change his position that we should leave Iraq if asked?”

And also this from Ambinder on the same subject:

  • This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq’s Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there’s no wiggle room or fudge factor.
    This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what’s left to argue? to argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing.
    Obviously, our national interests aren’t equivalent to Iraq’s, but… Maliki isn’t listening to the generals on the ground…but the “hasn’t been to Iraq” line doesn’t work here.
    So how will the McCain campaign respond?
    (Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, “We’re fucked.”
    No response yet from the McCain campaign, although here’s what McCain said the last time Maliki mentioned withdrawal: “Since we are succeeding, then I am convinced, as I have said before, we can withdraw and withdraw with honor, not according to a set timetable. And I’’m confident that is what Prime Minister Maliki is talking about, since he has told me that for many meetings we’’ve had.”
    Will Maliki retract his words?

Only time will tell.
And yes, the GOP is fucked, but because of Decider George, the whole, wide world is fucked.

‘Grandiose’ Eagle Pull

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And this morning from the Germans via Reuters:

  • Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.
    In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.
    “U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
    …
    Asked if he supported Obama’s ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.
    “Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.”
    …
    “The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn’t,” Maliki told Der Spiegel.

Ah, Nuri, but is, yes it is — to Decider George and Dufus Dick Cheney.
And really, really bad for Jackboot John McCain.
Oil, how the livin’ hell will they get that oil?
And to seemingly make matters worse, Obama is now in Afghanistan for a tour and will move on to Iraq this weekend.
Timing is everything, as the jokesters say.

Yesterday, Decider George let his own shit hit the fan.
Instead of a “timetable” for getting US GIs out of Iraq, Decider George decided on another term: “time horizon,” which makes it easier for everyone in the White House to swallow:

  • The decision, reached during a video-conference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks the culmination of a gradual but significant shift for the president, who has adamantly fought — and even ridiculed — efforts by congressional Democrats to impose what he described as artificial timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces.
    …
    In a statement issued yesterday, after the conversation between Bush and Maliki, the White House went further than it has in previous official statements to indicate that it shares that expectation.
    “In the area of security cooperation, the president and the prime minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals,” the statement said. It said those goals include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and “the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

The point being the Iraqis want the US to get out as soon as possible.
From the Washington Post article:

  • But Sadiq Rikabi, a senior political adviser to Maliki, said in an interview that negotiators were still hashing out the details of troop cuts. The Iraqi government, he said, wants specific time-lines governing different stages of what will eventually become a full U.S. withdrawal of combat forces.
    “There are two principles that determine the military relationship: no permanent bases and no permanent existence,” Rikabi said. “In such a way, there should be a timetable for withdrawal.”

And from the New York Times:

  • In Baghdad, a member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party, Ali al-Adeeb, said the withdrawal of American and other foreign forces was fundamental to an accord.
    “The Iraqi government considers the determination of a specific date for the withdrawal of foreign forces an important issue to deal with,” he said. “I don’t know what the American side thinks, but we consider it the core of the subject.”
    …
    Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts who has held hearings on the legality of the agreement the administration is seeking, said that “a timetable with specific dates is critical,” calling the White House’s time horizon “very vague and nebulous.”
    He welcomed the pending agreement as “far less grandiose than what was initially articulated,” but said he remained concerned about the legal authority allowing American military operations in Iraq once the United Nations mandate expired on Dec. 31 of this year.

Can the US get its shit out in a short space?
Last September, the Center for American Progress issued a report authored by Lawrence Korb and others detailing a 12-month time-frame for redeployment from Iraq. The report shows that “it is possible to conduct an orderly and relatively complete redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq in roughly a year…”

  • During [a 10 to 12 month] time-frame, the military will not replace outgoing troops as they rotate home at the end of their tours and will draw down force and equipment levels gradually, at a pace similar to previous rotations conducted by our military over the past four years. According to a U.S. military official in Baghdad involved in planning, a withdrawal could take place safely in this time period.
    …
    The report states that the U.S. “clearly wants to remove all equipment of value or sensitive nature from Iraq as it withdraws, but it does not need to remove every nut and bolt belonging to the U.S. government.”

Horror time for Decider George and his oil-sucking criminal minions.
Just as tomdispatch noted nearly three years ago:

  • It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country.

Plans change.

Darkness in the Footlights

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One definition-aspect of the word, theatrical, is deeds marked by pretense or artificiality of emotion.
Our entangled mess of a planet nowadays is becoming a very-astutely-written piece of theater, a play of many acts and performers — the plot is of a horrible, anti-tragicomedy.
And the end is as the French do, ‘finis.’

In this current and certain piece of time, many different, and mostly-terrifying, events have appeared to have come together to form a much-horrible whole.
Nearly all the global problems — climate change (much-more rapid and strange than we all suspect), food shortages, high energy costs — are caused by man, some more recent, others going back hundreds of years.
And just about all of the problems facing the US this summer have either been instigated or exacerbated by one man — Decider George.

Of course, Decider George makes the decisions retched up by his vice president, Dufus Dick Cheney, and the two perform as a pair of psychotic twins — impaired reality testing; unable to distinguish personal, subjective experience from the reality of the external world — characters usually found in John Carpenter movies.

Even catfish farms are feeling a literal draining in Decider George’s energy program, which even near-moron New York Times‘ op-ed writer Tom Friedman calls “massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy…”
And on climate control, Decider George both blows and sucks.
Yesterday, the EPA stood on its feet, belatedly, and reported global warming is a real-enough kind of thing and will bring on many changes — none of it real good.
And this after Decider George acted the complete arrogant, don’t-give-shit asshole at the G8 summit in Japan last week — a departing quip both cruel and dark:

  • The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
    He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Grinning more like a psychotic, born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-the-ass kind-of-guy, a true performance.

Decider George’s total karma is absurd-theatrical, highly seasoned with an all-hat-no-cattle girth of the non-cow-puncher asshole.
In this theatre, however, the absurdity is darkness and death.
He’s guilty not just for two catastrophic wars, an economy in a toilet that’s about to be flushed and for governing without any regard whatsoever to the Constitution, but for the horrific image the US now has abroad.
He’s even part of theatre in Gaza:

  • Brandishing “the sword of Islam”, a Palestinian boy stabbed U.S. President George W. Bush to death in a new puppet show for children aired by Hamas-owned television in the Gaza Strip.
    “You are a criminal, Bush, a despicable man. You made me an orphan. You deprived me of everything,” said the hand-held puppet, representing a child and accusing the U.S. president of killing his family in Iraq and in Gaza in collusion with Israel.
    The programme was broadcast on Hamas’s al-Aqsa television, which has used puppets and cartoon characters in the past to illustrate the Islamist movement’s battle against Israel and opposition to U.S. support for the Jewish state.

Above it all is the criminal, inhumane use of torture — Theatre over-watched by the Marquis de Sade .
A dark, dark horror which signaled the end of the US as America.

Writing about all of Decider George’s shit does sometimes require a creative, theatrical insight to be able to piece all the ugly parts together.
One of our most favorite opinionators on this is the New York Times‘ Frank Rich, a Times theatre critic for 14 years and a columnist for the newspaper since 1994.
Whether it’s Barack Obama and race or Hillary Clinton and gender or the continuous mischief of Decider George, Rich has an unique voice in laying open was really bare beneath.
And it has the sound of the theatre.

Last Sunday, Rich’s column was about torture and a new book about inside dealings in the White House in approving the use of torture in the lubricious Global War on Terror.
He compared The Final Days, about Dick Nixon’s last few months in office, and The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War On Terror Turned into a War On American Ideals by freelance investigative writer, Jane Mayer.

Read Rich’s full piece here.
Some snippets:

  • “The Final Days” was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away.
    The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat.
    Her book “The Dark Side” connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.
    Nixon parallels take us only so far, however.
    “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher.
    Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless.
    Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.
    On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. Bush’s 2005 proclamation that “we do not torture” was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that “there is no longer any doubt” that “war crimes were committed.” Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.
    …
    In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001.
    Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.”
    By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America.
    But there was no urgency at the top.
    Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”
    …
    In last Sunday’s Washington Post, the national security expert Daniel Benjamin sounded an alarm about the “chronic” indecisiveness and poor execution of Bush national security policy as well as the continuing inadequacies of the Department of Homeland Security.
    Mr. Benjamin must feel a sinking sense of déjà vu.
    Exactly seven years ago in the same newspaper, just two months before 9/11, he co-wrote an article headlined “Defusing a Time Bomb” imploring the Bush administration in vain to pay attention to Afghanistan because that country’s terrorists “continue to pose the most dangerous threat to American lives.”

How bad does it go?
Mayer held a question-and-answer session last week with Scott Horton at Harpers magazine:

  • Horton — Reports have circulated for some time that the Red Cross examination of the CIA’s highly coercive interrogation regime—what President Bush likes to call “The Program” — concluded that it was “tantamount to torture.”
    But you write that the Red Cross categorically described the program as “torture.”
    The Red Cross is notoriously tight-lipped about its reports, and you do not cite your source or even note that you examined the report.
    Do you believe that the threat of criminal prosecution drove the Bush Administration’s crafting of the Military Commissions Act?
    Mayer — Activists will be angry at me for saying this, but as someone who has covered politics in Washington, D.C., for two decades, I would be surprised if there is the political appetite for going after public servants who convinced themselves that they were acting in the best interests of the country, and had legal authority to do so.
    An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.
    …
    Before September 11, 2001, these extreme political positions would not have stood a change of being instituted — they would never have survived democratic scrutiny.
    But by September 12, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were extraordinarily empowered. Political opposition evaporated as critics feared being labeled anti-patriotic or worse.
    It’s a familiar dynamic in American history — not unlike the shameful abridgement of civil liberties represented by FDR’s internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.
    …
    Helgerson’s 2004 report had been described to me as very disturbing, the size of two Manhattan phone books, and full of terrible descriptions of mistreatment.
    The confirmation that Helgerson was called in to talk with Cheney about it proves that–as early as then–the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The Program.
    …
    One of the strongest quotes in the book, I think, comes from Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, former counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, and a historian who teaches at the University of Virginia.
    He suggests in time that America’s descent into torture will be viewed like the internment of the Japanese, because they happened for similar reasons.
    As he puts it, “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”

So check out the insane, tortured expression on the face of Decider George.

Afghan Denial: ‘No disregard’

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Another lost opportunity for Decider George.
Even as he holds out a shocking, back-stabbing fig leaf to Iran, the original intent with the late-great Global War on Terror in Afghanistan is going to shit in a wire basket.

Just in the last few days, the situation on the ground there has quickly quick-sanded into a too-little-too-late kind of thing with the US-led coalition on the road to a major setback at best, and a full, pell-mell retreat at worst.
While US eyeballs have been focused on Iraq, and now are more-focused on the freakin’ economy and the freakin’ banks, the Afghan war has slowly deteriorated, bleeding the so-called ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the indigenous peoples completely dry.
As the developments worsen comes the modern military’s adage in handling an insurgency — If ya can’t beat ‘em on the ground, bomb the shit out of ‘em from the air.

And lately a number of weddings have been so interrupted.
Read tomdispatch‘s most-excellent analysis here.

And the killing of these indigenous peoples continues because there seems to no other way.
The Russians in their own version of the US-disaster in Vietnam ended up bombing the livin’ shit out of everything and everybody in Afghanistan before they packed it in and departed. They were there more than a decade.

Yesterday the plot thickened.
A US bombing raid in western Afghanistan killed more civilians, this time even tribal leaders.

  • Dozens of Afghan civilians have been killed during aerial bombing by US forces in the western province of Herat, tribal elders say.
    They said an important tribal elder was among the dead in Shindand district.
    …
    They said a large number of civilians had been killed in aerial attacks from midnight until 1000 local time.
    There were also unconfirmed reports of demonstrations beginning against Afghan security checkpoints.
    …
    A Nato spokesman confirmed there had been an operation in the region of Parmagan village and said: “All indicators were that it had been successful with a number of insurgents killed and no reports of any civilian casualties.”

Afghans are pissed at the continuous “...no reports of any civilian casualties.”
In country, foreign troops are being regarded as villains.

  • “Such acts provoke public hatred towards internal and foreign forces and force people to join the enemy who encourages them to carry out terrorist and suicide attacks,” said the state-run Hewad
    First, Afghan officials say, US aircraft killed 15 civilians in the northeast on July 4, then just three days later, hit a wedding in the east, killing 47, mostly women and children.
    “The Americans will soon face new resistance with new motives if they continue such operations and do not care even a little about the lives of the people,” the state-run daily Anis said.
    While the US military first of all denied civilians had been hit, then launched what is likely to be a lengthy investigation, most Afghans have already made up their minds.

Across the country, in northeastern Afghanistan, where Taliban fighters stormed a US outpost this past weekend, killing nine US GIs, NATO authorities reported on Wednesday a coalition withdrawal from the area:

  • U.S. troops have pulled out of a remote outpost in northeastern Afghanistan, NATO-led security force said on Wednesday, three days after Taliban militants tried to overrun the base and killed nine U.S. soldiers.
    NATO played down the significance of the withdrawal, but Taliban militants are sure to claim victory in driving foreign forces out of the wooded valley, close to the Pakistani border.
    Taliban militants briefly breached the incomplete defences of the newly established base in the Wanat district of Kunar province on Sunday and hours of fierce fighting ensued that killed nine U.S. soldiers and many more insurgents.
    It was the biggest single loss of life for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since 2005.

And what did Decider George say about all this? — Of course, without wisdom or intelligence.
During a press conference Tuesday, he blubbered about how terrible terrorists are and how they kill innocents, but no sadness of those caught under a 500-pound bomb:

  • “And they have no disregard (sic) for human life. And it’s really important we succeed there, as well as in Iraq.
    We do not want the enemy to have safe haven — unless, of course, your attitude is, this isn’t a war, so if that’s the case, it wouldn’t matter whether we succeed or not.”

The man’s a full-blown turd of the worse kind — Self delusional.

‘I Shot My Dude’

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A little legal note in the shadows of Decider George’s Iraqi adventure.

  • Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, in a tape-recorded interview with a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent, said he and Sgt. Ryan Weemer were ordered by Sgt. Jose Nazario to kill the prisoners as the Marines swept through a neighborhood in Fallouja in late 2004.
    Several minutes of the tape were played at the hearing for Weemer, who faces murder and dereliction of duty charges. Nelson faces similar charges, and Nazario faces manslaughter charges in federal court in Riverside.
    …
    Nelson and Weemer, in their interviews, said that Nazario ordered the killings after he had radioed a platoon leader to report that they had taken four prisoners and was asked twice, “Are they dead yet?”
    …
    Nelson told the investigator that Nazario told him, “I’m not doing all this [expletive] by myself. You’re doing one and Weemer is doing one.”
    Nelson said that he watched in shock as Nazario shot a kneeling prisoner at point-blank range: “He hit the dude in the forehead, the dude went down and there was blood . . . all over his [Nazario's] boots.”
    …
    After seeing Weemer and Nazario shot prisoners, Nelson said he lost his reluctance to join in the killings. “I said [expletive] and I shot my dude.”

All this good stuff came out during a hearing yesterday in Camp Pendleton, the sprawling US Marine base in Southern California.
This case is just one of a bunch that has come out of the horror of the Iraqi war and displays clear evidence of what Decider George and his minions have created for US GIs — a nightmare, personality-altering environment.

Clusters Last Stand: Hypocrisy

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A shitload of stuff the US says and then does is an outright lie, or at best, a stance hidden behind a forest of double-standards.

Case in full point: Cluster bombs.
These little bits of long-term horror have been used repeatedly by all the world’s military since the Russians introduced the Germans to its capabilities in 1943.
Termed a ‘submuntion’ due it to being a second-tier explosive device, coming out of an original ‘munition,’ a cluster bomb can be fired from the ground or dropped from airplanes.
After discharge, the big mama munition break open in mid-air, releasing the submunitions and saturating an area that can be the size of several football fields. Anybody within that area, be they military or civilian, is very likely to be killed or seriously injured.

A side-effect is slaughter of the innocent as a good percentage of these so-called ‘submuntions’ do not denonate when originally used.
Although designed to explode upon impact, many do not, and thusly leave a fairly-large area literally riddled with unexploded ordnance waiting…

The US has always used cluster bombs, real big time in Southeast Asia:

  • The ICRC estimates that in Laos alone, nine to 27 million unexploded submunitions remain, and some 11,000 people have been killed or injured, more than 30 percent of them children.
    An estimate based on US military databases states that 9,500 sorties in Cambodia delivered up to 87,000 air-dropped cluster munitions.

And the little devils are back in the news again this week and the US is still playing a heavy-handed villain, deploying a hypocritical stance to keep these killing-field-makers on the market.
Current US Defense Chief Bob Gates (and who might end up being Obama’s defense chief, too!) has reportedly ordered the Pentagon to clean-up/improve cluster performance by 2018 to reduce the danger to civilians.

  • “The policy is that by 2018, we will procure cluster munitions that only have a proven dud rate of less than 1 percent, said a senior defense official, who asked not to be identified.
    …
    An international treaty that bans existing cluster munitions and requires the destruction of existing stockpiles in eight years was adopted May 30 by 111 countries, including U.S. allies. But the U.S., Russia and China have refused to join.
    Steve Goose, of Human Rights Watch, said the new U.S. policy was “too little, too late.”
    “Most key U.S. allies have already rejected cluster bombs because innocent civilians are killed and maimed, not only when the weapons are used, but also months and years after that.
    “Knowing this, how in good conscience can the U.S. wait 10 years to accept a lesser standard?” he said in a statement.

Yes, and the operative phrase? — “…in good conscience…”

Most of the civilized world — excluding the US, China and Russia — can see the problem here.
The UK was a latecomer signatory to the cluster-bomb treaty adopted in Dublin, Ireland, and the action must have miffed Decider George, who needs those kinds of weapons for his ludicrous, mega-dangerous-to-every-living-thing Wide World of War on Terror.
The treaty was signed despite “US efforts to undermine” the whole conference.

  • American officials are not attending the treaty talks but have lobbied hard in world capitals to undermine the treaty. Diplomats in Dublin say US Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice and even President George W. Bush have been telephoning their counterparts around the world to promote US positions.
    …
    The US won some concessions on the issue of “interoperability.”
    The draft treaty text contains a loophole in Article 21, allowing treaty signatories to “engage in military cooperation and operations with States not parties to this Convention that might engage in activities prohibited to a State party.”
    The negotiating states have insisted that the provision is needed for situations where the US might use cluster munitions against the wishes of its allies.
    But the wording is vague enough so as to allow states to assist the United States in operations where it uses cluster munitions.
    The US government has argued that prohibiting such assistance would have hindered humanitarian operations around the world. But identical provisions in the land-mines treaty have had no such effect in the 11 years since the treaty went into effect.

Just how hypocritical can one bunch of assholes be? — “…would have hindered humanitarian operations…”

And this a commentary from the UK’s Guardian last May:

  • Clusters, however, are still used in massive numbers.
    It is hard to imagine the deadly legacy of one million cluster duds hidden in the homes, gardens, and fields of southern Lebanon.
    I tiptoed through those terrifying booby-trapped killing fields in the course of investigations for Human Rights Watch.
    It will take years of work to clear the land of the bitter fruit of conflict.
    They maim and kill, but they also mean you cannot farm the land or walk the fields.
    Imagine if the green and pleasant pastures of England were suddenly off limits, the hospitals filled with injured, the morgues with the dead.
    And even when life started to turn around, the farmers had to sit idly by contemplating their unplanted fields, unable to make a living for fear of stepping on a hidden bomb.
    …
    I have to wonder if the members of the British delegation or their political masters would be comfortable with their children playing in the fields of southern Lebanon.
    I am scared to walk even in the cleared areas – and I am a grown-up with a soldier’s training.

Good personal perspective on cluster bombs — Read the entire piece here.

In this post-Soviet period of US history, hypocrisy appears to be the norm not the exception to policy toward people, places or things “not in the interest” of this country.
The US would cluster-bomb the living-shit out of Bosnia, but turned the other ass-cheek to the genocide in Rwanda.
And of course, Decider George and his military:

  • Pentagon officials have said cluster bombs save the lives of U.S. troops and have a legitimate role in its arsenal.
    “They provide distinct advantages against a range of targets, where their use reduces risks to U.S. forces and can save U.S. lives,” according to a Pentagon statement.

Save lives? Whose lives? Civilian lives?
A few US lives for a whole shitload of Other lives?

Hypocrisy toward the Other.

And this last month from The Independent Florida Alligator, the newspaper for the University of Florida — which we attended and in 1973 a young writer for the ‘Florida’ Alligator when it was booted from the Student Center and off campus for being too pushy and nosy, thus the ‘Independent’ in the current name — seemed to hit the cluster of hypocrisy right on:

  • For Russia, Pakistan and China, countries whose leaders have historically disregarded human rights and make no apologies about it, the decision not to sign this enlightened and humane treaty makes perfect sense.
    But for the U.S. and Israel to continuously rant about the depravity of “terrorists” while simultaneously reserving the right to use weapons which they know maim and kill almost exclusively civilians and children, brings a whole new depth to the word “hypocrisy.”
    Sadly, we have now lost all moral credibility in the eyes of the world community.
    We do not have the right to label any person, organization or state a “terrorist” until we actually walk the walk and start holding ourselves up to the same standards we so disingenuously demand of the rest of the world.

The US has lost the morals — as if ever had any.

True Liar

Filed Under Musings, Orwellian, Politics, War & Politics | Leave a Comment

Hats off to the most-excellent news site, thinkprogress.org for noting yesterday of Decider George’s blatant use of the most-forked of tongues.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blurted out some heavy words to a meeting of Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates Monday morning about how time is coming nigh for the US to gather up its shit and leave.
Nuri’s comments the first ever, at least in public anyway, about a withdrawal of US forces from his war-torn country.

  • “Today, we are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty,” Maliki told Arab ambassadors in blunt remarks during an official visit to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.
    “One of the two basic topics is either to have a memorandum of understanding for the departure of forces or a memorandum of understanding to set a timetable for the presence of the forces, so that we know (their presence) will end in a specific time.”
    Maliki was responding to questions from the ambassadors about the security negotiations with the United States. The exchange was shown on Iraqiya state television.
    …
    Maliki said the Iraqi and U.S. positions had gotten closer, but added “we cannot talk about reaching an agreement yet”. He said foreign forces would need Iraqi permission for many of their activities once the U.N. mandate ended.
    “This means the phenomena of unilateral detention will be over, as well as unilateral operations and immunity,” he said. Maliki did not clarify who the immunity referred to.

Although US officials poo-pooed the whole thing — the White House saying “these talks are not on a hard date for a withdrawal,” and over/or-down at the Pentagon, one military flak noted “timelines tend to be artificial in nature” — the chatter Tuesday from Maliki’s top security adviser, Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, was even more on point.

From always the informative Robert Dryfuss blog at thenation:

  • [UPDATE July 8: Rubaie was even stronger today: "There should not be any permanent bases in Iraq unless these bases are under Iraqi control. ... We would not accept any memorandum of understanding with (the US) side that has no obvious and specific dates for the foreign troops' withdrawal from Iraq."]

So there you have it and what’s going to happen now?
Iraq and the entire Middle East want the US gone.
The problem could be Decider George and the trainwreck of an administration.

And despite a new poll today from Opinion Research Corp. showing 68 percent of US respondents oppose the Iraq war, these negotiations between the US and the Iraqi national government are a linchpin in Decider George’s Oil for War.

So today another rejection of the withdrawal concept, this time from the US State Department:

  • “The US government and the government of Iraq are in agreement that we, the US government, we want to withdraw, we will withdraw. However, that decision will be conditions-based,” State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said.

Which brings us back around to Decider George’s forked tongue.
In a May 2007 press conference, he said withdrawal is most likely not going to happen, mainly because the Iraqis will not ask for it:

  • Q Thank you, Mr. President. You say you want nothing short of victory, that leaving Iraq would be catastrophic; you once again mentioned al Qaeda. Does that mean that you are willing to leave American troops there, no matter what the Iraqi government does? I know this is a question we’ve asked before, but you can begin it with a “yes” or “no.”
    THE PRESIDENT: We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.
    Q — catastrophic, as you’ve said over and over again?
    THE PRESIDENT: I would hope that they would recognize that the results would be catastrophic.
    This is a sovereign nation, Martha. We are there at their request. And hopefully the Iraqi government would be wise enough to recognize that without coalition troops, the U.S. troops, that they would endanger their very existence.
    And it’s why we work very closely with them, to make sure that the realities are such that they wouldn’t make that request — but if they were to make the request, we wouldn’t be there.

He lied twice: Once by not answering the damn question with a “yes” or “no” response, then blubbering the US invaded their country, destroyed its infrastructure and killed a million of its citizens “at the invitation of the Iraqi government,” which didn’t even exist five years ago.
Asshole!

Interesting how Decider George handles this horrible, reversal “they wouldn’t make that request…”

Oh, but they have, they really, really have.

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