Toe-Heeled America
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Interview of Seymour Hersh by Arabic daily, Asharq Al-Awsat, via AlterNet:
- I really believe something happened to America; after 9/11 we became a different country.
That is fine, presidents sometimes might want to do that, but my issue is how did Bush do it?
How did he beat the press?
How did he beat the military and Congress and turn everyone into a coward?
Why didn’t people stand up to him in this situation?
In other words, how fragile is the American constitution; it turns out that it is much more fragile than people think.
These are the questions.
Hersh was explaining how after Bush leaves office people might open up.
(Illustration found here).
And on journalism in the US:
- In America, it is collapsing.
Economically it’s a disaster.
I have an easy fix for the problems regarding reporting in America; I would get rid of 70 per cent of the editors.
You see it is always the more cautious people that get promoted and the more aggressive people who do not because they are harder to control.
Above and beyond that, the newspapers have been very slow in coping with the internet and we are dying.
One of the great things in America is the first amendment; we can publish any top secret document we can get, there is nothing like that in Britain or anywhere else.
Let us assume I obtain some highly sensitive material, It is my call whether to publish it or not. Of course, one wouldn’t want to jeopardize his colleagues or fellow Americans etc, but what I am saying is that we are failing despite this incredible press freedom.
Hersh is right.
In a new survey by Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the Internet has surpassed newspapers for news.
Via RawStory:
- Forty percent said they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007, and more than the 35 percent who cited newspapers as their main news source.
TV is still the top dog for most Americans:
- Seventy percent of the 1,489 people surveyed by Pew said television is their primary source for national and international news.
TV my ass, which leaves US peoples as ignorant as ever.
Oil Gone
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Life as we know it is coming to a quick, sure end.
A story this morning is disturbing:
- So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA (International Energy Agency) radically changed its assessment.
Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak.
In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as “doomsayers.”
Wrong!
The IEA apparently has the right to change its mind, especially if the facts present themselves.
And the world will be different very shortly.
(Illustration found here).
Now the shoe is on the other foot (sorry can’t help it):
- In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7 percent a year.
This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered.
But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7 percent, which means a much greater gap to fill.
…
More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers.
“Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”
These bland words reveal a major shift.
Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).
…
“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]“, he (Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook) replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”
Read all of this interesting piece at AlterNet.
Oil, oil, bye-bye!
Taliban Taunt — ‘Bring ‘em On’
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A war that just keeps on giving, and in lieu of current events, now the shoe could be on the other foot.
Five years ago, Decider George blubbered bring ‘em on like his ass was actually on the line — a big mouth that killed a lot of people.
Now Mullah Omar and his Taliban have regrouped their balls to also taunt out a dare, but in what could be some nasty real time.
(Illustration found here).
Two years prior to the baiting outburst, an expression he now regrets (see video here), the US invaded Afghanistan in hurried pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda crowd, being in protective care of the Omar’s Taliban.
Although supposedly the Taliban was routed late 2001 and a new government installed in Kabul, the entire operation was placed on the back burner while Decider George invaded Iraq, a move worse than worse.
Now seven years later, the Afghan war is going to shit and even a reported surge of some 30,000 more US troops hasn’t deterred Omar.
From Agence France-Presse last week:
- “They now want to send more troops to Afghanistan…. The Russians also sent that many troops but were badly defeated,” said the spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, referring to Moscow’s doomed decade-long occupation of Afghanistan.
“When the US increases its troop levels to that of the Russians, they will also be cruelly defeated,” warned Ahmadi, who claims to speak on behalf of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
“More troops — that means there will be more targets for the Taliban,” he said by telephone from an unknown location.
And from antiwar.com:
- “The current armed clashes, which now number into tens, will spiral up to hundred of armed clashes. Your current casualties of hundreds will jack up to thousand casualties of dead and injured,” said the statement, which was written in broken English and posted on a Web site Sunday that has previously carried militant messages.
…
In his statement, Omar also called on those Afghans who fought against Soviet troops in the 1980s to abandon their government jobs and join the ranks of the Taliban.
He also said that the idea of creating tribal militias in order to fight the Taliban and other insurgent groups in the country will not work.
“No Afghan will lower himself to such an irrational and insensitive position to fight against his own brothers for the interests of the invaders and lose his life and faith for … the pleasure of the invaders,” the statement said.
And WireDispatch:
- “Reconsider your wrong decision of wrong occupation, and seek a safe exit to withdraw your forces,” said the message, which the Taliban said came from Omar.
“If you leave our lands, we can arrange for you a reasonable opportunity for your departure,” he said, adding that the Taliban posed no harm to anyone in the world.
If the occupation persisted, “you will be defeated in all parts of the world … like the former Soviet Union”, Omar said.
The boy’s got guff.
A commentary in GulfNews yesterday noted not only a stronger Taliban, but a revival of al-Qaeda as well.
- Al Qaida, having regrouped and expanded in Iraq, was wrong-footed by General David Petraeus’ ’surge’ and ‘awakening’ campaigns. Now battle-hardened and well trained fighters are migrating back to the organisation’s former safe haven in Afghanistan where they are protected by a resurgent Taliban, who control two-thirds of the country.
The renewed significance of Afghanistan in Al Qaida’s global jihad prospectus is signalled by the arrival there of ‘top brass’ leaders such as the former emir, Abu Ayoob Al Masri, whom many believed captured or killed in May 2008 but who resurfaced in the tribal area in the summer.
(Illustration found here).
The GulfNews column, written by Abdel Bari Atwan, Editor-in-chief of Al Quds Al Arabi pan-Arab daily newspaper, takes the position of history.
- Invasions of Afghanistan are doomed to failure by several insurmountable factors.
The terrain is extremely mountainous and hostile, familiar to the insurgents but impenetrable by outside forces — exactly the scenario that allowed Algeria’s National Liberation Front to defeat the French in 1962.
The indigenous population is equally hostile and the majority Pashtun are notoriously fierce, bloodthirsty warriors who have a history of setting aside their tribal differences to create a united force to repel invaders.
…
Let us look at the Soviet experience a little closer: The Red Army invaded in 1979 and established a puppet regime (first, in 1980, under Karmal then, in 1986, under Najibullah); they faced the unexpected and rapid formation of a hugely successful insurgency composed of international Mujaheddin which dragged them into a prolonged war of attrition; the Soviet economy, and empire, crumbled under the pressure of unmanageable military and security costs.
Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar have been there before.
The world has been there before, except the present situation sees the additional challenge to the current invaders, US-led Nato, of the insurgency’s rapid spread into Pakistan.
As long ago as 1996, when I interviewed him in Tora Bora, Bin Laden told me that his strategy was to “bleed the US to the point of bankruptcy” with prolonged wars of attrition on several fronts.
…
For two centuries, Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperialist ambition.
As the US and British economy face meltdown, are Obama and (UK’s Gordon) Brown really in any position to change history?
Yes, the big question.
‘Two Feet in One Shoe’ or A Cordwainer’s Delight
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Bloomberg reported Friday a certain Turkish shoe is flying off the shelf (h/t TPM):
- Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999.
…
“We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy,” he said. “We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising.”
(Illustration of Armen Eloyan’s ‘Two Feet In One Shoe’ found here).
The shoe maker, Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., is based in Istanbul and markets the brown, thick-soled “Model 271,” the type used by Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi to try and pop Decider George in the face last week — he missed — all over including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt.
Just from Iraq, 120,000 of the shoes were ordered last week.
Ramazan Baydan, who owns the company, said the model may soon be renamed “The Bush Shoe” or “Bye-Bye Bush.”
Sounds about right.
Al-Zaidi reportedly has said I’m sorry to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, but not to Decider George:
- “In a letter to Iraqi prime minister, Muntadhar al-Zaidi has only apologized to Nuri al-Maliki himself,” Fardanews reported, citing comments by an Iraqi source familiar with the case.
“He said that he felt no remorse for throwing his shoes at the ‘Great Satan’, George Bush, and added that he would repeat his actions if he sees him again, because Bush’s forces have killed many of Iraq’s children,” added the source.
…
The official also said that in a written statement to the judge, al-Zaidi had said that he expected to be killed by the Bush’s body guards after hurling the first shoe.
“It seemed that his bodyguards were not on full alert at the time, that was how I managed to throw the second shoe,” the official quoted al-Zaidi as saying.
Shoe tossing is apparently more than meets the eye.
Memory
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During the daily US State Department press briefing Thursday, Sean McCormack said the infamous shoe-throwing incident last weekend will be eclipsed by other more-important shit 50 years from now.
An image, though, for pure foolish failure: A shoe-gram for the last eight years.
(Illustration found here).
Also a pure snapshot of twisted, historical logic. (h/t: ThinkProgress).
- McCormack: Well, look, you guys make decisions about what you cover.
I suspect — just a guess — that three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now that the fact of the President making that visit under those circumstances will probably overshadow any memory of this particular gentleman and what he did.
Q: That’s a pretty – that’s a pretty interesting prediction.
McCormack: Come back to me in 50 years; we can talk about it.
Q: Would you care to bet? (Laughter.)
McCormack: Try and collect on it 50 years from now. (Laughter.)
Although Muntadar al-Zaidi’s attempt to knock Decider George out of the box is really, really funny, the actual reality of the man and the entire Iraq affair is way-more than deadly serious.
And we’re not talking about 50 years from now, but in the right here and now.
In a Pew Research survey published Thursday nailed Decider George with shoe-leathered distaste:
- Nearly two-thirds (64%) say his administration will be remembered more for its failures than its accomplishments, and a plurality (34%) says Bush will go down in history as a poor president.
Fully 68% say they disapprove of Bush’s performance and most of those — 53% of the public — say they disapprove strongly.
That is the highest rate of strong disapproval measured by Pew surveys in Bush’s eight years in office.
If one looks hard at the stills/video of the shoe incident, Decider George and Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki appear like a couple of Marx Brothers, or a couple of dudes involved in a Laurel and Hardy routine, while at the same time, the whole episode seems a dream, not really happening, and Decider George isn’t ducking, and then ducking again — that flat, dumb-ass expression on his face — and we wait for the little, ‘That’s All Folks,’ to end an eight-year horror-tune.
If the one shit fits, try the other for size.
Dangerous Shoe
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Another observation from the UK’s Patrick Cockburn on last weekend’s shoe-throwing-at-Decider George incident and how these press conferences, media glad-handing photo ops can be highly misleading.
Even with all the Iraqi public support for the shoe bomber.
- I used to comfort myself with the thought that these official visits did little harm even if they did no good.
Iraqis were all too aware of the grim reality of their lives to be taken in by official posturing.
After five years of war, American voters have seen too many claims of success in Iraq deflated by news of fresh slaughter to be deceived into thinking that the war was being won.
In retrospect I think I was over-optimistic: The foreign leaders who visited the Green Zone or other US or British military camps came away with the dangerous idea that they knew something about Iraq.
They would depart not realising that the most important political fact was that the majority of Iraqis detested the US-led occupation whatever they thought of Saddam Hussein.
Even the foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, widely seen as pro-American called the occupation, “the mother of all mistakes.”
This explains the popular enthusiasm for Mr Zaidi on display in Baghdad yesterday.
Read Cockburn’s piece here.
‘War Dog’
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War correspondents are a relatively new entity on history’s battlefields, only since the middle of the 19th century have these adrenaline-driven reporters been around to point out foolish, fatal horrors of war.
In the Crimean War (1853-1856), William Howard Russell is credited with being the world’s first battlefield reporter.
Others followed, such as Winston Churchhill, H. H. Munro (Saki), Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace, Ernest Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh, who crafted their literary ability and knowledge of human nature to depict man-made terror.
A job always needed.
(Michael Ware image found here).
“I’m a war dog,” says Michael Ware from a profile this month in Men’s Journal.
Ware has covered Iraq for CNN since the beginning.
He’s been kidnapped, thought dead, interviewed insurgents, gone under the gun with the grunts, lived an environment those back in the USA could never understand, or come to even appreciate.
Also a bit of a celebrity, especially after he flung it with CBS hottie war reporter Lara Logan last summer, Ware is considered a topnotch journalist, but so addicted to the furnace of Iraq, being home is hard.
In the Journal story:
“After seven straight years, you’re always hyper-vigilant, always on alert. You become conditioned to a state of being where everything is a threat and it’s hard to turn that off; that becomes your normal. There’s an old cliché about the legendary war correspondent who comes home to find he has no wife or many ex-wives, no kids or kids who won’t talk to him, who has no tapestry to his life. At some point you have to consciously reclaim your life.”
Covering the Iraqi war, though, make make a meat grinder out of dog’s ear.
Since the invasion, 265 journalists have been killed in Iraq.
Sixty-nine correspondents were killed during WWII, 17 in Korea and 63 killed in Vietnam, according to Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan free speech advocacy group.
The toll is slowing, seemingly, as a report this week notes 95 newsmen covering various wars worldwide have been killed in 2008, down 20 from last year — 15 killed in Iraq, a drastic decrease from 2007’s 50.
Although Baghdad is still considered mega-dangerous for journalists, according to the report, Asia as a region is the most hazardous, 30 killed there in less than a year — India/Pakistan and the never-ending insurgency in the Philippines make it so.
And despite the shoe-throwing incident this past weekend, news reporters in country and stories from Iraq have been reduced this year and the conflict — and there is a conflict there, no doubt about it, SOFA or not — placed on the back burner, first to a bizarre presidential election, and then to a bizarre melt-downing economy.
Still dying in Iraq, though, with 32 killed Wednesday and 66 wounded, from small arms fire to suicide bombers — and northeast of Baghdad authorities are working a grave site, where so far 87 bodies have been unearthed, including 20 in less than a week, with 10 or more women and children among the total.
Reporting carnage as it occurs takes a different set of intestines.
From NBC’s Martin Fletcher on reporting conflict: “But if you ask most war correspondents, cameramen, etc. how they last so long, many, if they’re truthful, which is unlikely, would reply, ‘Oh, no problem, a combination of drink, drugs, divorce, depression,’ which I notice here all begin with D, as does death.
What keeps me going? I don’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or get depressed. I have no idea why I am so unaffected by all I have seen, although my wife is sure I’m simply suppressing it all.”
Likewise from NBC’s kid-looking Richard Engel, who chronicled his own intense war-coverage in War Zone Diary, which displays some mean urban warfare.
Engel from an interview in the Washington Post: “It’s horrible,” Engel says. “I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies — rotting bodies, bodies buried in shallow graves. One time I watched a dog carry a severed human head in its mouth. You’re smelling bodies, you’re seeing people who are so angry and insanely distraught. The people who are being killed are too old, too stupid, too poor, too young or too weak, socially or otherwise, to leave.”
War correspondents, beyond the danger, can make an immeasurable difference.
The above-mentioned Russell once told his editor, “Am I to tell these things or hold my tongue?” as he uncovered terrible incompetence and swaggering-jingle-but-no-spurs bluster from British commanders during the Crimean fiasco — the little war of The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Russell also attended the US Civil War and once again didn’t hold his tongue: After describing the Battle of Bull Run as an Union defeat/retreat, he was promptly placed on the North’s shit list. (Russell image and more info found here).
The Vietnam War changed the US and journalism, especially war reporting, “when correspondents concentrated on more than the pathological madness and savagery that accompany the call to arms.”
Great pieces, truth-told came from the Vietnam era.
In an American Journalism Review review of the book, Reporting Vietnam:
- Nowhere is the fruitlessness more achingly visible than in the thoughts of the U.S. soldiers themselves.
In a poignant set of letters home quoted in U.S. News & World Report, Air Force pilot Jerry Shank wrote in January 1964:
“If we keep up like we are going, we will definitely lose. I’m not being pessimistic. It’s so obvious. How our government can lie to its own people–it’s something you wouldn’t think a democratic government could do.” Shank died in combat about two months later.
The slaughter in Vietnam continued for another NINE years, although war reporters kept screaming the obvious.
In Iraq, the media is a non-indicted co-conspirator.
During the run-up to war (see Judith Miller) the mainstream media was busting a gut for battlefield footage — cheer-led by a drove of retired military types as TV analysts — and helped Decider George in his quest for infamy.
TV has had a problem covering Iraq.
As another war correspondent and probably the very-best on Iraq, UK print journalist Patrick Cockburn noted in a piece last year, Iraq is unique.
- Iraq has become almost impossible to cover adequately by the old system of foreign correspondents, cameraman or woman, and crew. It is simply too dangerous for a foreigner to move freely around Baghdad and the rest of the country. It is bad enough for print journalists like myself but cameramen, by the nature of their trade, have to stand in the open and make themselves visible.
…
Iraq is worse than previous wars.
The Sunni insurgents kill or kidnap cameramen just as they do any foreigner. They regard an Iraqi cameraman as a possible spy. Important events now go unrecorded in a way that has not been true of any other recent conflict.
Even Logan, now promoted to CBS chief foreign affairs correspondent, believes US TV coverage of the Iraqi war is so bad, as she told Jon Stewart, and had to depend on it for news, “I’d just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts.” (See the video here).
Iraq has been a watershed event on many levels, from the fall of the America experience, to carnage galore.
And back again to the Men’s Journal profile of Michael Ware:
- Explaining why he first wanted to become a war reporter, Ware mentions an Australian cameraman named Neil Davis, whose interviews he used to listen to as a child.
Davis is famous for shooting footage of a North Vietnamese tank running through the presidential palace in Saigon; he’s also known for filming his own death during a 1985 coup in Bangkok.
Among his maxims was that it’s one thing to film a soldier firing his weapon, but it’s a whole other thing to shoot the expression on his face as he does it.
“If you think about it, to get that expression on his face, what do you have to do?” Ware asks.
“You have to break from cover and expose yourself. You have to get in front of the man who is shooting and being shot at.
Because that’s where the story is, in that face.”
And in that facial expression lies the dogged terror of war.
Preparatory Beware: Info from Liars and Incompetents
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Advice from fabricators and twisters of truth.
The current White House people have produced “contingency plans” for President-Elect Obama in case some emergency might quickly pop up in the first few weeks of his administration, which in turn, creates the silly scenario of actually taking serious the managing director of the White Star Line.
(Illustration found here).
Lightning yes!
And with just two words: Katrina and Iraq.
One here, one there: So completes the entire emergency-briefing situation — thank-you for attending.
Despite all the blustering of a changed world since Clinton, and the noted seemingly-friendly exchanges between Obama’s camp and Decider George’s crew, the last few lines in the Times story tells the tale.
Bad juju:
- And there are things that cannot be put in a briefing or memorandum.
James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said much of the apparatus of government would know what to do in the event of a crisis.
The real test for Mr. Obama will be projecting leadership.
“For a president thinking about crisis management,” Mr. Carafano said, “the most important thing is not decision making, it’s public relations.”
Same shit, different mouth.
Outta Iraq!
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Under the newly-approved SOFA arrangement in Iraq, US troops have to be out by 2011.
This dovetails with President-Elect Obama’s 16-month commitment to pull the plug on the Iraqi misadventure, but the way things happen, this may or may not be the reality.
Decider George’s Middle East entanglements leave a narrow window of opportunity to get the US military presence out of the country in s short space — US GIs have to withdraw to its bases by next summer.
(Illustration found here).
US peoples, however, want out of Iraq.
From the Washington Post this morning:
- Despite growing perceptions of progress, most Americans want U.S. troops out of Iraq.
The poll found that seven in 10 Americans think Obama should stick to his plan to withdraw most U.S. forces within 16 months, although there is some division about how quickly he should move on that promise.
A majority of those who say the war is not worth its costs want Obama to focus on the pullout immediately, while those who support the war think he should move more slowly, if at all.
…
Public views about Iraq are central to assessments of Bush’s job performance and his legacy.
From the outset of the war, negative attitudes about the U.S. effort in Iraq have moved higher nearly in lock step with public disapproval of the president.
Today, 30 percent of Americans approve of how Bush is doing his job; 68 percent disapprove.
Bush’s approval numbers are up somewhat from the fall presidential campaign, when they bottomed out at 23 percent in Post-ABC News polling, but he gets little direct credit for improved perceptions of the situation in Iraq now.
Bush has been below 50 percent in approval ratings for nearly four years, a record in presidential public opinion polls dating back 70 years.
The last time a majority called the war worth fighting was in September 2004.
Only time will tell.
Shoe Two
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As the UK prepares to remove its Iraqi operations out in a couple of months — in a “humiliating” withdrawal — Decider George’s last visit to that ruined country this past weekend windows the disaster this past near-eight years has been. From a UK (Scottish) commentary:
- We can ask, nevertheless.
What has it all been for? In one sense, it has been “for” £8 billion, officially, though the actual cost has undoubtedly been higher.
It has been “for” the loss of 177 Britons killed, thousands maimed or mentally scarred and countless — the armies still refuse to count — Iraqis dead.
The other reasons why, mutating with every phase of the disaster, are familiar now, perhaps too familiar. First, non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
Next, Saddam’s non-existent sponsorship of al Qaeda. Next, the duty to follow Washington’s lead without question, and maintain that old special relationship. Next, the moral obligation to enforce regime change — “rid the world of a dictator” — that Tony Blair had rejected, explicitly, in the Commons, when he was still talking up WMD.
(Illustration found here).
And on top of that, Decider George’s arrogant, don’t-give-shit attitude in an ABC News interview.
After he blubbers on awhile about his legacy, including the most-important FACT that al-Qaeda made Iraq the front-line of terror, interviewer Martha Raddatz corrected him:
- Raddatz: But not until after the U.S. invaded.
Bush: Yeah, that’s right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they’re going to take a stand.
So what? Asshole!
And on the shoe-flinging:
- Bush: At least that’s what they told me on the way out, that it’s a person who works in the Iraqi press, stands up and throws his shoe.
And it was amusing. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of weird things during my presidency and this may rank up there as one of the weirdest.
No, you shithead — the weirdest and worse is having your sorry ass in the White House for way, way too long.
Shoe fly!
Shoe and Awe
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Quick and forceful: Decider George dodged and ducked more than some footware today.
See the YouTube video here.
(Illustration found here).
Accordingly, one Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist with Egypt-based al-Baghdadia television network, the guy above with the shoe in his up-raised hand, threw both his footwear at Decider George this evening during a press conference in Baghdad.
I’ve watched the video several times (see HuffPost for more videos and links) and al-Zaidi didn’t hold back, he pitched one quick and hard, then in a seemingly fluent motion, whips off the other one, throws it forcefully right at Decider George’s mug.
The US president — in name only now — was in Baghdad to make whoopee on the SOFA arrangement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and he got a taste of how a lot of Middle Eastern peoples feel about the big-hat-no-cattle cowboy.
According to the Washington Post:
- Just after Bush finished his remarks and said “Thank you” in Arabic, an Iraqi journalist took off his shoes and threw them at Bush, one after the other.
The incident lent an air of chaos and farce to a trip intended to highlight improving security conditions in the war-torn country.
Throwing a shoe at someone is considered the worst possible insult in Iraq and is meant to show extreme disrespect and contempt.
When U.S. forces helped topple a statue of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein after rolling into Baghdad in April 2003, jubilant Iraqis beat the statue’s face with their shoes.
Reportedly, al-Zaidi screamed, “It is the farewell kiss, you dog,” before he started throwing shoes.
The horrible thing: al-Zaidi failed.
Farce, Marx Brothers and the black humor of MASH: Only if Decider George’s decisions had killed and ruined a shitload of people.
Warmongers, Inc.
Filed Under Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Even as the Pentagon is engaged in two badly-run wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and militarily involved all kinds of wars in all kinds of superfluous ways, the chief weapons merchant for the world in all these engagements is the one supposedly spreading democracy — the US.
Arming the planet keeps a certain part of the world’s economy surging.
(Illustration of Pablo Picasso’s ‘World Without Weapons‘ was found here).
According to the New America Foundation:
- The United States, which entered into over $23 billion in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreements in fiscal year (FY) 2007 and $32 billion in FY 2008 (see table 1), is the world’s largest arms supplier.
U.S. exports range from combat aircraft to Pakistan, Morocco, Greece, Romania, and Chile to small arms and light weapons to the Philippines, Egypt, and Georgia.
In 2006 and 2007, the United States sold weapons to over 174 states and territories, a significant increase from the beginning of the Bush administration when the number of U.S. arms clients stood at 123.
…
Thirteen of the top 25 U.S. arms recipients in the developing world in 2006/07 were either undemocratic governments or regimes guilty of major ongoing human rights abuses.
This is a one-third reduction in the number (18) of top U.S. recipients that fit these categories when we last surveyed these trends in 2005, but the number of such recipients contrasts sharply with the Bush administration’s pro-democracy rhetoric.
Although the administration’s motivations for arming these nations-protecting oil flows, supporting antiterrorism efforts, or promoting coalition partnerships in theaters of war-are not without merit, the rationales for making these sales and their effectiveness in achieving U.S. policy goals need to be reconsidered.
Will U.S. weapons supplied to Iraqi and Afghan forces end up in the right hands or disappear into local black markets where they could just as easily end up in the possession of anti-U.S. rebels, insurgents, and terrorists?
Has the U.S. decision to arm and support Ethiopia in its recent war against Somalia helped to stabilize or destabilize the Horn of Africa? These and other questions will be addressed as appropriate in the country profiles that follow.
…
All of this is not to say that arms transfers do not have security benefits, particularly in the realm of fostering military cooperation.
But the level and types of exports provided to specific countries need to be subjected to much more careful scrutiny, including consideration as to whether the same benefits might be obtained through nonmilitary forms of engagement.
War and more war.
President-Elect Obama are you paying attention?
keep looking »