Dismay-In-Chief
Filed Under Just Plain War, Lying, Politics, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
One despicable poll out Tuesday from the American Red Cross really, really reveals just how far the US war machinery has influenced its people, especially the young.
Nearly 3/5 youth (59%) – compared to 51% of adults – believe there are times when it is acceptable to torture the enemy.
More than 2/5 youth (41%) believe there are times when it is acceptable for the enemy to torture captured American prisoners, while only 30% of adults agree.
More than half of youth (56%) believe that there are times when it is acceptable to kill enemy prisoners in retaliation if the enemy has been killing American prisoners, while only 29% of adults agree.
When you use torture as part of your game plan, and then don’t prosecute US war criminals when all the horror comes to light then maybe one can not be surprised how this carries with the young — how this country’s future will be blighted.
George Jr. and his whole crowd, of course, are war criminals — proclaiming torture and using torture as a game plan of war — and when President Obama came into power he backed away from bringing these charges, making him an accessory after the fact and a major negative influence on this country’s future.
Most-likely the US people who are hurting the most right now are the people who not only voted for Obama, but actually took him at his word(s) circa 2007/2008.
One of the best, and most heartfelt examples of this let down was found this past weekend from a blogger with a handle of brooklynbadboy at Daily Kos reflecting pain and a not-so-happy future.
A couple of nuggets:
Instead of being the public leader, the transformational leader, that many of us expected, the leader he campaigned to be, he’s shrunk. \He’s just become another Washington insider playing the insider game. The insider game has him making choices between shutting down the government and stepping on the poor.
The insider game has him choosing between tax cuts for the wealthy or declaring war on the unemployed middle class.
The insider game has convinced him there is almost nothing he can do about the housing crisis.
The insider game has him appointing a corporate CEO who ships jobs overseas as the head of his domestic jobs council.
The insider game has him appointing the very same people who ran the economy into the ground as his principal economic advisers.
He told us of a Washington that was broken, but he was quite mistaken.
Washington works just fine.
Just not for regular people.
…
Lets face facts: fundamental change just isn’t going to happen by his doing.
He’s not that kind of guy, despite the high-flying rhetoric.
That is something we must live with, especially considering the alternatives.
For fear of what could come, he deserves to keep his job.
But if there is going to be any real change for the better in this country, it is going to have to happen in spite of him, and on occasion probably against his wishes.
His actions these past six months have made it clear he isn’t even interested in tinkering anymore.
He’s made his peace with the establishment.
The people of Wisconsin are showing us the way forward.
When I saw the president last week, I realized, sadly, that the Wisconsin Way is the only way forward.
Way sad, but very-much true.
War is the amphetamine of power and despite the age, the world is involved in total war, total time, thanks to George Jr. and his henchmen, and allowed to continue by Obama.
One of the best observers around on Obama’s war-hood-ness is Andrew Bacevich, who has a great post up at tomdispatch about how US-led conflicts are ending up disasters.
Some thoughts:
For all sorts of reasons, the expectations raised by Barack Obama’s arrival in the Oval Office were especially high.
Americans weren’t the only ones affected.
How else to explain the Nobel Committee’s decision to honor the new president by transforming its Peace Prize into a Prize Anticipating Peace — more or less the equivalent of designating the winner of the Heisman Trophy during week one of the college football season.
Of course, if the political mood immediately prior to and following a presidential inauguration emphasizes promise and discovery (the First Lady has biceps!), it doesn’t take long for the novelty to start wearing off.
Then the narrative arc takes a nosedive: he’s breaking his promises, he’s letting us down, he’s not so different after all.
The words of H.L. Mencken apply. “When I hear a man applauded by the mob,” the Sage of Baltimore wrote, “I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.”
Barack Obama has now lived long enough to attract his fair share of hisses, boos, and catcalls.
…
The key point is this: like those who preceded them, neither Obama nor his Harpies (nor anyone else in a position of influence) could evidently be bothered to assess whether the hammer actually works as advertised — notwithstanding abundant evidence showing that it doesn’t.
Bacevich’s term ‘Harpies‘ means Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council Human Rights Director Samantha Power — maybe the influence behind the throne.
Apparently the future is so bleak and dark, I’ll surely not need shades — a little sunshine would create more dismay.
War in the Not-Abstract
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome.”
“…once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few.”
– Erasmus and War, 14th Century
(Illustration of Picasso’s “Massacre in Korea” found here via Google Images).
Despite the advance of so-called civilization, this particular era of human history would be much-considered a time of continuous war, and in conflicts circling the globe, the US has its cruel fingers wagging in most of them.
And despite President Obama proclaiming no US military boots on the ground in Libya, he was lying — the CIA already thin-skinned boots kicking up Libyan dust, and now it seem the US will indeed put our GIs on the stalemated Libyan ground.
War not in the abstract.
And the shit in Libya is gonna require more Western bootstraps as the so-called Libyan rebels are complaining enough is not being done by NATO.
From Der Spiegel:
But the Libyan rebels are not alone in their complaints: Within NATO, there is also increasing frustration at the slow progress on the ground.
The seemingly rudderless attacking and fleeing of the untrained fighters in the face of government soldiers is causing the Western allies to despair, albeit not in public, because it looks more and more likely that the undeclared aim of the international intervention — the removal of dictator Moammar Gadhafi — will probably never be achieved.
And again, Obama has said regime change is not in the plans — Yeah, right.
Meanwhile back at the bad burning pile of bushes — Afghanistan.
Even as US troops die, the anti-US feeling in Afghanistan, and Pakistan for that matter, is off the charts, as the theater of war in the area is going way south.
This is due mainly to everyday people getting the shaft: In both Afghanistan and Pakistan the domestic security situation is fast deteriorating, their economies are faltering, their governments are seen as corrupt and incompetent and ordinary people cannot see any improvement in their lives.
Events go downhill from there.
In a post at Counterpunch, Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier and a former president of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, describes Why the US is Doomed in Afghanistan.
He picks up on the infamous and notorious US “Kill Team.”
A few nuggets:
In ‘The Kill Team’, carried by ‘Rolling Stone’ on March 27 this year, Mark Boal revealed the exploits of ‘Bravo Company’, in which Staff Sergeant David Bram and Corporal Jeremy Morlock on one fine morning, early last year, decided to chalk up kills of innocent Afghans.
They picked them at random during their patrols or ‘cordon and search’ operations, took them to a ditch and shot them, collecting tips of little fingers as souvenirs and taking hundreds of photographs.
Everyone was in on the kills, many others joined in. the whole company was jubilant, taking photographs of each other with the dead body; one smiling, the other rakishly smoking a cigarette.
No effort was made to stop or discipline the men; in fact, all officers of Bravo Company helped cover for them, even as they continued their killing spree.
Finally, when one of their colleagues ratted on them, they threatened to kill him on their next outing.
Even that was covered up, but fortunately for the Rat, the story broke before his elimination.
According to Boal, Gen McChrystal and Hamid Karzai learnt of this scandal May last year.
Both joined in the cover up, destroying whatever documents, disks, hardware, software, photographs, and any other incriminatory evidence that could be found, while the killing continued.
Early this month, Morlock was finally sentenced to twenty four years, though no action is being initiated against any officer at any level.
Boal concludes his expose with, “Toward the end of Morlock’s interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur.
“None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people,” Morlock said.
Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan.
“Some shit goes down,” he said, “you’re gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck ‘em.”
An eye-oping post — read the whole thing.
And how to explain this shit.
From the UK’s The Independent:
Something is happening at the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that mental health experts are finding hard to explain: British and American soldiers appear to be having markedly different reactions to the stress of combat. In America, there has been a sharp increase in the number experiencing mental-health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Between 2006 and 2007 alone, there was a 50 per cent jump in cases of combat stress among soldiers and suicides more than doubled. Why the precipitous rise? And why hasn’t there been an accompanying rise in these symptoms among British troops?
The conclusion that British soldiers appear to have a different psychological reaction to the stresses of these modern conflicts was the finding of several recent high-profile studies.
…
The simple but mind-bending truth is that mental illnesses such as PTSD can be both culturally shaped and utterly real to the sufferer.
And the real losers are everybody.
A Terrible Tale Nearly Forgotten
Filed Under Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the face of so much bad shit going on right now — even another US theater of war in Libya — the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan is taking a deep-back seat on the runaway bus of a 24-hour news cycle.
However, death is still there as six US GIs were killed Tuesday in eastern Afghanistan during a major operation against insurgents, but Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division claims the war is A-Okay: He said morale remains high for the troops from the storied division, who have suffered their deadliest year in combat since Vietnam. “They’ve been able to look over the last 10 months and look at the accomplishments they have had, the difference they have made in the lives of the Afghan people,” he said.
Reality begs to differ.
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
According to an Associated Press tally, at least 1,408 US servicemen have died in Afghanistan since the conflict started there in October 2001 — 10,749 have been wounded in action.
And it seems to be getting a bit hotter: An American GI was killed just about every day in March.
Intertwined in death are Afghan peoples — seven civilians, including some children, were killed over the weekend in a NATO airstrike: Brigadier General Tim Zadalis, ISAF Joint Command Director of air plans and team leader, expressed “deep regret” over the incident, and pledged to “apply what we learned in this assessment in future operations as we strive to eliminate civilian casualties.”
Not working too well — a UN report indicates a 15 percent increase in Afghan civilian deaths in 2010 when compared with the previous year.
And the bender is that although many of those deaths came directly/indirectly by insurgents/Taliban, the Afghan look at the situation bit different: Though the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan in NATO and Afghan military operations have fallen in recent months, they evoke much greater anger among the Afghan population than the ones caused by the Taliban attacks.
And from Press TV: UNAMA reports that 2010 was the bloodiest year since the war began in terms of the civilian death toll. Civilian casualties increased by 31% since last year. The number of children killed in the war is up 55 percent from last year.
A result of Gen. David Petraeus taking command.
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com offers this:
This comes as several reports affirm that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus’ predecessor, had actually reduced the number of killings by a measurable amount, even as the Obama Administration escalated the war to new heights.
McChrystal had made the reduction of civilian deaths a top priority, banning air strikes near civilian populations and sharply curbing night raids.
Since taking over Petraeus has removed most if not all of the restrictions, and the deaths have predictably soared.
Yet in a historical perspective the Afghan war can’t be won — an iron law of human conflict: most people hate foreigners coming to their country and trying to force them to change their way of life for a better and wiser one.
The place ain’t called the ‘graveyard of empires‘ for nothin’.
There is no winning there.
A Melbourne, Australia, Baptist minister, husband and father of three took a recent trip to Afghanistan to see how the so-called “good war” was holding up after a near-decade.
Via the Australian Broadcasting Company:
Afghanistan has from the very beginning been sold to us as “the good war.”
Yet precious little information about the situation on the ground is allowed to filter through to the Australian people.
With a Defence Department which routes everything through its PR department, I decided to travel to Afghanistan to see for myself.
What I saw and heard there belies most of what we are told by our government.
No one — it seems — in Afghanistan supports the Karzai government, with the exception of government officials and the military.
Karzai is seen as entirely corrupt and out of touch with everyday people, and his warlord Parliament are only interested in their own wealth.
People just get on with their lives, resigned to this veneer of democracy being impenetrable for the ordinary Afghan, with no expectation that these criminals will represent their interests.
The only thing stopping the government from being entirely irrelevant is the amount of aid money which flows straight into their pockets, a source of anger for ordinary Afghans.
As a result, even aid has become suspect in Afghanistan — so much of it is militarised, tainted by partisan interests or stripped bare by corruption that only the bravest, most foolish and most desperate are willing to receive it.
Meanwhile, according to a World Health Organisation worker at my hotel, there is nothing stopping the open sewers in the streets of Kabul from running into the water supply.
There is no sanitation, and he is shocked a massive outbreak of cholera has not occurred.
Additionally, the poor air quality in Kabul kills 3000 people a year through respiratory disease.
Unemployment is at 40%, and people still have to survive on an average wage of $200 per year.
Meanwhile, security contractors earn up to $350 per hour.
Afghans see this disparity and understandably conclude we are not there to help them.
Fairly shitty, huh?
Yet, the US will hammer on.
An example of the major problem with war making in this modern era is that the official line is awash in bullshit.
And President Obama was supposed to keep all this shit in the public eye, but how can this be when even an award ceremony for being open was held in secret..
Huh?
On Monday President Obama received an award for transparency, which ironically was given to him during a closed, unannounced meeting. Bestowed upon the President from a group of transparency advocates, the ceremony took place in secret, even though — as of two weeks ago — it was supposed to be open to the press.
According to Politico, the meeting was “inexplicably postponed” and rescheduled without notice for Monday “without disclosing the meeting on [the President's] public schedule or letting photographers or print reporters into the room.”
…
Miller (Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation) said the president’s open government directive had made the open government community hopeful after years of secrecy from the Bush administration, particularly because the government promised things like data audits of federal agencies and the publishing of high-value government data sets for public use that have yet to come to fruition.
…
An award touting this administration as transparent does nothing more than underscore its total lack of transparency.
And even if the Obama administration were to have stayed true to its promises of openness, many question whether that calls for an award.
Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, does not seem to think so.
He remarked on the lack of necessity for the award, “I don’t feel moved today to say ‘thank you, Mr. President.’”
And so we’re stuck like a pig in the muck — un-winnable and unmovable.
Snapshot
Filed Under Just Plain War, Madness | Leave a Comment
“There is a distance, a veil between us.”
– ‘All Quiet On The Western Front,’ Erich Maria Remarque
(Illustration found here).
War as waged nowadays — slipshod and way-unnecessary — kills in ways way-beyond the flesh.
The US has destroyed a certain of segment of its population, a big chunk, in waging nasty, cruel and unusual conflicts in places far, far away.
Returning US military from Afghanistan and Iraq bring the horror home with them.
In a report released yesterday (Tuesday), the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, detailed data received from the US Veterans Affairs Department on the mental state of veterans: Lee Igel, a psychologist and assistant professor at New York University, said the numbers were “staggering” when compared to the general population.
The National Institute of Mental Health disclosed that in 2008, the latest data available, 13.4 percent of US adults received treatment for mental health problems — as of last December, of the 625,834 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans enrolled in the VA health care system, 313,670 were treated for mental shit.
And out of that nearly 314 thousand, 161,794, or 41.9 percent, received a primary diagnosis of a mental health condition, a rate three times higher than that of the general population.
In Washington state, five soldiers from the 5th (Stryker) Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division are accused of participating in the murders of three unarmed Afghans in January, February and May of 2010.
They were arrested and charged last year for the incidents — all coming coming from what was called the “kill team” during their deployment to Afghanistan — these the guys who collected body parts, especially fingers, of victims as trophies.
And this week, the German magazine Der Spiegel released photos from the “killing team” as it displayed the aftermath of its namesake. (The photo above is one).
In a display of shit-hypocrisy, the US Army apologized, saying the images are “repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States.”
Yeah, right.
Long-time great investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, gave his reflections on the photos and the impact of horrors of war upon the human condition in a post at The New Yorker.
Hersh, who has been reporting the terrible results of war since Viet Nam (he broke the My Lai story in 1969 and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal from Iraq in 2004), believes those images will return to bite the US on its holier-than-thou ass.
The bottom line:
Why photograph atrocities?
And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units?
How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost?
No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question.
As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians — recklessly, as payback, or just at random — as a facet of modern unconventional warfare.
In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary.
In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy — the people trying to kill you — do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise.
The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous.
This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us.
The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course.
But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.
The Der Spiegel photographs also help to explain why the American war in Afghanistan can probably never be “won,” in my view, just as we did not win in Vietnam.
Terrible things happen in war, and terrible things are happening every day in Afghanistan, as Americans continue to conduct nightly assassination raids and have escalated the number of bombing sorties.
There are also reports of suspected Taliban sympathizers we turn over to Afghan police and soldiers being tortured or worse.
This will be a long haul; revenge in Afghan society does not have to come immediately.
We could end up not knowing who hit us, or why, a decade or two from now.
Blowback of a quick snap shot can be a bitch.
$Billion Blast Walls
Filed Under Just Plain War | Leave a Comment
In war, the crazed bull is sometimes left alone in the china shop.
(Illustration found here).
As the US attempts to wind down its horrible fiasco in Iraq, some mindless and numbing details have been left behind — in a futile grasp to curb violence in 2005, the US turned Baghdad into a kind of walled city within a city, throwing up miles and miles of concrete blast walls, some short concrete dividers like those used along US roadways and also the larger 20-footers used to completely cut off whatever.
From the Stars and Stripes in April 2007: According to Wednesday’s news release from Multi-National Corps-Iraq, “the wall [in Adhamiyah] is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence. Planners hope the creation of the wall will help restore law and order by providing a way to screen people entering and exiting the neighborhood — allowing residents and people with legitimate business in, while keeping death squads and militia groups out.”
Death comes no matter and now something must be done, and the Baghdad city government is suing.
From Reuters on Thursday:
Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military.
“The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste,” the statement said.
“Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford…we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses.”
Good-luck with that, boys.
And what to do with huge, empty blast walls?
(Illustration found here).
Awe without the shock.
The US misadventure in Iraq will fester for generations.