The US is getting the shaft in war making.
Two invasions and two bloody, nasty quagmires.

Rare is the Maureen Dowd column that is more than pancake face powder, or a shoe-horned turn at national politics, and rare still is a piece with insight into the US’ two beleaguered faraway wars.
In her column this morning, Dowd touches upon the deathly maze of Afghanistan and how the US is up against some terrible and experienced fighters.
The money graph:

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing.
And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work.
Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

Along with the IEDs, the savage car bombs and a wicked, back-stabbing insurgency, is a shitload of cruel corruption, a corruption so deep, the the majority of Afghans would take the Taliban over the supposedly
legitimate government in Kabul.
Indeed, the culture of corruption is a way of life, according to some of those 92,000 documents leaked Sunday by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks.

Why is the US there?
There have been 1,207 US military deaths in Afghanistan and to fuel the conflict there requires gasoline at $85 a gallon — enough said.
The US needs to do a quick shit out of dodge, eagle pull before the situation gets worse.

One really mind-boggling particular nowadays is the continual use of hypocritical-irony; creating a two-faced lie through the clenched-teeth of a smile.

Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers.
For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through their voice while truly trying to claim they’re not upset, it would not be verbal irony by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony).
But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that they were upset by claiming they were not, the utterance would be verbal irony.
This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves.
There are examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic.

We’re living and walking around in an age of horrifying and catastrophic irony.

A terrible case in point: Nimble-minded George Jr. arrogantly blubbered to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001:

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

And the irony of it all:

Americans are asking “Why do they hate us?”
They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

(Illustration found here).

The then-spawned The Global War on Terror coupled with the creation of the huge, bungling Department of Homeland Security reproduced what it supposedly sought to eradicate — an example would best be described in the old reflective-adage of pouring JP4 jet fuel on a small, charcoal brazier in order to smother the fire.

This morning from Al Jazeera English:

Extremists held in a US-run detention centre in Iraq were allowed to teach fellow detainees how to use explosives and become suicide bombers, a former inmate has told Al Jazeera.
Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee of Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, said that US officials did nothing to stop radicals from indoctrinating young detainees at the camp.
“Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,” Mohammed said.
“For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].”
Adel, who was held for four years without charge at Camp Bucca, said that extremists were allowed to speak freely to fellow inmates.
“In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority,” he said.
“He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees – they became extremists like him.”

And those five young, naive Americans arrested last week week in Pakistan has created a good scare about homegrown jihad, and the fabled wide, wide world-war on terror has doubled back on itself, feeding off its own entrails, as it were, to make matters far, far worse.
Those lost souls from Virginia were nabbed only after one of the guys’ daddy, Khalid Farooq, called authorities — and after his son and the others were arrested, and just to be on the safe-terror side: Police said they’d also detained Khalid Farooq as a precautionary measure.
One never knows the mystery of jihad.
Read a good view on the mythology of the US-led terror war here.

And this past week, the current US president, Barack Obama, reached far into the cosmic-ironic heavens to pluck a few words to whitewash the total-irony of  being both a Nobel peace-prize winner and a war escalator.

(Illustration found here).

Although Obama claimed he was “most surprised and deeply humbled” by the Nobel prize in October, he popped some hawkish-spin into the peace mix last week in Oslo, Norway:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
…
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their (Gandhi and King) examples alone.
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.
For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.
Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

But what about change?
And what about reality vs bullshit?

A situation stated best via a letter to the editor, published Friday in the New York Times: The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.

Obama, therefore, has produced verbal irony using both the situational and dramatic ironies — Pain is just weakness leaving the body!

Some serious shit: “Tony Blair and George Bush at Camp David in February 2001 where they discovered they both used Colgate toothpaste.”

And they loved war games, much to the peril of the planet.

These two terrifying clowns are together again — part-and-parcel of an UK inquiry into British shenanigans in the US-led nefarious run-up to the Iraq war.
Despite some nasty, back-stabbing testimony this week, news of the hearings have been downplayed in the US, if reported at all.

(Illustration found here).

On Thursday, the former British ambassador to Washington related how so intense the preparations for the invasion (in early 2002), the UN weapons inspectors couldn’t do the proper job and were forced to find evidence, any kind of evidence:

Sir Christopher Meyer said the “unforgiving nature” of the build-up after American forces had been told to prepare for war meant that “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”.
He added: “It was another way of saying ‘it’s not that Saddam has to prove that he’s innocent, we’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty.’
And we — the Americans, the British — have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun.”
…
Asked about Tony Blair’s meeting with Bush at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where, some observers believe, the decision to go to war was made, Meyer said: “To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas range.”
…
On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in “no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation.”
The following weekend Bush and his key advisers met at Camp David and contacts later told Meyer there had been a “big ding-dong” about Iraq and Saddam.

And Meyer expressed the idea Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job than Twisted-Tony Blair:

Sir Christopher said that he was “not making a party political point,” but Lady Thatcher had been much tougher on the “special relationship” with the Americans.
He expressed frustration over the failure of the allies to agree a diplomatic strategy to overthrow Saddam or to prepare properly for victory, which would have prevented the country’s descent into chaos.
“Quite often I think what would Margaret Thatcher have done,” Sir Christopher told the inquiry.
“I think she would have insisted on a clear, coherent political-diplomatic strategy. I think she would have demanded the greatest clarity about what the heck happened if, and when, we removed Saddam Hussein.”

And the ever-so-delightful Dick Cheney:

“I remember saying to London ‘This may be the most powerful Vice-President ever.’
I mean, his institutional opposite number was the Deputy Prime Minister,” said Sir Christopher. “This was an unbalanced relationship and probably didn’t reap the dividends that we might have expected.”

And on Wednesday, senior officials within UK’s Foreign Office told the inquiry Iraq’s WMD was known to be non-existent, even early on in pre-war planning:

The inquiry was told how officials within the Foreign Office had become convinced that the regime in Baghdad was developing chemical and biological weapons.
When it received intelligence contradicting the claim in March 2003, this was discounted.
“There was contradictory intelligence, so I don’t think it invalidated the point about what weapons [Saddam] had,” Sir William (Ehrman, a senior official within the Foreign Office) said. “It was more about their use. Even if they were disassembled the [chemical or biological] agents still existed.”
It also emerged that a secret paper drawn up in the summer of 2002, which pointed to Iraq as a potential threat, was based almost entirely on uncorroborated and outdated assumptions.
Tim Dowse, the former head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, said the document was based on information obtained before weapons inspectors were thrown out of the country in 1998.
“We had got ourselves in a particular mindset,” Mr Dowse said.
Nevertheless, there were repeated warnings to ministers about the reliability of the intelligence on Iraq.
In April 2000, intelligence was said to be “limited to chemical weapons.”
By May 2001, knowledge of major weapons programmes was described as “patchy;” by March 2002 it was “sporadic and patchy.”
Advisers admitted in August they knew “very little” about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, while intelligence information “remained limited” by September.

In June 2008, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report: “Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” (chairman of the Committee John D.) Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

Meanwhile back at the UK hearings last week, Jeremy Greenstock, the Brit’s former ambassador to the UN, testified George Jr. was “hell bent on the use of force” in Iraq and was not going to be stymied:

As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush’s key aides grew impatient — criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.
Grumbling from Washington “included noises about ‘this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what’s going to have to be done anyway — and deal with this with the use of force,’” Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.

And on the Crawford, Texas, pow-wow between George Jr. and Twisted-Tony, there was this:

Greenstock said following the Crawford meeting, he realized Britain “was being drawn into quite a different discussion.”
But, like Meyer, he said the talks were secretive and the conversation between the two leaders was not disclosed to officials.

Read more on the inquiry here and here.
And read about what end the inquiry — according to the UK’s Independent, which will be nothing except some good headlines (in the UK, of course, not the US) and another whitewash.

A shame and disgrace that such public hearings won’t be held in the US as President Obama has made it fairly clear there won’t be any Iraq-war criminal investigations, despite all indications to the contrary.
From the Center for Public Integrity in January 2008:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

People should be scrabbling for a real-life legal gun.

The Iraqi saga is a horror-eyed bristle of lies.
In the run-up to the invasion, all kinds of fear-mongering lies created a sense of urgency, which quickly evaporated when those woeful tales of woe were shot-to-bits by reality.
We’re familiar with George Jr. and Dick Cheney’s intentional falsehoods — “deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate” — but what about others involved in the criminal and immoral enterprise.

Today in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action.
In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.
The need to conceal this from Parliament and all but “very small numbers” of officials “constrained” the planning process.
The result was a “rushed”operation “lacking in coherence and resources” which caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the post-war period.
Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each.
Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage.
Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.
Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat.”
One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling,” saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.”
…
The leaked documents bring into question statements that Mr Blair made to Parliament in the build up to the invasion.
On July 16 2002, amid growing media speculation about Britain’s future role in Iraq, Mr Blair was asked: “Are we then preparing for possible military action in Iraq?”
He replied: “No.”

Twisted-Tony Blair just lied through his ass.

In the pile of leaked documents to the Telegraph — classified verbatim transcripts, reports and papers — was the actual situation of the British forces: The analysis of the war phase describes it as a “significant military success” but one achieved against a “third-rate army.” It identifies a long list of “significant” weaknesses and notes: “A more capable enemy would probably have punished these shortcomings severely.”

Reminds one of Donald Rumfeld’s reply to all those young US boots-on-the-ground who were getting killed or blown apart by inadequate military equipment: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
He added: “If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up.”

Pity the heartless lie.
And one does wonder if any of these lying bastards on both sides of the pond will ever pay the piper for creating a horror story for the ages.

While eyes of just about everybody are on Afghanistan’s potboiler of a national election, a mutinous DOD without a clue and a rising death toll there of US troops, Iraq has become one of those horrific, malignant gifts that keeps on giving.

On Monday, there was considered “light violence” in Iraq — two US GIs died from non-combat injuries and only three Iraqis killed and two wounded.
Blessed relief?

Since the invasion in 2003, 4,357 US GIs have been killed, 31,545wounded and the toll on Iraqi itself is frightening: Six-plus years later 94,000 to 102,000, and by some estimates, upwards to more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died — another 4 million displaced.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, now it’s a given — the entire Iraqi misadventure was not only illegal, but immoral and Saddam had no WMD, despite Condi’s slobbering ‘mushroom-cloud‘ fearmongering and Dick Cheney’s bullshit to CNN: “We will succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan. We will stand up a new government under an Iraqi-drafted constitution. We will defeat that insurgency, and, in fact, it will be an enormous success story.”

Glaringly worse in the false realm of Iraqi WMD — the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, the guy who’s been around the nuclear-watchdog block, on Monday called out George Jr. and Dick Cheney as liars, and did so in public.

‘I will always lament the fact that a tragic war was launched in Iraq,’ he said in a last address to the UN General Assembly.
‘This was done on the basis of false pretext, without the authorization of the UN Security Council,’ he said.
He said the IAEA and UN weapons inspectors had found ‘no evidence’ that Iraq’s nuclear programmes involved production of weapons of mass destruction.
‘It gives me no consolation that the agency (IAEA)’s findings were subsequently vindicated,’ he said, implying that the US military campaign in Iraq had caused high civilians casualties.

Along with the war crime of the Iraqi invasion, George Jr.’s White House changed the US and the world for the far, far worse. and once the cat’s out of the bag, or the horse is out of the barn (closing the barn door concept) or Pandora’s box pried open, the end result is the same — we be screwed.

End of the week and bad war-related shit.

Beyond the US domestic horror of Joe Lieberman, military exercises in the Middle East are becoming way-more frightening than any paranormal or blair-witch fantasy could envision, creating a deep hole-drain in anything that remains of a moral fiber in the facade of a so-called American Ideal.

The righteous, or “just war,” is a lie perpetrated since day one — no such thing as a good murder, despite all the literary and artistic rhetoric babbled-out by political people and pundits pointing at the dire need to make the planet collateral damage.

In March 2003, at the time of the Iraq invasion, I was an editor/writer at a twice-weekly in Central California and responsible for the lay-out (and content) of several pages, including ones for religious activities, church services, specials and the like — after interviewing some local preachers/lay people on the religious/moral grounds for the war, I came away with the distinct impression that anyone with any sense of ethics would know the Iraqi endeavor was near-pure bad and appeared to signal a significant schism in history.
Of course, not that many people truly and fully understood back then (I didn’t) the true terror of George Jr.’s White House — the near fabrications, the outright ‘Curveball‘ lies, the twisted-torture of the US Constitution — and only some gut instinct told me these assholes were so-full of shit.
However, what I really didn’t comprehend was US-home-grown war criminals on a grand scale spawning two horrifying endless wars in faraway places as part-and-parcel of a long, freakin’-ass long war on terror — a worldwide and timeless conflict created by the US that feeds off itself.

And history is indeed now rampant, one would have to be a total dumb ass not to realize 9/11 and its after-effects of Afghanistan and Iraq made the world a much-more strange and violent place.
Even a pastor within George Jr.’s own supposed Christian denomination, Methodist, told me the Iraqi invasion did not fall under the premise of  the “just war” doctrine  — in fact some Texas Methodists crafted a petition/letter of complaint against George Jr. (“a member of Park Hill United Methodist Church (UMC) in Dallas, Texas”) and his boss, Dick Cheney (“local membership unknown”) for being “undeniably guilty of at least four chargeable offenses…crime, immorality, disobedience to the Order and Discipline of The UMC, and dissemination of doctrine contrary to the established standards of doctrine of The UMC. For these offenses, we the undersigned call for an immediate and public act of repentance by the respondents. If the respondents do not reply with sincere and public repentance for their crimes, we demand that their membership in the United Methodist Church be revoked until such time that they sincerely and publicly repent.”
Hahaha…gotcha! Hell first will freeze way-over.

Meanwhile, back up to speed: Bad wars getting way-badly worse, especially in the nefarious Af-Pak zone of insanity.
Wednesday morning, Taliban gunman staged an explosive pre-dawn raid on a guest house in Kabul, shooting-to-death six UN workers and a couple of Afghan security people — the scene was anti-pretty.
According to the New York Times:

The police said one of the victims, a woman, had been shot in the head, and another burned to death.
A cellphone video taken by a security official and seen by a reporter showed just the head and torso of a third victim, apparently cut in half when one of the attackers detonated his suicide vest.

And to add JP4 to an already-roaring fire, the Times has also reported the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, has been on the payroll of the US CIA the past eight years — since the October 2001 invasion.
WTF!
Key long-range quote from the brothers Karzai story:

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.

No shit sherlock!
And says it all for Gen. Stan McNasty (oops, sorry, I always do that) McChrystal’s big, bright idea of a counterinsurgency program — the so-called ‘population-centric strategy’ — to turn the tide of an already-lost operation, to give the US a victory in that endless war on terror.
The good general is all mouth and no brains — even with all the NATO troops (about a 100,000) and the vaporous-like Afghan forces (from 50,000 upwards to 200,000, but mostly not many at all according to some experts) against the suspected 25,000 (tops) Taliban, a 12-to-one ratio in favor of NATO, there is still no sign of any kind of tide turning.
And what’s worse, dumb-simple bombs are beating the shit out of the most-powerful military in all of history — IEDs killed eight US GIs on Tuesday in several incidents in south Afghanistan.
From Wired‘s Danger Room blog on these “dumb-down” devices:

We’ve become accustomed to the idea that a weapon’s potency grows with its sophistication: “Smart” munitions are more effective than dumb ones; supersonic jets can shoot down slower planes.
But Afghanistan and its IEDs are proving the exception to that rule.

Couple dumb with bad terrain and you’ve got the mixing of a hell-hole.
Due to the asinine US military set-up in a rugged, jagged, mountainous Afghanistan, placing outposts way out in country, nearly-non-accessible except by air — by helicopter.
As insurgents plant sometimes up to 100 IEDs a day, and although the military is throwing a lot of money and time to figure how to better detect booby-traps (the Danger Room post above goes into some detail on that aspect), the only way to move troops and supplies is by whirlybird.
A good look at this dangerous situation — three choppers went down on Monday (two collided) killing 14 Americans — can be found at a Popular Mechanics piece from last April, which proclaimed: “Afghanistan is hell on helicopters: Temperature swings can ruin seals and gaskets; towering mountains with low air density sap power from spinning rotor blades and engines; dusty deserts gum up hydraulics; and enemy combatants pepper the machines with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.”
A terrible place to be right now.

And right now, President Obama is deciding what to do with Afghanistan — in reality he’s weighting how much of an troop escalation should be allowed — as McNasty (oops) McChrystal wants at least 40,000 additional US troops, and up to 80,000 to do the job right, but now it seems the tortured nitwit general will end up getting far less fodder for his foolish fancies.
Obama, according to reports, will attempt a less ambitious plan in which 10 population centers and the Helmand River Valley in the south will see an increase in troops, a “compromise” it’s been called instead of trying to beat the Taliban out of the bushes all across the country — supposedly about 16,000 new GIs.
Much to Obama’s extreme-near-future misfortune, the only real course for the US in Afghanistan is withdrawal, a concept the White House has said is not even an option, which in turn creates a self-defeating, no-way-out strategy into a box canyon without exit signs or doorways — expect horror stories from there soon.
(Obama will have to curtail activities like his heartfelt photo op this morning at Dover AFB as the bodies of US peoples killed overseas were returned home — there will be way-too many of them).

One new twist in the ugly Afghan saga is Matthew Hoh, the first publicly-known U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel.
“I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

Much has been made of Hoh’s resignation, which paints not a good picture of the US/Afghan scenario and a lot of commentators, politicians and other sorts have lofted Hoh way up high as a banner for getting the US out of the country.
He was on PBS’ News Hour this evening, saying “I don’t believe al-Qaeda is coming back…” in addressing the fear the terror group would return and set up camp if the US pulled out, and a troop increase would only “fuel the insurgency” — good talk, though nothing really new, for the US getting the shit gone (I didn’t take notes).
One former Afghan legislator called Hoh “A Great American Patriot”.
Glenn Greenwald gets in on the act with a post found here.
Even Garrison Keillor came out of the smooth-voiced woods in honor of Hoh, ending an opinion piece in The New York Times: Time to move on. Tell the others. It’s a brand-new day. Let us start making our way on out of Afghanistan, Mr. President.
What’s been missed is the moral slaughter involved in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was criminal and immoral from the get-go.

One quote from Hoh in the original Post story has not been much touched upon in which he discussed his time in Iraq and there were no qualms about killing, death and destruction there:

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
“I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

Nothing immoral and bad about Iraq — a complete criminal enterprise.

No one seems to feel anything about the Iraqi invasion being a war crime, immoral and really, really bad.
I didn’t catch that deeper, much-more scarier vein of verbiage in that last quote of Hoh’s until I read Chris Floyd’s most-excellent post on the subject.
Floyd always looks at stuff at a more truthful, less hampered way (he’s one of my daily reads — or when he posts, which is just about daily) and his take on Hoh begins first with an examination of an interview with Jane Mayer, which appeared in the New Yorker online, and concerned the use of unmanned drones and its effect on Pakistan.
Meyer replies that although about 10 top bad al-Qaeda guys have been killed, a shitload of ordinary folks have been slaughtered to get them.
Floyd counters:

What is astonishing about this is that the interview doesn’t end there, in a roar of outrage from Mayer and her interviewer: “They’ve killed hundreds of civilians!”
Hundreds of Pakistani civilians, men, women and children with no involvement whatsoever in war or terrorism; just ordinary people living their lives as best they can — just like your neighbor, just like your mother, just like you…or just like the people killed on September 11, whose deaths are used as an eternal justification for war and bloodshed on a global scale by the American state.
But these drone-murdered Pakistanis — these human beings, these fathers and mothers, these grandparents, these toddlers, these brothers and sisters — their lives are just statistics to be coldly weighed in the calibrations of imperial policy.
The “bad news” about their deaths is not that they were murdered, not that these utterly defenseless men, women and children were blown to shreds without warning, without the slightest chance of escape, by flying robots controlled by unseen hands a world away; no, the “bad news” is that these that these killing might possibly hamper America’s “counterinsurgency program”…

And Floyd’s take on Hoh:

Hoh doesn’t like the war crime in Afghanistan because it doesn’t seem to be working out too well — not because it’s wrong.
Mayer doesn’t like the CIA Predator program of targeted assassination and massive “collateral damage” because it’s too unregulated, too opaque, and we need to find ways to make it work better — more like the Pentagon program of targeted assassination and massive “collateral damage.”

Floyd pulls insight from another most-excellent writer, Arthur Silber, who blogs at Once Upon a Time… and although he can really become involved in his subject matter, he also cuts to the bone of reality.
In his post regarding Hoh and the US, Silber nails the bottom line:

The critical facts are few in number, and remarkably easy to understand: Iraq never threatened the U.S. in any serious manner.
Our leaders knew Iraq did not threaten us.
Despite what should have been the only fact that mattered, the U.S. invaded and occupied, and still occupies, a nation that never threatened us and had never attacked us.
Under the applicable principles of international law and the Nuremberg Principles, the U.S. thus committed a monstrous, unforgivable series of war crimes.
Those who support and continue the occupation of Iraq are war criminals — not because I say so, but because the same principles that the U.S. applies to every other nation, but never to the U.S. itself, necessitate that judgment and no other.
While it may be true that some “dudes” threatened Hoh’s life and the lives of those with whom he served, Hoh could never have been threatened in that manner but for the fact that he was in Iraq as part of a criminal war of aggression.
In other words, he had no right to be in Iraq in the first place.
And if he had not been, he would never have been in a position to “whack[] a bunch of guys.”

Highly recommend both Floyd and Silber — both more intelligently-eloquent than I.

UPDATE/ADD-ON BELOW

Yes, the Edwin Starr song paraphrased is the counterinsurgency of fighting dumb-shit wars.
Last month on PBS‘ “Frontline,” an interview with Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and a level head in this era of military idiots.
He’s also a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran and the author of the 2008 book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”
The US military’s fog-horning a counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is baffling:

I am baffled by the fad of counterinsurgency, and I’m especially baffled by the extent to which the American officer corps has embraced this fad.
Now, I say that from the point of view of somebody who comes from a generation when counterinsurgency was anathema to the United States military.
In the era after Vietnam, the officer corps believed with something close to unanimity that long, protracted campaigns were very much at odds not only with the well-being of the military as an institution, but frankly at odds with the interests of the country.
Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.
What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that.
War has become a permanent condition.
I mean, we’ve been at war now for eight years, and for all practical purposes, nobody can say with any accuracy when war will likely come to an end.
In my judgment — I know people that would disagree with this — we are now engaged in wars where we do not have vital interests at stake.
And … we’ve now abandoned the notion that we can win wars quickly or cheaply.
Our approach to war is one in which we now accept the notion that war is an open-ended proposition and that if someday out there some outcome is reached, it’s likely to be an ambiguous outcome that really doesn’t resemble in any sense the traditional definition of military victory. …

And this shit is generational?

It’s probably generational in that perhaps young people — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — have bigger dreams, have bigger ambitions. Older people tend to perhaps be more given to pessimism or cynicism.
I mean, I would like to call it realism, but others might view it differently.
I hesitate to say that older people have a better understanding of the human consequences of unrealistic and naive projects, because I know that these younger fellows like Nagl and [CNAS fellow Andrew] Exum have lost friends.
But at the same time, I puzzle over why their personal losses don’t cause them to question the implications for the policy proposals that they support.
We’ve lost over 5,000 American soldiers over the past eight years between Iraq and Afghanistan.
We think Iraq is now finally winding down.
At the same time, we ratchet up Afghanistan.
So if we do indeed have a full-court-press application of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certainly at least several hundred more American soldiers are going to die.
And I think it’s very, very important to be absolutely certain that no alternative exists that would enable us to achieve our interests in Afghanistan without all those soldiers being killed.
And I think the people who insist that it has to be done through counterinsurgency have not seriously examined all the alternatives.

Is President Obama boxed in with regards to an Afghan escalation?

I think so. … I don’t think the president has to worry too much about being criticized from the right.
I mean, he’s going to be criticized from the right on, if not on the war in Afghanistan, on any number of other issues.
By staying the course in Afghanistan, he’s not going to get more Republican votes for health care or anything like that.
But if the president alienates the core of his support, plunging more deeply into this war when many on the left or people like myself, … wary of an overly militarized foreign policy, then I think he could find the enormous public support that he had during much of the first year of his term in office collapsing pretty quickly. …
There are many glib comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
And maybe we’re beyond making glib comparisons. But I do think that’s one of the areas where the Vietnam comparison still has merit.
The Vietnam War destroyed the Johnson presidency, and it destroyed the Johnson domestic reform agenda. And to the extent that Obama’s war becomes this costly, open-ended proposition with no end in sight, then one possible consequence that he has to consider is that his own very ambitious and important domestic reform agenda could be placed in jeopardy. …

And is this Obama’s war?

I think so.
And the question is whether or not [it is] going to be Obama’s war in the same sense that Iraq became Bush’s war, that Vietnam became Johnson’s war; that it’s going to be the one issue that consumes his presidency; the one thing that, … for the rest of his time in office, reporters [are] going to be asking: “When is it going end? When will light become visible at the end of the tunnel? How many more soldiers are going to have to die? How many more hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent?”
That’s what I fear he is inviting if he allows himself to be sold this counterinsurgency program.
But the president is a smart guy, and the president, I believe, is a very shrewd man in the best sense of the word.
And so I retain at least a smidgen of hope that he will understand the trap that he’s being led into here and therefore avoid it.

Read the entire interview here.

And to highlight the coup-like seriousness of the problem, yesterday NATO indeed boxed Obama.
From the UK’s Independent via antiwar.com:

Nato defence ministers signalled their backing for the Afghan strategy put forward by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal yesterday in an implicit rejection of the alternative plan proposed by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
The general had made an unscheduled appearance at the meeting of ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, to give a presentation behind closed doors. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: “What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counter-insurgency approach.”

Real-bad moon rising — an insurgent War, What is it good for?

Update/Add-On:
Just discovered this evening — a way-little noted story of Seymour Hersh’s speech at Duke University 10 days ago, in which he said the US military, along with working hard in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, etc., are also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in…They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”
According to the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, Hersh also had this to say (h/t HuffPost):

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”
The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.
“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

If anywhere near reality, and Hersh has been so-many times around the military block, he’s got a shitload of DOD sources — what a US-constitutional catastrophe.

Ironic in an age of such brain-busting technology, such a simple device can cause such horror.

Four US soldiers were killed last Sunday in a roadside IED blast in eastern Afghanistan, three of those from the Illinois National Guard — 11 from its ranks have now died since the unit arrived in country last September.

“It’s a very, very sad day for our state,” said Gov. Pat Quinn. “Our Illinois National Guard, we’ve sent 3,000 brave men and women to the gates of hell in Afghanistan, and I think it’s important for all of us in Illinois and America to say a prayer for their families.”

An Air Force staff sergeant from Tucson, Ariz., was the fourth fatality in the incident.

The Afghan war is about to get worse.

(Illustration found here).

Makeshift bombs like the one in the situation mentioned above — IEDs or improvised explosive devices — are indeed making life a tortured hell for coalition troops in Afghanistan, and have killed three times the soldiers in the first two months of 2009 than during the same period last year — 32 already this year, only 10 in 2008 with 96 troops wounded in January and February of 2009, a 146 percent increase from the 39 early last year.

IEDs can be made from all kinds of shit, jerry-rigged from household chemicals and appliances, some use standard cooking oil — components just need be of four parts: A power source, switches, an explosive initiator and, of course, some kind of explosive.

Or more gut grabbing: Hand grenade with pin pulled, placed in a small glass with glass filled mortar or plastic of paris; 120-mm HE mortar with hole drilled in shipping cap with an electric blasting cap inserted (placed in a sandbag); suicide vest — leather-look sleeveless waistcoat with explosives and ball bearing sewn into the interior; and maybe a thrown block of TNT with a grenade fuze inside.
Whatever works.

IEDs as terror weapon has a short history.

Not too long ago in a place not too far away — 1886 Chicago and the Haymarket Riot, where some asshole thrown a shrapnel-filled dynamite bomb into a crowd of cops.

Off and running was the concept of terror to influence a shitload of people.

The Haymarket incident cripplied the struggling US labor movement and the bombing resonated for years.
The World Trade Center attacks in 2001 killed 2,752 people, but the event scared the living shit out of 300 million and eventually caused even far, far-worse problems.

T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ was a proponent of IEDs, using railway and roadside bombs to disrupt Turkish supply routes during WWI and create, as he put it, “an uncertain terror for the enemy.”

Flash-forward to Iraq: IEDs really came into its own, killing 70 percent of US troops in combat; Iraq and Afghanistan now carry the scar of IEDs being the signature weapon of those conflicts.

Although all the whack-heads who started both the Iraqi and Afghan misadventures knew the US military was not equipped to handle an IED proliferation, but did nothing, causing another term to arise, “hillbilly armor“, or an ‘improvised defensive device‘ — bits of scrap metal and ballistic glass — used by soldiers to “up-armor” their vehicles.
And from one pissed-off Iraqi war vet:

Well, as it turns out, Bush, Rumsfeld and all those folks who were supposed to be running this bitch knew that when we invaded and toppled Saddam, that an insurgency would develop and those insurgents would develop IEDs that would be used to kill Americans.
In spite of this, they sent us with insufficiently armored vehicles.
In spite of this, they cut off development and deployment of MRAPs.
In spite of this, they failed to provide for returning troops and fully fund the VA.
This has lead to increased homelessness, addiction and suicide amongst returning OIF/OEF veterans.
Now, I usually try to be a good person and forgive and forget. However, it was one of these IEDs that took 6 of my Marines.
I hope these people have a long time to burn in hell.