Clear and chilly this way-too-early Wednesday on California’s north coast as we plow on through another quick-as-a-dash work week.
No matter the situation, time don’t stand still at all.
One nasty time-buster right now is Iraq — a nightmare clock ticking away at the speed of a bullet off an AK-47 rifle, fired toward Baghdad — this morning, more ugly news this time at a major oil production facility north of Tikrit as ISIS militants have apparently taken “75 percent of the refinery,” which could open this terrible shit in another nasty direction.
Although the scenario looks bad, the worse-crazies are still out of range of the major Iraqi oil fields — for now. A nifty map of the situation can be found at Business Insider.
(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Tete d’homme du XVIIeme siecle,’ found here).
Meanwhile, in the last few days at least 500 Iraqi civilians have been killed all over the place during this latest assault, and the disaster last week at Mosul, Tikrit, and Kirkuk, where the Iraq national army took tail and run: In just three days, the army had simply folded as first the jihadist insurgents and then the Kurds rode into town. Its soldiers returned to their homes and its weapons were carted away, either by the peshmerga or the jihadists, depending on who got there first.
Although, the government fired some of the generals involved with the rout, this the most-horrible quote I’ve seen in awhile, but is picture-perfect for the remorse of cowardice:
“I see it in the eyes of my family, relatives and neighbors,” one lieutenant-colonel who escaped the militants’ sweep over the northern city of Mosul told The Associated Press.
“I am as broken and ashamed as a bride who is not a virgin on her wedding night.”
In the nowadays, not so bad, except in those hard-line regions.
The latest Iraq manifestation is not unique in one distinct way — assholes who really should be a near-whore on their wedding night, are allowed to be dressed in white.
In the last few days, the lying, braying, war-praying assholes who created this awful mess in the first place are coming again out of the woodwork and from under moldy rocks to proclaim their righteous-right to blubber insanity.
James Fallows at The Atlantic explains the total shit:
Am I sounding a little testy here?
You bet.
We all make mistakes.
But we are talking about people in public life — writers, politicians, academics — who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong.
Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense.
None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned.
But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago.
In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while.
They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with.
They have earned the right not to be listened to.
And there’s a shit-list of these assholes — even my favorite of the worse of the worse, Paul “Wolfman” Wolfowitz. The self-centered little shit was on “Meet the Press” last Sunday and acted as if 2003 was the year that didn’t happen: “It’s a complicated situation in which you don’t just come up with, ‘We’re going to bomb this, we’re going to do that.'” And then he said, “Maliki is a big part of the problem. He’s not a leader of Iraq. We need to find people there.”
In February 2003, Wolfman blubbered before Congress: These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators. And when the message gets out to the whole Arab world, it’s going to be a powerful counter to Osama bin Laden…It will be a great step forward.
Assholes! Surrounded by assholes!
In a big way, Americans oppose more Iraqi-war nonsense with a new survey released yesterday by Public Policy Polling, with 74 percent of voters oppose sending US troops to Iraq, while 16 percent said that shit is okay.
Further:
Those figures are roughly the same as they were in 2011, when a Gallup poll conducted after President Barack Obama announced the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq found that 75 percent supported the decision to leave, while 21 percent opposed it.
According to the new poll, conducted June 14-15 for Americans United for Change, Democrats (82 percent) and independents (86 percent) overwhelmingly oppose sending U.S. troops to Iraq.
Just 10 percent of Democrats say they would support sending troops to the region; among independents, that figure is 9 percent.
Among Republicans, 28 percent say they would support sending troops to Iraq, while 57 percent oppose the idea.
The release of the poll “is a sign lefty groups are gearing up to oppose any re-engagement,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes, “which means winning the argument with Republicans such as John McCain over not just what to do now, but over the broader meaning and legacy of the Iraq War.”
In a vacuum of sense, can anyone hear you scream?