War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
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…
Beware of feel-good economic news… (Illustration found here). Even as the US stock markets post some high gains, even as the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which has risen over the past six sessions, also finished Monday at its highest level in a year, and even as those infamous banks appear to slowing on losses…
US troops slugging through Afghanistan are sick of it and according to their chaplains: “The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale,…
Today eight years ago, Oct. 7, 2001… “On my order, U.S. forces have begun strikes on terrorist camps of al Qaeda, and the military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” Bush said in a somber, televised address from the White House Treaty Room. … “We are supported by the collective will of the world,”…
Iran getting nuked — one view of the repercussions… James Howard Kunstler, author of ‘The Long Emergency,’ describes a nightmare domino effect if Iran is bombed, and what the planet would then face. From his aptly titled blog, Clusterfuck Nation: This is a dangerous situation. I’m not so sure that Israel could launch an effective…
“On the heights of the Kabul Gorge, they still find ancient belt buckles and corroded sword hilts. You can no longer read the insignia of the British regiments of the old East India Company but their bones — those of all 16,000 of them — still lie somewhere amid the dark earth and scree of…
(Illustration of Salvador Dali’s The Visages of War found here). War is not pretty, funny or real clever. War is Ambrose Bierce‘s ‘Chickamauga‘ revealed as “the dead body of a woman — the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles…
As I was thinking fairly-clear this morning — thinking is sometimes for me a really, really mega-complicated ordeal and not so unclouded — and although mostly about all kinds of related/unrelated shit, the focus finally came to war, which is part and partial to this whole blog, and on today’s complete-whole world the life-and-death real…
How in the living shit of any-kind-of-daylight can the US ‘win‘ any kind of war in Afghanistan? On Tuesday via Raw Story: According to a watchdog group and a litany of whistleblowers, Armorgroup North America, a key U.S. security contractor in Afghanistan, has suffered a breakdown of its chain of command resulting in an atmosphere…
UPDATE BELOW The war-worn and weary Afghan people go to the polls tomorrow for a national election amidst Taliban scare tactics and a weak central government unable to comprehend the inevitable. In October 2004, Moqadasa Sidiqi (left), was the first Afghan to cast a ballot in the first national election post-Taliban, but she did so in…