War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
This morning the jobs report is better than expected even as AIG posts a second-quarter profit, the media continues to ignore the GOP reality behind the healthcare townhall disruptions and a DOS attack on Twitter, FaceBook and Google leaves techno-life flustered, the news of five US GIs killed in Afghanistan the past couple of days has gone almost un-reported.…
Although I’ve been working on some other projects the past few days, this came up last weekend and is such a glaring example of how this country in reality will never recover from the last eight years, and since I’d seen no comment about it anywhere in any blogs or news commentaries, I just have…
Despite tough tours in Iraq, an even-more persistent and deadly situation: But he says he never encountered an enemy as tenacious as what he saw immediately after arriving at this outpost in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In his first days here in late June, he fought through three ambushes, each lasting as long as the most…
An example of why this so-called ‘War on Terror’ is such a complete, abysmal failure. Sen. James Webb, Democrat from Virginia, has called for an investigation into the details surrounding an attack on a US outpost in eastern Afghanistan last year, which left nine soldiers dead, and offers past Army lies as an incentive. “The manner…
Seymour Hersh had ’em nailed all along. From the New Yorker online: They want to turn these guys into assassins,†a former high-level intelligence officer told me. “They want to go on rumors — not facts — and go for political effect, and that’s what the Special Forces Command is really afraid of. Rummy is…
In the realm of stalemate/quagmire: But after nearly eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, the war’s strategic rationale still remains tenuous. Central Asia holds little intrinsic strategic value to the United States, and America’s security will not necessarily be endangered even if an oppressive regime takes over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory. Given Afghanistan’s…
Four more US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Monday and this morning news of eight suicide bombers striking government compounds in two eastern towns as this near-decade-long war is going from bad to worse to even worser (if there is such a word/situation). Thirty US GIs have already been killed this month, and coupled with 25…
Two US marines were killed Saturday in southern Afghanistan, two more died Monday, while the UK lost eight soldiers in a swift, 24-hour period at the end of last week — a war getting worse and already in apparent bad need of more boots on the ground. An ironic scenerio when coupled with the recent death…
Last fall, I read Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan, which contains a view of the riot/battle at Qala-i-Jangi fort in November, 2001, exposing the US public to a view of some ferocious insurgency fighting in those panic/dream-days just after 9/11. A work of fiction, but Forsyth’s novel has more truth in it than what the US…
Here on the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion comes an odd historical look at the Normandy landings from an altogether different perspective: The civilian inhabitants along that particular French Coast. And according to history, the Allies acted like barbarians — high saturation bombing of cities, villages and even blowing the shit out of a…