Just happened to be at the gate (Las Vegas) as a plane-load of U. S. Marines arrived home from Iraq. These guys were mighty glad to be back. I couldn’t help thinking to myself that these guys are acting like they’re home for good. Hope so. As they left the gate area, travelers burst into spontaneous applause. It was moving and –for a few seconds– nobody was thinking about politics.
Category Archives: Military & War
If you support the war in Iraq, why aren’t you over there?
If you support the war in Iraq, why aren’t you over there? That’s the rude question Max Blumenthal asked some young Republicans:
“…when I asked these College Repulicans why they were not participating in this historical cause, they immediately went into contortions. Asthma. Bad knees from playing catcher in high school. “Medical reasons.” “It’s not for me.” These were some of the excuses College Republicans offered for why they could not fight them “over there.”
NYT: The Road Home
“It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.
This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.” — New York Times editorial
Iraq: How bad will it be?
Reply
Rolling Stone convened a panel of experts and asked their opinions on what’s next for Iraq. The panel was comprised of:
- Zbigniew Brzezinski – National security adviser to President Carter
- Gen. Tony McPeak (Retired) – Member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War
- Paul Pillar – Former lead counterterrorism analyst for the CIA
- Richard Clarke – Counterterrorism czar from 1992-2003
- Bob Graham – Former chair, Senate Intelligence Committee
- Michael Scheuer – Former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit; author of Imperial Hubris
- Nir Rosen – Author of In the Belly of the Green Bird, about Iraq’s spiral into civil war
- Chas Freeman – Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War; president of the the Middle East Policy Council
- Juan Cole – Professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan
In the article (Beyond Quagmire, written by Tim Dickin in the March 22, 2007 issue), they asked the panel members for: Best-Case Scenario; Most Likely Scenario; and Worst-Case Scenario.
For years we’ve been hearing “it’s gonna be really bad if we leave,” but I can’t recall anyone getting very specific about that. The Rolling Stone panel seemed to conclude it’s gonna be (is) a shit-story whether we stay or come home. But, finally, someone has provided an answer I can understand.
It’s too late for pounding the Bush administration but General McPeak concluded the article:
“This is a dark chapter in our history. Whatever else happens, our country’s international standing has been frittered away by people who don’t have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn’t make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment [laughs]. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference.”
That’s stinging for me because I was one of those smart-asses that thought/said it really didn’t make any difference who was in the White House. Now I know.
Halliburton hauling ass
Halliburton, the big energy services company, said today that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there. The company will maintain its existing corporate office here as well as its incorporation in the United States.
Halliburton, which was led by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000, is currently in the process of spinning off KBR, its military-contracting unit, to focus on its business of drilling wells and maintaining fields for oil companies. The company did not say what implications the Dubai development might have for its Pentagon contracts. [New York Times]
Rooting for the home team
Matt Taibbi responds to the accustation that liberals are “rooting” for failure in Iraq. Warning: Strong lanuage.
“I’m sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We’re Americans just like you. You don’t have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue; shut up about us. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. “Rooting” is a kid’s word; grow the fuck up.”
Spook Country
Spook Country is William Gibson’s newest novel. According to amazon.com it will be released on August 7, 2007. Fragments of the novel have been posted non-sequentially on Gibson’s blog for some time now, and have led to much speculation on the content and plot of the novel. From the US publisher Putnam’s catalog:
“Tito is in his early 20s. Cuban by ancestry, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a Nolita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.
Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn’t exist yet, which is fine, she’s used to that, but it seems to be actively preventing the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they begin to exist. That would be odd, and even a little scary, if Hollis allowed herself to think about it much, which she can’t afford to do.
Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription anti-anxiety drugs, but he figures he wouldn’t survive 24 hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying the little bubble-packs. What Brown is up to Milgrim can’t say, but it seems to be military – at least, Milgrim’s very nuanced Russian is a big part of it, as is breaking into locked rooms.
Bobby Chombo is a ‘producer’, and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.”
Gibson is far and away my favorite author. Yet another reason to go on.
Matt Taibbi: The argument for more troops
“The argument for more troops assumes that the troops we have there already are actively engaged in making Iraq secure, only there aren’t enough of them. What I saw was that our troops were mostly engaged in keeping themselves secure — and even that was a very tough job. The Iraq war has gone so wrong that it is no longer an occupation, no longer even a security mission. It’s just a huge mass of isolated soldiers running in place in a walled-off FOB (Forward Operating Base) archipelago, trying not to get shot or blown up and occasionally firing back at an enemy over the wall they can’t see. It’s lunacy. Adding more guys to it just means more lunacy. But our government has a high tolerance for that sort of thing, and I wouldn’t bet on it ending anytime soon.”
Do we win by losing?
“Maybe sometimes we need to go pound a country that’s harboring terrorists, for example. But do we need to stay and overthrow the government after the pounding is done? If the U.S. didn’t have troops in Afghanistan, would Osama be any harder to find?
I like to look on the bright side. The U.S. proved that it can destroy any country that it wants. Iraq has shown that no little country can be occupied without unacceptable costs. That seems like a good way to leave things.” — Scott Adams
Have cartoonists always been smarter than politicians, or is it just a W thing?
God bless Miss USA!
Scott Adams asks: “…who would you rather have representing your country – a do-gooder who yammers about world peace, or the hot chick who’s trying to pin Miss Florida against the bar? America is all about freedom, not imposing your views on others. I say let Miss USA be free, like the great nation she represents. If we start restricting Miss USA’s right to party, the Taliban has won”.