Tag Archives: Iraq

Scott Adams: Apology to Iraqi people

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“Whatever you think about the reasons for invading (Iraq), everyone seems to agree that we botched the occupation, and the results have been a disaster for the Iraqi civilian population. I feel like I owe them an apology for letting my idiot government screw them so thoroughly.

Your first reaction might be to explain all the rationalizations, and how war is messy, and it was really Saddam’s fault, and blah, blah, blah. But apologies don’t work that way. I could be wrong, but I think the Iraqi people who were minding their own business would like to hear an apology.

But how? My idiot government won’t apologize on my behalf. And if I fire them and get a new idiot government, they won’t do it either, until fifty years are past. That seems too late.

So here’s my public apology to the Iraqi civilians who did nothing to deserve their current situation: I’m sorry I trusted my idiot government to handle things correctly. I should have been watching more closely. To be honest, I never once thought to even ask if there was a post-war plan. That was clearly a mistake on my part. For that, I am sorry.”

Full post at Dilbert.Blog

“I’m sorry for the way things are in China, I’m sorry things ain’t what they used to be.” — John Denver

Band of Bloggers: War Through A Soldiers Eyes

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Watched a really interesting program on the History Channel last night about military bloggers (milbloggers) in Irag:

“For the first time in history, modern technology is enabling viewers to experience war as it really is… directly from the battlefield. An ever growing band of military bloggers are using the internet, video cameras and cell phones to deliver honest, powerful and uncensored content. Band of Bloggers will be the site that will collect this raw and riveting “soldier generated content.”

Remember the early day of the war when network reporters (and anchors) were “embedded” with our troops, reporting from “the front lines?” Well, a lot of those reporters have got the fuck out of Dodge or been forced to do their reports from the basement of the Baghdad Hilton.

Questions of objectivity aside, you can’t get much more “front line” than these men and women. Some of them have even rigged cameras to their helmets to record video.

If Vietnam was our first televised war, Iraq is our first blogged war. If you’re a blogger or read blogs, you’ll want to watch Band of Bloggers.

“War hasn’t been profitable for decades”

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I recently read Halting State by Charles Stross. It’s science fiction (for lack of a better description) set in 2012 (in Scotland and/or cyberspace). You can read the description on Amazon. A couple of paragraphs have been haunting me for a few days. Not sure they’ll make much sense out of context, but I include them here for future reference:

“This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happen in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree — his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and france — and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of  — sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache — a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”

Who is we? That’s the question you’re asking yourself…

” ‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in — call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. American isn’t in play — they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure –Europe’s– is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out.”

Welcome home, Marines

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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.

If you support the war in Iraq, why aren’t you over there?

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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.”

“How did the mainstream press get it so wrong?”

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Bill Moyers'That’s the question Bill Moyers attempts to answer in “Buying the War” (Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS). A damning indictment of the coverage of the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Tim Russert looked silly and Dan Rather was pathetic. I kept flashing on the old pre-WWII Nazi propaganda footage.

I always thought a good, strong, free press would be our last line of defense against the crooks and thieves we keep electing. (“Gooks in the wire!”)

After watching Buying the War on Tivo, we watched Moyer’s Conversation with Jon Stewart. An insightful look at The Daily Show. What it is and what it is not.

Following that, Moyers did a great segment with Josh Marshall, the political blogger from talkingpointsmemo.com. Blogging for Truth looked at Marshall’s perspective on the role of politics in the recent firings of federal prosecutors.

Watching these back-to-back was interesting. And somewhat reassuring (if you watch them in the right order). You’ll find video and transcripts on the PBS website. Good stuff.

Iraq: How bad will it be?

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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.

Rooting for the home team

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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.”

Matt Taibbi: The argument for more troops

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“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?

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“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?