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-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
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Saturday, December 17, 2011

What if they ended a war -- and nobody cared?
Posted by Jill | 5:21 AM
There's something very, very, very wrong when a war that has gone on for nearly a decade ends, and nobody pays attention -- not even the media, who are too busy sucking up to the dead corpse of their fellow Iraq warflogger Christopher Hitchens to notice.

We may want to forget how this country, still stinging from he 9/11 attacks, were willing to lash out at someone....anyone...in order to make ourselves feel better. Afghanistan didn't satisfy the blood lust, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both had been flogging the Saddam-as-boogeyman for over a decade leading up to George W. Bush's gleeful decision to both gain his father's favor by avenging an alleged death plot against the old man and simultaneously prove once and for all that his dick was even bigger than Daddy. I mean seriously...if you're going to do that silly Oedipal thing in the context of a war, at least go full-out Jimmy Darmody and be a REAL thug.

Yes, we want to forget. I'm sure Thomas Friedman wishes that this wasn't still out there on YouTube for everyone to see in perpetuity. I'm sure Bill Keller wants to forget all about Judith Miller. I'm sure every pundit that painted this as some kind of noble venture to both avenge our wound and create Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East wants to forget. Even now, it's painful to watch George W. Bush's blink-blink-blink-sure-sign-of-a-liar announcement of the start of the war.

The one person who never wanted to forget was Christopher Hitchens, who while he might have wished that Iraq hadn't been the clusterfuck that it was, was unrepentant about it until the end. Stabler over at Hitchens Watch has a summary of exactly what it waas that Hitchens was supporting.

Perhaps the outpouring for Christopher Hitchens is designed to give people like Friedman and Keller and all the other warfloggers at the time some cover, as his death gives them a reason to engage in verbal diarrhea over his passing instead of having to answer for their failure to engage in journalistic skepticism at the time. We're long past the realization that the talking heads of Washington and the gasbags of the Sunday morning network TV Mouse Circus (™ Driftglass) are a bunch of hacks who'll sell their souls for cocktail weenies and pinot noir at Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee's place. We expect them to want to walk back all their armchair braggadocio. But what of the rest of us? What about all the people still sporting mouldering "Support Our Troops" ribbon magnets on their SUVs and still voting for Republicans who want to slash veterans benefits? What about 54-60% who supported the war before it began? Should millions of people be able to get off the hook so easily, when we have the blood of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on our hands? And what of the families of the dead? What of the mothers, siblings, children and spouses of those who died in this misadventure? How can we make sense of their loss without forgetting the lies that took their loved ones away from them?

Lessons learned? What has been learned, when Newt Gingrich is out there calling for regime change in Iran and announcing that the insane John Bolton would be his Secretary of State? What has been learned when Mitt Romney, a man involved in his own penis size with daddy dilemma, throws red meat to Wall Street Journal editorial page readers and says that unlike that pussy Obama, I won't let Iran get nuclear weapons, and I'll do it by surrounding Iran with military ships, throwing more money at Israel (which has the side benefit of maybe getting me some Jewish votes in Florida), and I'll talk really, really, really tough.

All the GOP candidates are saber-rattling about Iran. It's what Republicans do -- create wars to serve the military contractors that help fill their coffers. And wars in the Middle East also make the oil men who are another sizable source of Republican cash happy. But what you will never hear from any of them is how George W. Bush's misadventure in Iraq has made the very same Iran about which they are saber-rattling now that much more of a concern.

Loren Thompson at Forbes.com:
The one local government run by Shiites that Maliki can turn to for help when the Americans are gone is that of Iran, which is essentially a Shiite theocracy. In other words, what looks like a fledgling democracy in Iraq to some U.S. policymakers looks to the governments in surrounding states more like a huge opportunity for radical leaders in Teheran to expand their influence. I won’t get into how resentful many Sunni Arabs are about the role America played in giving Shiites — a distinct minority in the Arab world — political power in Iraq, but that is likely to be a potent factor in future regional relations.

Concerns about Iranian influence in one of the Arab world’s premier oil-producing states explains why some of the U.S. troops departing Iraq aren’t going any farther away than neighboring Kuwait. Until Washington has a better understanding of Maliki’s intentions and his ability to control Iraq’s many political factions, it is likely to keep a sizable military presence nearby.

[snip]

Local troublemakers know the U.S. electorate has had enough of Iraq, and that our threats to deal forcefully with them if they try to destabilize Maliki’s regime probably are empty (it might de-legitimize him to invite us back).

But it isn’t just perceptions of weakening resolve that have undermined Washington’s ability to influence developments in the region. America’s uneven performance in the Iraq war prior to the removal of Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon’s top post in 2006 eliminated any residual sense of U.S. military omnipotence that survived the 9-11 attacks. CIA analysts turned out to be ignorant about what was happening in Iraq. American soldiers had a devilish time coping with improvised explosive devices and other relatively simple tactics employed by a poorly-equipped and under-resourced adversary. The success of insurgents in pushing America’s vast military machine to the verge of defeat three years into the conflict will undoubtedly inform the efforts of future enemies.

Iran doesn't care about the saber-rattling of armchair quarterbacks like Newt Gingrich, because they've seen what happens when pasty American Republicans talk tough -- they rush into military adventures for the sound bites and the preening alone, without concern for the actual mission. Paradoxically, that makes this group of GOP candidates that much more dangerous, because with George W. Bush having demonstrated that all the money we spend on weaponry doesn't make us competent to wage the 21st century's wars, this bunch of bellicose warwhores won't hesitate to up the ante by dropping nukes on Iran. And then we're all done for.

Perhaps that's why no one wants to look at what we've left in Iraq.

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Saturday, August 23, 2008

Mike Boettcher Takes Flight With No Ignoring! Truth Through Risk!
Posted by Anonymous | 11:48 PM
Our good friend, Mike Boettcher, of No Ignoring!, has reportedly completed preproduction and headed back to the sandbox. He headed out yesterday and is currently in Kuwait at Ali as Salim Air Base. He is now scheduled for an early equipment draw and then an air movement into Baghdad's Green Zone, followed by a Rhino Ride to Camp Liberty. At Liberty the team has a production trailer from which they will jump headlong into the dangerous project that they have spent months preparing for via a boot camp-like preproduction situation. The time in Baghdad is approximately 7 hours ahead of us here in New York City, and as he is duplicating the experience of the soldiers in the field, we can expect that by now Mike and his team are exhausted.

In the coming weeks, Mike will be providing us with information and stories from the battlefield to the field camps of Iraq. He and his team will be living alongside the soldiers and showing their experiences as soldiers, members of their platoons, and as human beings far from home, doing a job that is as difficult as it is terrifying and heartbreaking.






At the same time, Mike will be co-teaching a groundbreaking class, "War and Media,"at his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, along with the Gaylord College of Journalism. Mike will appear weekly via video link to interact with students and give them an on the ground experience of what goes into war reporting. More on that here.

c/p RIPCoco

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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

We'd be within our rights to demand an apology
Posted by Jill | 6:55 AM
Remember when you would try to tell your friends that the case for war in Iraq was fabricated, that there were no mass stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks? Remember how that guy in the office called you a traitor? Remember the guy in the Hummer who tailgated you on the Turnpike because you had a "No Blood for Oil" bumper sticker on your car?

All those people owe you an apology, because you were right. And I wonder what hoops those people are jumping through now to justify what they believed then, especially in the face of this:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

[snip]

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

[snip]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.


Except there's going to be no impeachment. At this point there isn't time. The Bush Administration has effectively played out the clock, except for one little glitch: impeachment and conviction only serves to remove the president from office; it is not a criminal prosecution. I would rather see this president and his henchmen on trial for war crimes after he leaves office.

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Friday, June 06, 2008

Can we please use the word "lie" now?
Posted by Jill | 6:42 AM
Why is the press still reluctant to tell the truth about George W. Bush's run up to war -- that is a bald-faced liar who deliberately lied to the very Americans he's supposed to serve because he wanted to get into a war that he thought would give him a Great Legacy™ and fatten the pockets of himself and his cronies in the bargain?

Now that the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has come out, this is no longer the exclusive province of bloggers and "kooks." It is absolute truth, that this president betrayed the trust of the American people in a way no other president has done in my lifetime -- not even Nixon. And yet, as he plays out the string of his ghastly, destructive, miserable presidency, the press still won't call him a liar.

Today's headlines:

"Inflated." "Misused." "Overstated." "Exaggerated." Even the report refuses to use "The L Word":
“Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,”

Richard Clarke weighed in on Countdown last night:





Let's not surgarcoat it: This president is a liar. A shameless bold-face liar. And that is to our eternal shame.

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Saturday, September 15, 2007

Between an iRack and a Hard Place
Posted by Anonymous | 6:53 AM
Victory defined at last
Even during the “glory years” with the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, I believed that Saturday Night Live just wasn’t that funny. Oh sure, there were always random moments of savage comedic brilliance, but most of the time I felt as though I needed a few shots and a bong hit for the jokes to work.

I thought shows like SCTV, In Living Color, the Upright Citizens Brigade, The Kids in The Hall, and MADtv were much funnier. Shorter, too.

After seeing Bush and his lying sock puppet of a general in the news the other day, I remembered this classic comedy sketch from MADTV that satirizes both Steve Jobs and the War in Iraq. It’s intelligent, well-crafted, ruthless in its’ logic, and doesn’t overstay its’ welcome. Only the humorless disciples of the Cult of Mac wouldn’t find this textbook example of a perfect comedy routine funny, and even then I’ll bet a treacherous chuckle will sneak out when St. Jobs isn’t looking.

You'll laugh bitterly even as the tears run down your face.

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Sunday, September 02, 2007

The Neverending War
Posted by Anonymous | 11:02 AM


Lynn Woolsey (D--CA) was the first member of Congress to demand that President Bush bring the troops home and is a co-founder of the "Out of Iraq Caucus". Although this was spoken months ago, it's more relevant now. Woolsey was angry, and anybody with a brain and a conscience should be too.

“The American public voted Democrats into power for one simple reason - they trusted us to act boldly to hold this President accountable and to bring our troops home. So far we are failing the very trust that they have placed in us. But more importantly, every day that we allow this occupation to continue we are failing our brave young men and women who are serving honorably and professionally in Iraq. And we are failing their families here at home, who, while struggling to keep their lives and families together, are forced to worry whether their loved ones will come home alive, and if so in what condition.

“Today is not an opportunity to claim victory, or to give bellicose speeches for partisan gain. Today is an opportunity to grieve for the soldiers who have sacrificed their lives for this President’s failed Iraq policy, to stand by our nation’s sons and daughters who suffer through the irreparable physical and mental wounds of war, and to grieve for the lives that we will continue to lose so long as this President refuses to bring our troops home, and continues to send our young men and women to die for his failure.”





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Crisis
Posted by Anonymous | 8:54 AM
"This is notoriously a time of crises, most of them false. A crisis is a turning point, and the affairs of the world don't turn as radically or as often as the daily newspapers would have us believe. Every so often, though, we've stopped dead by a crisis that we recognize at once as the genuine article; we recognize it not by its size (false crises can be made to look as big as real ones) but because in the course of it, for a measurable, anguished period--sometimes only minutes, sometimes, rarely as much as a day--nothing happens. Truly nothing. It is the moment of stasis between a deed that has been performed and must be responded to and the deed that will respond to it. At a false turning point, we nearly always know, within limits, what will happen next; at a true turning point, we not only know nothing, we know (something much more extraordinary and more terrifying) that nobody knows. Truly nobody."
--an editorial from The New Yorker

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