Slobber And Spittle (Archive)

There was some good news today, whatever else happens. Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman who wrote so many poignant articles about her experiences during and after the Iraq War, has made another entry in her blog after an absence of several years.

As you might imagine, she has a quite a few things to say, among them, asking the question that any American who can still use his mind ought to be asking about now:

What about George Bush, Condi, Wolfowitz, and Powell? Will they ever be held accountable for the devastation and the death they wrought in Iraq? Saddam was held accountable for 300,000 Iraqis... Surely someone should be held accountable for the million or so?

Finally, after all is said and done, we shouldn't forget what this was about - making America safer... And are you safer Americans? If you are, why is it that we hear more and more about attacks on your embassies and diplomats? Why is it that you are constantly warned to not go to this country or that one? Is it better now, ten years down the line? Do you feel safer, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of the way (granted half of them were women and children, but children grow up, right?)?

Ten Years On...

We aren't safer, and there's no reason to think we will be any time soon. That alone should have made Americans hopping mad about the waste of life and money, but it hasn't. Not enough of us to matter, anyway. What we've learned here is that there are two sets of rules. Those in charge can screw up all they like, and there will always be plenty of people ready to make excuses for them. Those of us who aren't in charge don't get to make any mistakes at all, and all those people who are happy to make excuses for the rich and famous are equally glad to blame us for all our problems.

We've learned that the Land Of The Free and The Home Of The Brave is no longer either. Far too many of us lost our minds on September 11, 2001, and the rest of us were along for the ride. Our corrupt and ignorant leaders were glad to lead the crazy on a quest to do something insane.

But at least Riverbend and her family have survived. They seem to have become permanent refugees, more victims of our folly. She tells the story at her blog, and I'll link there so you can read it, too.

Progressive columnist William Rivers Pitt apparently noticed something recently:

From the moment the Supreme Court decision came down in 2000 that gifted the White House to Bush, to the moment he was finally and forever out of power, I resisted him and his works, because I knew what he represented, what he was about, and what he was doing to my beloved country. My instincts were finely honed, and I gave probably a million words - in print, and spoken aloud on the road for some 800,000 miles - to the cause of thwarting him and everything he stood for.

And now? Now I'm suddenly wondering where that guy has been. He sure as hell isn't the one I see in the mirror. He lapsed into a moral coma, lulled by his idea of America and by the election of someone who can talk the birds out of the trees even as the lumberjacks clear-cut the forest.

Waking From My Moral Coma

I should point out that at least Mr. Pitt seems to be waking up to the reality of what's been going on all these years since the Little Bush Administration went to the great pig ranch in the sky. He's way ahead of some of his colleagues in that department. Still, you have to wonder why it took so long. I think that portion I emphasized explains why. I'll get back to that in a moment.

The proximate cause of Pitt's awakening was the case of Tomas Young, an Iraq War veteran whose spinal cord was severed by an insurgent's bullet not long after he arrived there. The man's health has deteriorated so much that he is contemplating suicide. It would be a tragic story even if the war he'd been engaged in was a necessary one. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and one hell of a lot of other people suffered similarly awful fates.

As Pitt writes:

I believe in the idea that is America, but Tomas Young is dying because he believed, too. He is dying, and the people who delivered him to the slow sunset of his death remain utterly unmolested by the rule of law we Americans take so much misguided pride in. I live with my idea of America in one hand, and the dying light of Tomas Young in the other, and when I look in the mirror, I cannot meet my own eyes. I spent all those years fighting against everything that is ending Tomas Young's life, I made documenting their serial crimes my life's work...and then I let it slide, because Bush was gone, and I couldn't summon the necessary energy to remain outraged over the fact that they all got away with the crime of the millennium scot-free.

Waking From My Moral Coma

That Pitt is late to "the party", as John MClane put it is mostly interesting because Pitt is right - he should have known better. Even now, though, he still mostly seems to be berating himself for not staying outraged enough.

But Barack Obama was so much more articulate than W. had ever been, Pitt seems to be saying. This is something that has had me grinding my teeth ever since Obama was inaugurated the first time whenever a progressive has uttered those words. All I can ever seem to say in response is "Who frigging cares?"

Really, what difference does it make? The man has delivered thousands more young men and women into the same hell Tomas Young inhabits. He has carried out assassinations at a rate Bush and his crew of thugs could only dream of, and most progressives haven't raised an objection worth noting. "Oh, you can't change things overnight", they'd say. Yes, he could. He had the power to order our armies home just as much as Bush had the right to order them there in the first place, maybe more. He didn't.

Pitt seems to disagree with that assessment, though:

Make no mistake, now: that's not an "Obama is the same as Bush" argument. Nobody is Bush, because Bush stands alone, and whoever makes that kind of equivalency either slept through the first eight years of this century, hit their head and forgot what those eight years were like, or is trying to sell you something.

Waking From My Moral Coma

I think that anyone who can write that has slept through the last five years, and let's not forget, Pitt is the one who said he was in a "coma". There's no difference that matters to me between those two. How they have conducted their business has been remarkably similar, and the differences don't always speak well of Obama. I'm outraged by Obama's actions for the same reasons I was outraged by the same actions when George W. Bush committed them. I was outraged when it was clear that Obama was going to give Bush and his torturers cover.

What someone does, measured against what he has the power to do, is what matters to most to me about a person. In that regard, Obama is as much of a failure as Bush. If Bush had made this country a better place while he was in office, or at least had tried to, I'd consider his bumbling verbal style nothing more than an amusing quirk. What matters is the work, and in that regard Obama has kept the Bush Administration alive into its fourth term.

Being articulate and educated doesn't impress me, in and of itself. What a person does with that education is what matters. When educated people do wrong, it's far worse than when people who might not understand the historical or social context do so. In short, educated people should know better. "Constitutional scholars" who violate the Constitution offend me more than lazy minded oafs who do the same.

Why do I think that's what Pitt was doing? This quote, for one thing:

I am finished with the moral geometry that says this is better than that, which makes this good. This is not good; this is, in fact, intolerable. Allowing the perpetrators of war crimes - widely televised ones at that - to retain their good name and go on Sunday talk shows as if they had anything to offer besides their ideology of murder and carnage is intolerable. Entertaining the idea that the billions we spend preparing for war cannot be touched, and so the elderly and the infirm and the young and the weak and the voiceless must pay the freight instead, is intolerable.

The pornography of America's global killing spree is intolerable, and, by the by, I am sick of hearing about drones. A child killed by a Hellfire missile that was fired from a drone is exactly, precisely as dead as a child killed by a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, precisely as dead as a child killed by a smart bomb, precisely as dead as a child killed by a sniper, precisely as dead as a child killed by a land mine, or by a cruise missile, or by any of the myriad other ways instant death is dealt by this hyper-weaponized nation of ours.

Waking From My Moral Coma

Caption: A BLU-97 cluster bomblet found in Al Maajala, Yemen, in December, 2009.

Image credit: Amnesty International/Common Dreams

For that matter, dropping a cluster bomb on a "terrorist camp" is a war crime, too. It amazes me still that so many of the same progressives who proclaim loudly that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes have no comment on the indiscriminate use of our air power against targets in countries that we're not even at war with. At least our leaders in World War II had the excuse that they were fighting against real enemies with real armies, and they hadn't signed a treaty yet that made such things explicitly illegal. Using an area weapon like a cluster bomb in an area where civilians are located is the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

Obama is every bit as about those things Pitt decries as George W. Bush. It's just that Bush couldn't have come up with a phrase like "the moral geometry" to save his life. That kind of excuse-making is the sort that people with some logic and language skills devise.

So, if I were able to give Mr. Pitt advice, it would be this: don't worry about looking in the mirror. Everyone gets tired sometimes. I did. What I'd be thinking about if I were you is why you let it slide - what made you think that it was OK, or to use your terminology, what made you decide there was a "geometry" to the pointless deaths of innocent people when Obama was the Decider? Then, and I say this in all seriousness and with considered thought:

Don't fucking do it again!!

Pitt is still ahead of most progressives on this issue, if this recent article is any indication. So congratulations on waking up. Now pass it on.

I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

Wikiquotes: Babylon 5 - (Marcus Cole)

A little over five years ago, I wrote this about the blog of a young woman from Iraq:

For those who don't know who Riverbend is, join the club. I know of her, but like most people who read her blog Baghdad Burning, I wouldn't know her if she was standing right next to me. That might be her picture on that book cover. Then again, it might not be for all I know. Nevertheless, like many of her readers, I felt some relief when I read this at Juan Cole's site[.]

Riverbend Has Left Iraq

It has now been five years since her last post in her blog, when she wrote this:

Syria is a beautiful country- at least I think it is. I say “I think” because while I perceive it to be beautiful, I sometimes wonder if I mistake safety, security and normalcy for ‘beauty’. In so many ways, Damascus is like Baghdad before the war- bustling streets, occasional traffic jams, markets seemingly always full of shoppers… And in so many ways it’s different. The buildings are higher, the streets are generally narrower and there’s a mountain, Qasiyoun, that looms in the distance.

Bloggers Without Borders

As I noted at the time, Syria was the most popular destination for Iraqi refugees. At one time, there were millions of them there.

Riverbend's last post went on to say that she was in Damascus, at least briefly. Where she ended up, and what happened to her, is a mystery as far as I can tell, because nothing has appeared from Riverbend since. She might be dead, in hiding, or just not interested in communicating with the rest of the world - given the information we have, it could be any of those. Either way, she's a casualty. Her life was changed in terrible ways by our invasion of Iraq.

Salam Pax, another Iraqi blogger who wrote at his eponymous blog, remained in Iraq as late as 2009. In March of that year, he wrote this, referring to an AP article entitled "It’s Fear That Keeps Baghdad’s Peace":

I know AP has numbers to back these claims up and, hey, just look at us. My aunts and uncles, four Shia families, and us we haven’t dared go back to our homes in the west of Baghdad, now declared Sunni. The first time we went to visit since 2005 was last month and it was depressing. So few of the old neighbours are still there and it feels so much less vibrant than the inner Baghdad neighbourhoods..

The Fear

He wrote that he was initially offended by the title, but eventually decided that it was largely true.

So maybe Riverbend and her family were right to leave Iraq for Syria. Unfortunately, now Syria is creating its own refugee problem, because it is involved in a civil war that has dragged on for a year and a half, and looks to drag on a good deal longer:

Up to 335,000 Syrian refugees have registered with the United Nations, ten times more than in March, but the real figure could be as high as 500,000, a U.N. refugee agency official said on Tuesday.

The UNHCR said last month that up to 700,000 refugees may flee the violence in Syria by the end of the year, four times higher than its June prediction.

Most of those fleeing are taking refuge in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

Up to 335,000 people have fled Syria violence - UNHCR

One potential refugee destination is noticeably absent: Iraq. Five years later, things are not yet safe enough in Iraq for people to flee there from a war zone.

Which brings us to the opening quote from Babylon 5. We, the United States and a few allies, invaded Iraq for no good reason. The people of Iraq hadn't attacked us, nor had its government. Yet we invaded the country, turned it upside down and shook it until it broke apart, then left the pieces on the ground to fix themselves. Estimates vary widely, but anywhere from a couple of hundred thousand to a couple of million Iraqis died in the aftermath of that war. We created more than four million refugees, many of whom have tales as tragic as Riverbend's. And for what?

Yes, it was President Bush's fault that he had people tortured so that he could make the bogus case for the war in Iraq. But it's not his fault that will happen again, nor is it his fault that our government is still committing war crimes. It's the fault of the current occupant. Yet I'm told that I simply have to vote for this guy, that it's the mature thing to do.

As Marcus Cole pointed out, the universe, or at least our little corner of it, is a cold and uncaring place. We're a product of that universe, and we Americans have clearly learned to fit right into it.

Afterword: I'd like to thank One Fly for reminding me about this in a comment yesterday. I'd intended to write something, but had pretty much forgotten about it. He has some thoughts on this as well, as you might imagine. And he's right - the war against Iraq was a crime against humanity, a crime we have steadfastly refused to admit to, let alone address, as a people. Even as progressives, the record is pretty sorry. To them, it appears that if a Democratic President does something, it must be legal, including covering for another administration's war crimes.

UPDATE (Apr. 14, 2013): Riverbend has posted an update to her blog, Baghdad Burning. Apparently, she and her family have been refugees ever since her last post in 2007.

Caption: Iraqi railroad engineer Abdul Latif Salman walks along Saddam Hussein's old train near Baghdad in the Al Jazeera documentary "Witness: The Green Train".

Image credit: Screenshot of this Al Jazeera video by Cujo359

Something I don't discuss here, because it's seldom relevant to anything, is that I've always been interested in trains. Yes, I have some model trains. Every once in a great while, I even pull them out of their boxes and run them.

So when I saw a video at Al Jazeera about trains in Iraq, I was especially interested. First, of course, to see the trains. There's another reason, though. Trains go everywhere in a country that's prosperous. They do that in America, even, though they're far more likely to be freight trains. Back in the day, they used to say that you could see a different version of America from trains. You could see peoples' back yards, the industrial buildings they try to keep away from the rich parts of town, and lots of other things you wouldn't see taking a car, let alone a plane. And so it seems to be in Iraq, too.

Here's a quote from the Al Jazeera web page for the video:

Once upon a time Iraq boasted an extensive railway network criss-crossing the country. But like so much else there, trains were a victim of the years of conflict and now only a skeleton service still runs.

Sixty-one year-old Abdul Latif Salman has a unique connection to the railways and a personal history that mirrors the turbulence of recent decades.

In his youth he was one of three drivers assigned to Saddam Hussein's private luxury train.

He was later a prisoner of war in Iran for ten years and his son was killed by a bomb attack on a government building in Iraq.

Witness: The Green Train

That last paragraph says so much about Iraq. In a way, the American invasion was only the latest in a long line of miseries the Iraqis have had to endure over the years. Their war with Iran, years of Saddam Hussein's rule and the embargoes it brought on, and finally the invasion and the civil war that followed have come one after another to this once prosperous country.

The title of the report is "The Green Train", a reference to the color the train that runs from Baghdad to Basra used to be. They're painted blue now, for reasons that Abdul Salman doesn't understand. His thought on that is the title of this article: "The color has nothing to do with the past or the present." It seems like Iraq's leaders have taken a page out of our book - if something is unpopular, make some quick superficial change, and people will feel better. At least, such must be the theory behind that sort of rule. Whatever it is, I don't think it works very well. The only green train I saw was the old train of Saddam's, still in a train yard where it had been stripped bare by looters after the Iraqi government collapsed.

As we follow Abdul Salman we see the realities of the new Iraq - the road blocks, the almost constant presence of security people, the lack of crowds. Salman is a fan of movies. He mentions having seen The Birds and Psycho, for instance. He mentions that in today's Iraq, a few hundred people gathered together in a crowd would be too tempting a target for bombings. Things weren't like that before the invasion, he says, and I'm sure he's right. Maybe if there's any lesson we should learn from the disaster of our war in Iraq, it's that this is what happens after. We should also remember that there are reasons you don't want government so small you can drown it in a bathtub. We drowned Iraq's government, and the result was years of chaos.

People keep talking every September about how I'm supposed to remember 9/11. I say they should remember this. Remember Abdul Salman's decade as a prisoner of war, in a war we helped continue because we didn't like what Iran did to us. Remember his dead son, killed in the unrest that followed the invasion. Remember the cinemas no one can visit for fear they'll be killed thanks to that unrest. Multiply all that by tens of thousands of times, for everyone it happened to in Iraq when we invaded the place. Remember what misdirected anger and obsessive fear can do to a country, when you have the power that we do.

Remember that, for fuck sake.

As someone who is interested in trains, I can see something of American rail fans in Abdul Salman. He knows the history of his country's trains. He talks about Agatha Christie having ridden trains there while she and her husband lived in the country. You can imagine him shaking his head as he relates the story of how American armed convoys expected his coworkers to stop a train for them. He wonders why they have to change the color of the trains, when the color they were was something people knew.

Abdul Latif Salman sees a part of his country many people probably don't. If you want to see what Iraq looks like today, watching this video is well worth the time. It's something you're not likely to see on U.S. television for many years to come.

UPDATE: Changed the paragraph that referred to the death of Salman's son. His son was killed by a suicide bomber.

Caption: My copy of Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near. I can't think of a more fitting memorial to the man than his work.

Image credit: Photo by Cujo359

Having had my nose to an entirely different grindstone this week, I missed this bit of news from Thursday:

Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.

At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Dies

Shadid was the kind of foreign correspondent that I wish we had far more of here in America. He wasn't, like so many of his colleagues, content to read official press releases, go to parties and other functions put on by the elites of a country, then tell us what was supposedly happening there. He told the stories of the Middle Eastern countries he covered through the eyes of ordinary people he met there - folks like you and me, but in whatever country he was stationed. His book Night Draws Near, about Iraq just prior to and during the 2002 invasion, was both heartwarming and tragic. It was a reminder of what Iraqis had suffered under Saddam Hussein, and what they would suffer under the aftermath of his regime as well.

Reporters of his caliber are few and far between, whether in the Middle East or anywhere else in American journalism. He will be missed.

I haven't felt like writing about Christopher Hitchens' passing. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think his credulous and arrogant support for the war in Iraq was probably the biggest reason. Whatever else he's done, and he has done a lot, that's a stain that deserves to be on his memory. No one with a properly skeptical mind would have believed the case for war. It wasn't there. Yet Hitchens trumpeted it as though he was a high priest delivering the word of his god.

Meanwhile, in his second article about Hitchens, biology Professor P.Z. Myers gets it pretty close to right, I think:

Hitchens was a complicated fellow: talented and intelligent, and on some subjects he was warm and humane and a true child of the Enlightenment. And on others, a bloodthirsty barbarian and a club-carrying primitive. At least in his final months it was the civilized and thoughtful humanist who emerged most.

The dark side of Hitchens

Besides his support for that disastrous war, my other lasting impression of Hitchens is his voluntarily subjecting himself to waterboarding. As he wrote before the experiment, he didn't believe it was torture. After experiencing it for himself, he courageously wrote that it was, indeed, torture. That was Hitchens in one bad afternoon - the arrogance to think that what other people who had experienced it said about it wasn't true, the curiosity to try it for himself, and the honesty to write about what he experienced and what he felt afterward.

Oh, and by the way, in that article he finally got around to mentioning Malcolm Nance, a counter-insurgency and SERE expert whom I'd quoted almost a year previously. He wasn't hard to find.

It was interesting to see that Prof. Myers was somewhat in awe of Hitchens. I can't see PZ being fooled by some con job like the "case" for the Iraq War, nor would he have ever been fool enough to believe that waterboarding wasn't torture. For my money, Myers is a hell of a lot smarter. I suspect that's because, as a scientist, Myers is uncomfortably aware that even really smart people can be really, really wrong. All they have to do is forget that it's possible.

Hitchens was a complicated man. Whether he will be missed probably depends on how those complexities worked out for you. I'm sad to say that I won't miss him all that much, except as an example of how arrogance can make you stupid.

Apparently, someone else is mourning the passing of the Space Shuttle:

I was talking about this depressing turn of events last Friday at a somewhat misnamed happy hour with my friend Ellen, who just about slumped forward to the point where her forehead was touching the icy rim of her martini glass, so demoralized was she over the prospect of the end of America’s space program, with all it symbolized—the ebbing of American optimism and enterprise, our supremacy in science and technology, the inexorable decline of the country. “And all because we couldn’t get our shit together to tax rich people and quit fighting expensive wars,” she said. Which gave me the idea for this cartoon.

We Could've Had the Moon

As I've mentioned before, we could have had a lot of things, instead of two failed wars and more on the way. Count the Moon, Mars, and any real chance of doing anything in space until the Chinese get there among them.

Anyway, go read the article. It's at both the image credit link and the quote link.

(h/t Pharyngula)

It's another Memorial Day in America. For the first time, we are involved in three separate wars. Here's an aerial view of the section of Arlington Cemetery that is set aside for casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Image credit: Screenshot of TangoGPS display of Google satellite imagery by Cujo359

Click on the picture and look carefully, you can see the headstones. There are lots of them.

It's called Section 60, which some call the saddest acre in America. Ignore the great war of my formative years, Vietnam, and that would certainly be an accurate label. It might be even if one doesn't ignore our tragic misadventure in Indochina. At least back then the country cared that a war was going on. It sometimes seems we don't even remember these wars, and the victims of them who are buried here.

On this Memorial Day, like just about all the Memorial Days of the last decade, I find myself wishing we had real political leaders who kept us out of these useless tragedies, or were really willing to risk their careers to end them. Unfortunately, about all we're left with are the opportunists, crooks, and nonentities who run things now.

America's saddest acre won't be closing anytime soon.

UPDATE: Speaking of Vietnam, Dana Hunter wrote about some of her father's memories of Vietnam today:

My dad used to tell me stories.

He'd been in Vietnam. Infantry, United States Army. He'd gotten drafted while switching colleges (never let it be said grades aren't important: they can keep you from getting shot, for instance). And it was a hard year. That year changed his life. He went to war. He lost half his hearing when someone shot a .45 near his ear in a tunnel; he'd had his jaw broken by a bullet; he still has bits of shrapnel working their way out of his chest from a grenade wound he took to the ankle. He still won't sit with his back to a door. And for years, he could only allow bits and pieces of that year to surface. He'd talk about it, but only in fragments. Some of it he barely talked about at all.

Memorials

Each of the dead has stories to tell, and each of them is missed by someone. That's the universal tragedy of war.

Speaking of stories, somehow this one by Army LTC Robert Bateman made the rounds back in 2007 and I missed it:

"10:36 hours: The clapping starts at the E-Ring. That is the outermost of the five rings of the Pentagon and it is closest to the entrance to the building. This clapping is low, sustained, hearty. It is applause with a deep emotion behind it as it moves forward in a wave down the length of the hallway.

"A steady rolling wave of sound it is, moving at the pace of the soldier in the wheelchair who marks the forward edge with his presence. He is the first. He is missing the greater part of one leg, and some of his wounds are still suppurating. By his age I expect that he is a private, or perhaps a private first class.

"Captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels meet his gaze and nod as they applaud, soldier to soldier. Three years ago when I described one of these events, those lining the hallways were somewhat different. The applause a little wilder, perhaps in private guilt for not having shared in the burden ... yet.

Fridays at the Pentagon

I spent most of my adult life working with and around people like this. They are good people - maybe a little conservative for my tastes, but good people. Their sense of duty shows in this story, the duty of superiors to their people as much as the reverse. So does their sense of honor. You might think, based on things I've written before that this is an odd thing for me to write, but articles like that are more about the rare opportunists who excel in the civilian world.

So, if you wonder why, instead of extolling the exploits of Seal Team 6, I focus on the cost of the wars we wage, it's because I've seen that cost for far too long. I've seen it in broken minds, broken bodies, and amusing stories of comrades long gone. As I wrote in my first Memorial Day post:

To be a young soldier in a war is to learn the meaning of "choiceless". They are usually told what to do, where to go, and what not to do or where not to go. The consequences for not following those directions can be drastic. They are often even told when they can sleep and eat, in contradiction to what seems like the most basic human instincts. When they are sent to a war their only choices are to serve or face jail, or worse. That's their duty.

Our duty is to make sure that they aren't sent into a war for frivolous reasons, which as I've mentioned before, we have not done. The other part of our responsibility is to help the soldiers who are hurt in those wars as well as we are able. In that way we've also failed to do our duty.

I think the best way we can thank all these people for what they have done for us is to live up to our end of the bargain.

A Way To Say Thank You

We've done a really lousy job of that lately.

Is anyone surprised at this?

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball" by German and American intelligence officials, now admits he made up tales of mobile biological weapons trucks and clandestine weapons factories in Iraq, information that was used by the Bush White House to press the case for war. He also says he'd do it again.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," Janabi told The Guardian. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

'Curveball': I Lied About Iraq WMD To Help Topple Saddam

Anyone who thinks that someone from another country wouldn't lie to a foreign intelligence service to serve his own agenda, or that of his country, is a damn fool. Anyone who would believe someone who says something like this with no credible corroborating evidence, which is what the situation clearly was even at that time, is a flaming idiot.

Of course, "flaming idiots" is a good description of many of the "serious" people we see on TV being offered up as experts on foreign policy. I really wonder if they have ever been anywhere more foreign than the next nearest supermarket to their own houses.

Caption: Riverbend's book. Alive or dead, she's a casualty, like millions of her countrymen.

It's hard not to read something like this without some mixed emotions:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011, saying his new government and the country's security forces were capable of confronting any remaining threats to Iraq's security, sovereignty and unity.

Mr. Maliki spoke with The Wall Street Journal in a two-hour interview, his first since Iraq ended nine months of stalemate and seated a new government after an inconclusive election, allowing Mr. Maliki to begin a second term as premier.

A majority of Iraqis—and some Iraqi and U.S. officials—have assumed the U.S. troop presence would eventually be extended, especially after the long government limbo. But Mr. Maliki was eager to draw a line in his most definitive remarks on the subject. "The last American soldier will leave Iraq" as agreed, he said, speaking at his office in a leafy section of Baghdad's protected Green Zone. "This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration. It is sealed."

Iraq Wants the U.S. Out

Of course, the most prevalent feeling is that it's about time we were out of there. We never should have been there in the first place. It's pretty clear that Iraqis have good reason to want us gone, we've wrecked the place, and it wasn't all that great when we got there.

Still, it does feel sad to be getting the bum's rush out of there. We lost good people there, and spent a lot of treasure, too. It's hard not to expect that people would be grateful for that, but I doubt I would be if I were in their place.


Caption: BARWANAH, Iraq (November 7, 2006) - U.S. Marines gather around the boots, helmet and rifle to pay homage to a fallen Marine during a memorial service in Barwanah, Iraq, on Oct. 25, 2006. Photo by Sgt. Jason L. Jensen, U.S. Marine Corps.

Image credit: U.S. Army Central Command, reduced by Cujo359

The other sad thing is that feeling of having gone through Vietnam all over again - lives lost and wealth destroyed in the name of making sure that some people didn't have to admit they were wrong, and others didn't lose profits from military spending. Our thousands of dead, the walking wounded who may never recover, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died, and the millions who lost their homes all suffered for nothing.

Somehow, this song seems appropriate:

The speculators made their money
On the blood you shed
Your Mama's pulled the sheets up off your bed
The profiteers on Jane Street
Sold your shoes and clothes
Ain't nobody talking 'cause everybody knows
We pulled your cycle out of the garage
And polished up the chrome
Our Gypsy biker's comin' home


Lyrics: Gypsy Biker

This video is a memorial to someone's friend, but I like it. It's the story of a life, and the people who valued that life. Hundreds of thousands of lives were extinguished in Iraq for no reason at all. It was started by a lie. Our current national house of prostitution (Congress), and our current con man of a President have decided that no one who told that lie will ever pay for it. And why should they? They did nothing to stop this tragedy from unfolding when they had the power. Many, in fact, profited from it, if only indirectly via campaign contributions from defense contractors.

As another great writer of tragedies once wrote, If it were done, when 'tis done; then 'twere well/It were done quickly.

It's taken more than eight years. In the end, we didn't even get that mercy.

The only good thing we can say is, at least for us, it will finally be over in a year or so.

UPDATE: Added the last two sentences in the fourth paragraph from the bottom. It's part of the tragedy of this war, and part of the folly, that the people who made the bad decisions are benefiting from them.

Caption: A screenshot taken from an Al Jazeera video about Put Him In Bucca, an Iraqi reality television show about bombs and checkpoints.

Image credit: All screenshots from this Al Jazeera video by Cujo359

Here's proof, if any were really needed, that humor can be awfully subjective:

An Iraqi prank television show has taken the 'candid camera' format to a new level after planting fake bombs under celebrities' cars.

The programme, “Put Him In Bucca”, also threatens high-profile contest[ant]s with jail in a maximum-security prison despite their protests of innocence.

The show, broadcast on the Al-Baghdadia network, targets famous Iraqi singers, comedians and artists.

Iraqi Prank Television Show Condemned For 'Fake Bomb' Stunts

As you might imagine, this show has received some pointed criticism in a country that lives with bomb threats, and actual bombings, on a regular basis:

A new Iraqi comedy show has come under criticism for making jokes about the dangerous reality of life in the country.

The show, "Put him in Bucca", features fake bombs being planted in celebrities' cars, and candid camera-style recording of their reactions.

But as Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh reports from Baghdad, not everyone finds it funny.

Iraq comedy show under fire

In the video at that link, Al Jazeera quotes the show's producer as saying that one of the reasons the reasons they created the show was to try to relieve some of the stress of constantly worrying about bombs and checkpoints. "The joke's on Al Qaeda", he said, "not the Iraqi people."

The show strikes me as the sort of grim humor you'd expect to see in the circumstances Iraqis find themselves in. Wanting to make a joke of such a situation seems as natural to me as being afraid.



And, quite naturally, there are people who take a dim view of this sort of thing, like this psychologist who deplores that his fellow Iraqis won't be taking the bombs seriously. As if anyone wouldn't take them seriously when they're a monthly occurrence.

It looks to me like maybe Al Jazeera has picked up the bad habit of American journalists who try to find an opposing view no matter how crazy it might be to think that there is one.

Sadly, the Iraqi government has apparently decided to crack down on the show, perhaps worried that people won't take real checkpoints and bomb searches seriously anymore. I have to say I'm rooting for the show to keep going. Laughter makes just about anything seem a little less daunting.

Afterword: In case you're wondering what possessed me to pick the title of this article, there's an explanation this time. According to the Al Jazeera video, the Arabic version of the title is a play on words that sounds like "let's rob him". Some sort of play on words seemed appropriate.

Glenn Greenwald, referring to a report that says that terrorist activity directed at America has increased in 2010:

Maybe, one day, we might want to ask: "why"? Is it because they Hate Us For Our Freedoms more than ever before? Are we Extra Free now, thus increasing their Hatred to brand new levels? Or are they still angry about George Bush's cowboy swagger even though he's been gone for a-year-and-a-half? Or is it that those Crazy Primitive Hateful Muslim Fanatics are being pumped full of more unfair anti-American conspiracy theories than before? Or does something else explain this? Is there perhaps anything we're doing to cause it? Asking all that may not be as fun or as profitable as picking out all the new rights we're going to restrict and renounce and the shiny new powers we're going to vest in our leaders each time there is another attempted Terrorist attack, but it's probably still a good idea to do it anyway.

The Unasked Question

For the life of me, I cannot understand why, when he was elected as much as anything to end them, President Obama has continued the same failed policies of the Bush Administration toward the Muslim world and terrorism. Yet here we are, trying to avoid losing any more rights and knowing full well that we'll be stuck in both Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of his term of office.

Caption: Construction Representative Robert L. Williams (far right) shows the Cadets a gate at the Ministry of Defense that has some foundation problems and asks them how they would design the foundation to resolve the issue. (Photo by Leslie J. Wright, Capacity Development Program Manager)

Image credit: Leslie J. Wright/U.S. Army

Spencer Ackerman discussed General Stanley McChrystal's operational philosophy for Afghanistan today at The Washington Independent:

That approach is familiar to anyone who read McChrystal’s counterinsurgency guidance or the “metrics” he set out with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. Protect the population. Give the population material reasons to support the Afghan government and NATO. “Prioritize responsive and accountable governance,” which appears like a pipe dream now that Hamid Karzai looks to have stolen an election. Reorganize the NATO command to better fit these missions. Reverse the Taliban’s momentum in the next year — or, he doesn’t say explicitly, mitigate failure. It’s also, as Josh Foust has observed, more of a quantitative change from McChrystal’s predecessor than a qualitative one.

It’s Not Just Resources: McChrystal’s Message to Obama, and to the Military

This strikes me as the proper strategy. In fact, it strikes me as the only strategy that ever plausibly could have worked in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, I just can't get over the feeling that it's about four years too late.

We passed on the "material reasons" idea by invading Iraq for no good reason. That diverted money and resources that could have been used, not only to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leaders, but to improve the country. As The Globalist's Stephen Richter observed last month:

[I]nstead of focusing its mission on Afghanistan and taking the opportunity to deal with neighboring Pakistan — and, in turn, improving its own tumultuous relations with India — the Bush Administration suffered from outright mission creep and utter delusion when instead it changed its focus to Iraq.

To this day, George Bush's successor, Barack Obama, still struggles with accepting the lesson that an opportunity missed can sadly mean an opportunity lost.

To succeed in the critical and extremely worthy Afghanistan-turnaround mission would have required relentless focus. By turning Afghanistan into a sideshow to the war in Iraq, the execution of that vital mission could not succeed.

Why Afghanistan Is Lost

I can't claim to know what the average citizen of Afghanistan is thinking, but I think if I were one I'd be wondering why the Americans and NATO are still there. I'd probably also be wondering why they don't seem to do anything but blow the place to smithereens.

That's because there's lots more water under the bridge than just a stolen election. The air strikes that Gen. McChrystal has rightly limited have killed wedding parties, our allies' soldiers, and a whole lot of other people. The lack of accountability has honked off Afghanistan's leaders:

A US spokesman said that if "innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologise and express our condolences". But the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, called on the US and its president-elect, Barack Obama, to stop civilian killings.

"Our demand is that there will be no civilian casualties in Afghanistan. We cannot win the fight against terrorism with airstrikes. This is my first demand of the new president of the United States."

US warplanes 'bomb Afghan wedding party'

Short of repeatedly bombing mosques while services are in session, I can't think of a better way to make new enemies than bombing wedding parties. But that isn't the first such incident, nor is it likely to be the last. It hasn't helped us with our allies, either.

It's astonishing that an army that went through a long, failed counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign has not learned this lesson yet, but this isn't like fighting the Wehrmacht. Civilian casualties will come back to haunt you here, and there are already a lot of ghosts in Afghanistan.

So, good strategy though it might be, it's a day late and a dollar short.

UPDATE: Added a (somewhat) expository link for "a lot of ghosts". More than one empire has reached its limits there. Maybe the real reason it's a "burial ground for empires" is that only an empire that had fallen so far that idiots or maniacs run it would try to conquer the place.

image credit: U.S. Army

Seven years after the Bush Administration used the confessions of tortured prisoners to justify war in Iraq, our soldiers and Iraq's citizens are still paying for this dreadful folly. Here's the caption for this picture:

Spc. Herrick Lidstone, a radio operator with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, takes a security halt during a nighttime foot patrol in Sha'ab, Baghdad on May 4 [,2007].

There was a time when people only half-seriously suggested that the Bush Administration deliberately had terrorism suspects tortured to produce "evidence" that there was a link between Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. As Joe Conason reports in Salon, that's not a joke any more:

In an essay that first appeared on the Washington Note blog, [aide to then Secretary of State Colin Powell Lawrence] Wilkerson says that even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become “compliant” -- in other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse -- the vice-president’s office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what [Vice President Dick] Cheney wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration's newfound friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man won't be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why.

Wilkerson's essay was followed swiftly by an investigative report in the Daily Beast, authored by former NBC News producer Robert Windrem, who interviewed two former senior intelligence officers who told him a similar story about a different prisoner. In April 2003, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Those unnamed officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi's capture, the vice-president's office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence waterboarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Evidently that suggestion was not enforced by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Study Group who controlled Dulaymi's interrogation.

We Tortured To Justify War

[links from original]

Let's just review this evidence to see why, while this information is based partly on anonymous sources, it is credible.

First, it's not entirely anonymous. We know who Lawrence Wilkerson is. At the time in question, he was the aide of Secretary of State Colin Powell. It's certainly possible that he knew the origin of whatever intelligence he was told about regarding Iraq. He certainly would have asked what the origin of any intelligence was, since that's information necessary to determine its validity.

Wilkerson has also been a critic of the Bush Administration's foreign policy:

In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security -- including vital decisions about postwar Iraq -- were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New American Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

The White House Cabal

This article by Wilkerson, short though it is, is a thoughtful essay on effective decision making in areas where the relevant knowledge isn't all in one person's head. That's a set of problems that includes most of the ones organizations deal with these days. Business and government leaders at any level should read it and take its lessons to heart. Wilkerson is neither a fool nor stupid.

The second reason is that the story is at least partially confirmed by Charles Duelfer, who as the head of the Iraq Study Group:

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Cheney's Role Deepens

The third reason we should take this seriously is that it explains the events that followed. The White House, and its sycophants in the press, insisted that there was a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda even though there clearly wasn't one. Hussein clearly had no motivation to do more than give Al Qaeda lip service. He certainly would not have permitted a rival for power to exist on his territory. That's an elementary lesson of Hussein's career - he quickly and ruthlessly eliminated or marginalized all possible competition for his power. Yet we were asked to believe, with no credible evidence, that he welcomed Al Qaeda.

While reaching a definite conclusion really requires a proper criminal or scientific investigation, it's clear that this charge against the Vice President and others is a credible one. It should also be one that Americans find disturbing. That we could have deliberately tortured people as part of a pretense for war is as serious a charge against a government as I can imagine.

The caption for this picture reads: U.S. Army 1st Lt. Joshua Jones, with the 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, talks with a member of the Sons of Iraq in Ameriyah, Iraq, Feb. 9, 2009. There appears to be an Iraqi police officer in the group, as well. Image credit: U.S. Army




There are many reasons that a country should never get involved in a war when it doesn't have to. Spencer Ackerman wrote about one today:

Over the weekend and continuing somewhat during the week, Sons of Iraq militiamen have been battling Iraqi government forces after the government arrested Adil Mashadani, a Sons of Iraq/Awakening leader. Now the U.S. military is firing from the air on the militiamen it has backed since 2007.

We Can’t Be Friends We Can’t Be Enemies

[link from original]

This is a part of any protracted war - there will inevitably be alliances that are based on the mutual benefit they bring to the parties, not on the shared interests or cultural ties. Such alliances are easily broken, as should be evident from our alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II. In that conflict, after initially aligning itself with Nazi Germany, the Soviets turned to the Allies and the United States after Hitler invaded them in 1941.

That alliance lasted, barely, until the end of the war. The Soviet Union then regained its status as our principal enemy, which ended with the end of communism in the 1980s.

Over at Army of Dude, Alex Horton wrote an article on one such alliance we've had in Iraq, with a militia known as The 1920s:

The 'awakening group' movement first appeared in Anbar in late 2005 (or if you're John McCain, it started in a time warp before and after the surge) and has since grown to a large, lethal force that battles elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq. That is usually where the media narrative leaves you, insinuating that these groups are patriotic volunteers casting out the demons of al-Qaeda. What they don't mention is both the original motivations for these groups and their history of battling American soldiers. One of the latest to operate (and propped up by my unit in Diyala Province) is the 1920 Revolution Brigade. I covered their nationalist history a year ago, citing their name was a throwback to the 1920 revolution to oust British influence. So this group in particular didn't start in 2005, 2006 or even 2007, but in 2003 for one reason: to attack and kill Americans.

They got pretty good at it. While in Baghdad in late 2006 and early 2007, any group that we battled that wasn't Sadr's militia was likely the 1920s.

Enemies With Benefits

[links from original]

Like many such groups in Iraq, they probably found it easy to attract experienced recruits. We disbanded the old Iraqi Army and sent them home. The only thing they needed was weapons and money. We provided the money, and in some cases provided the weapons, as well.

Such groups didn't like Al Qaeda in Iraq any more than we did, but for their own reasons:

We grudingly worked with the 1920s as per our orders. We were moderately successful in tracking down al-Qaeda operatives (or possibly doing in-house cleaning) and caches. But the point isn't the success of turning over a new leaf with insurgents, though. We traded in our values, our self reliance to get things done, for $300 a head. We did not destroy our enemy but rather aided them. We secured not only their future success, but the future instability with the Iraqi government. Maliki and his Shia government adamantly oppose the Sunni groups and have said in the past that they will never become a permanent part of Iraqi forces.

But they don't pay the former insurgents, we do, as taxpayers. That's why they're trying to leverage the American military into giving them more money, the ol' "pay me more or I'm going back to killing you" ruse. And for their part, they'll probably be successful. Commanders know that they're important not for killing al-Qaeda, but for not fighting us. They're not allies, they're enemies with benefits. And they're holding the cards.

Enemies With Benefits

[links from original]

The 1920s were a different militia, of course, but as Wired observed last year, the reasons for our alliance with the Sons Of Iraq, and the potential dangers, were similar:

The enlistment of Sunni neighborhood militias -- the so-called "Sons of Iraq" groups -- helped turn the tide against extremists in Iraq last year. But now that security is improving and the Iraqi Army is taking charge, what do we do with more than 100,000 armed, empowered, but poorly trained militiamen? (You can tell them by their distinctive reflective belts, pictured.)

What to Do with the 'Sons of Iraq'

In a report on the situation from late last year, the Council on Foreign Relations observed:

In August 2006, tribal sheikhs in Iraq's Anbar Province publicly turned against a chief U.S. threat: al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Their decision to cut ties with AQI, dubbed the "Anbar Awakening" by Iraqi organizers, has been hailed a turning point in the U.S.-led war effort. Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told lawmakers in Washington the uprising reduced U.S. casualties, increased security, and even saved U.S. taxpayers money. Yet the future of the Awakening movement--and its associated security forces, the so-called Sons of Iraq (SOI) volunteers--continues to test Iraq's fractious political climate. Internal disputes within the predominantly Sunni groups have threatened the movement, some experts say. Sunni groups have also complained about low pay and a lack of opportunities for employment within Iraq's army and police forces. These concerns reached an apex in late 2008, when the U.S.-led military coalition began handing oversight for the Sons of Iraq--including responsibility for payment and job placement--to the Iraqi government.

Finding a Place for the ‘Sons of Iraq’

As you can see, the story sounds similar to the story of Alex Horton's acquaintances, the 1920s. These groups worked with us when it was in their best interests. Now, it no longer is. As the Army of Dude article indicates, our soldiers were well aware of this potential at the time, so I suspect it's not doing them any more emotional damage to be now fighting these folks than it is for them to be combating anyone else there. But it does show what a hazardous thing such alliances can be.

This is another reason you don't get involved in war when you don't have to. Almost inevitably, you end up doing things like this. It may be one of the lesser reasons, when you consider what other reasons exist, but making things much more complicated and hazardous for your country's future is one of them.

That didn't take long.

Just when I was obsessing about the boning the Obama Administration planned to give us somewhere down the road on healthcare, wouldn't you know that the Repbublicans would pick up the broom handle and ... I'll leave that to your imagination:

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked Democrats from adding $25 billion for highways, mass transit, and water projects to President Barack Obama's economic recovery program.

Already unhappy over the size of the measure, Republicans insisted additional infrastructure projects be paid for with cuts elsewhere in the bill.

But the Democratic amendment garnered 58 votes, just shy of the supermajority needed under Senate budget rules, and many more efforts to increase the measure's size are sure to follow.

Senate GOP blocks extra $25B in stimulus package

Never mind that it was just a few days ago that one of their number, Rep. John L. Mica (FL-07) said this about the infrastructure portion of the original stimulus bill:

Even some Republicans echo the call for more infrastructure spending, saying they would be more willing to support the bill if it showed more tangible and focused benefits, instead of being scattered across an array of existing programs. Rep. John L. Mica (Fla.), the ranking Republican on the transportation committee, called the proposed infrastructure spending "almost minuscule" and expressed regret that the administration had not crafted its plan around an ambitious goal such as building high-speed rail in 11 corridors around the country, which Mica said would cost $165 billion.

"They keep comparing this to Eisenhower, but he proposed a $500 billion highway system, and they're going to put $30 billion" in roads and bridges, he said. "How farcical can you be? Give me a break."

Administration officials and defenders of the stimulus package say that the plan should be seen as just a start of Obama's priorities, and that there will be chances to do more later, such as in the five-year transportation bill that will come before Congress this year.

Democrats Among Stimulus Skeptics

Of course, like all the other Republicans, Mica voted against the stimulus bill, but his point remains valid. That $30 billion would have been barely enough to fund one mass transit program, Seattle's light rail expansion program:

The numbers might be enough to make voters dizzy: a full 50 miles of light rail, to be built over 20 years, at a long-term cost of $23 billion.

Sound Transit is betting that when citizens say they want light rail, they mean it.

The agency's governing board Thursday approved asking voters in November to extend the system south to Tacoma, east to Overlake and north to 164th Street Southwest at Ash Way in Snohomish County.

Proposed Light-Rail Extension Heading For Ballot

For those of you who don't have a map handy, that's a pretty extensive network. It's roughly 50 miles through mostly urban or suburban areas. As the article said, that project is scheduled to take 20 years, but there's almost certainly no reason it couldn't happen sooner if the money were there. It's also not the only major transportation project we have going out here. We have a traffic revision in downtown Seattle that may rival Boston's Big Dig in cost and complexity, loads of road improvements and buses to buy, and at least one floating bridge to replace. These are all multi-billion dollar projects. Seattle is just one largeish city, too. Multiply those numbers by twenty or thirty and you get some idea how much money is needed just for urban transportation in the next decade or so. Add that to Rep. Mica's estimate of how much those new trains will cost, toss in a few tens of billions for all the bridges that are about to fall down in this country, and you've got yourself a multi-hundred billion dollar bill.

Yet all but two Republican Senators voted against cloture on this far more modest proposal. These are the same Republican Senators, mind you, who sat around for four years while we blew billions of dollars trying to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure with no oversight (PDF), unqualified contractors, and quite often no clear specifications as well. They sat by while plane loads of money and weapons were lost in Iraq (PDF), and didn't even bother to hold hearings. Am I supposed to believe these guys are now concerned about fiscal responsibility?

Frank Rich had them pegged pretty well a few days ago when he wrote:

[Y]ou might think that a loyal opposition would want to pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril. Not by singing “Kumbaya” but by collaborating on possible solutions and advancing a policy debate that many Americans’ lives depend on. As Raymond Moley, of F.D.R.’s brain trust, said of the cross-party effort at the harrowing start of that presidency in March 1933, Hoover and Roosevelt acolytes “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats” as they urgently tried to rescue their country.

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.

Herbert Hoover Lives

[link from original article] Hoover, of course, was the guy who didn't want to spend too much and ruin that wonderful post-1929 economy.

I sure am glad things have returned to normal. For a while, it looked like the Democrats were going to replace Republicans as the biggest obstacle to progress. It's quite clear now that the Republicans don't intend to be outdone.

Kumba-frickin-ya.

(h/t Dana Hunter for that Mica quote.)

UPDATE (Feb. 6): For more on the importance of infrastructure, check out klynn's excellent diary on the subject at Oxdown/FireDogLake.

Image credit: U.S. Army

The caption reads: 1st Lt. Erik Wiesehan, of Canby, Ore., maintains security during Brig. Gen. Robin Swanís visit to a Husseniyah marketplace Jan. 22. Wiesehan is the essential services coordinator for 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment "Wolfhounds," 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team "Warrior," 25th Infantry Division, currently attached to 3rd BCT, 4th Inf. Div., Multi-National Division - Baghdad. Swan is the deputy commanding general for the 4th Infantry Division and MND-B.


The Los Angeles Times reports:

The suicide rate among Army soldiers reached its highest level in three decades in 2008, military officials said Thursday in a report that pointed to the inadequacy of anti-suicide efforts undertaken in recent years.

At least 128 Army soldiers took their own lives last year -- an estimated suicide rate of 20.2 per 100,000, a sharp increase from the 2007 rate of 16.8.

Army Sees Sharp Rise In Suicide Rate

American military involvement in Vietnam largely ended in 1973. The article indicates later that the Army didn't start tracking suicide rates until 1978, so how this compares to the Vietnam era is likely a subject of conjecture. The military, the Army in particular, had a difficult time after the war, with high rates of drug abuse and other disciplinary issues. There seems little doubt what the cause is this time:

"Why do the numbers keep going up? We cannot tell you," Army Secretary Pete Geren said.

Army officials believe that contributing factors include emotional and psychological stress caused by repeated combat deployments, along with the toll that the tours have taken on marriages.

About a third of suicides occur during deployments abroad, a third after deployments and a third among soldiers who never deploy.

"We all come to the table believing stress is a factor," said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff.

Army Sees Sharp Rise In Suicide Rate

Caution diagnosing such a phenomenon is wise, since it really is the result of a great many individuals making the decision to end their lives. Every decision has its own reasoning. Still, the high rates of deployments overseas to a combat zone probably have something to do with it, and the Army admits as much.

Beyond that, though, all I really can do is ask questions. What can be done to keep this situation from getting worse, besides ending the need for the deployments? I have to wonder if the recent appearance of dimwitted faith-based suicide prevention strategies have anything to do with this:

Here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), we get countless complaints about religiously based mental health and counseling programs, which, over the past few years, have been systematically replacing proven psychological and medical approaches to a multitude of issues faced by military personnel.
...
In March 2008, this presentation, titled "A New Approach To Suicide Prevention: Developing Purpose-Driven Airmen," was shown at a commander's call that was mandatory for an estimated 1,000 of Lakenheath's Air Force personnel, and sent out by email to the entire base of over 5,000 the following day. As the use of the phrase "Purpose-Driven" in its title implies, also incorporated into this presentation is the wisdom of presidential candidate inquisitor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, a book that, second only to the Bible itself, is the most heavily promoted religious book in the military.

Creationism: The Latest In Military Suicide Prevention

While the particular example that author Chris Rodda cited was an Air Force program, it's hard to imagine the Army is untouched by this movement. Army Secretary Geren, who was quoted in that report, has been associated in the past with a Christian evangelical organization called "Christian Embassy".

Another question would be, is there any difference in how suicides are being reported now? Back in April, I wrote about Sen. Patty Murray's (D-WA) efforts to get the Veterans Administration to come clean about the suicides they'd been noticing among their clients:

Senator Patty Murray, D-WA, said yesterday that she thinks the Veterans Administration is vastly understating the numbers of soldier suicides:

The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who have attempted suicide, Sen. Patty Murray said Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year while the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.

VA Lying About Number Of Veteran Suicides, Senator Charges

VA Caught Witholding Information

It's at least possible that fallout from that scandal has caused the Defense Department to be more ready to count a deaths as suicides than it was before. If the Army had to adjust the way it counts suicides, then that might affect the number, as well. Based on this quote from the New York Times, though, that seems unlikely:

At a news briefing, the secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, said the Army wanted to bolster its efforts to prevent suicide and was prepared to allocate the resources, “human and financial,” to do so. The Army had stepped up its efforts in the last two years as the numbers had begun to climb.

But, Mr. Geren cautioned, there are no easy answers. “Is there a silver bullet out there?” he said. “I’m confident there isn’t.”

The Army said that in the last year it had hired more general practitioners, often the first health care providers to come into contact with soldiers in distress. It also hired 250 more providers of mental health care, and wants to hire an additional 50.

Suicides of Soldiers Reach High of Nearly 3 Decades

That would indicate a problem of long standing, not a statistical glitch.

Hopefully, with a new Presidential Administration that's friendlier to science, proper psychological procedures will replace religious nonsense, and the added mental health professionals may help deal with the added stress.