McCain's support for our troops

Senators James Webb (D-Va.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) have each sponsored bills to boost veterans' educational assistance to cover the cost of tuition at state universities. This update to the G.I. Bill would cost taxpayers anywhere between two and a half to four billion dollars over ten years -- a drop in the bucket compared to what the war in Iraq is costing us. Most members of Congress think this is a wonderful idea. Isn't it the least we can do to "support our troops"?

Guess who opposes this proposal? Senator John McCain. Why does he oppose it? He fears it will discourage soldiers from re-enlisting, leaving us short of warriors to fight our glorious War on Terror. McCain comments, "I want to make sure that we have incentives for people to remain in the military as well as for people to join the military."

Stop a moment and consider: what does this say about why people join the military in the first place? Could it be that a large number of them are essentially economic refugees -- poor people who could not afford college and figured that it was somewhat less humiliating to don a soldier's uniform than a blue Walmart vest? People who, if given a chance for a good education -- and a good job to follow -- will leave the military in a heartbeat?

Rich man's war, poor man's fight. It was ever thus. Perhaps those who call for a return to the draft have a point. If not just the kids of poor folk but everyone was responsible for fighting this war, maybe the war would be brought to a conclusion a whole lot sooner.

Post-script: Last week a funeral at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati for Matthew Maupin, whose remains were finally recovered four years after he was kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Iraq. How did he end up in Iraq? He had joined the Army Reserve to make a little extra money for college.

McCain's Two Big Ideas

For his campaign John McCain is selling himself as our foreign affairs / security expert, asserting his manifest superiority in this realm over the Democratic candidates. "You wanna talk about war? Well, I know war!" Yet his statements on Iraq seem to suggest the opposite: that, when it comes to what is actually happening on the ground in Iraq, he's pretty much clueless. Take for instance his repeated assertion that Iran is training Al Qaeda terrorists and sending them back into Iraq to kill American soldiers. This is of course impossible. Al Qaeda is Sunni, Iran is Shiite, and never the twain shall meet.

It was almost inevitable, though, that he make this particular mistake. What he did was conflate the two Big Ideas about the war that he is deploying on the campaign trail: (1) that the enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that struck us on 9/11 and that (2) the enemy in Iraq is Iran. Never mind that these two assertions are mutually exclusive. McCain will continue to assert them.

Why? Because the reality on the ground of Iraq is too complicated for public consumption --also too damned hopeless. McCain's big ideas simplify things. According to McCain, the war in Iraq is a proper response to the crime that was committed against us on 9/11 and the enemy in Iraq is a coherent nation state that potentially could be defeated in a war. See? Simple! Wrong on both counts, but simple.

McCain's strategy is borrowed from Bush and his cronies: just keep saying the same thing over and over again, regardless of its relation to the truth (for example, that there is a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein), and perhaps enough people will believe it for it to have a political effect.

cheney on the move

News Brief: Vice President Dick Cheney today visited the smouldering remains of a large Iraqi orphanage that burnt down last night after being struck by a U.S. Navy submarine-launched Hellfire missile. Standing amidst the ruins he observed that he thought the fire "had gone very well," that "we were making good progress," and that "it was well worth it." When one reporter observed that Cheney was standing on a pile of charred corpses he responded that most of the children were "dead enders" to begin with and many had "links to Al Qaeda." One of the few surviving children shouted out "God bless you, Mr. Cheney!" at which point Cheney picked up a rock and, hurling it with great force, struck the child in the forehead. "Take that you little Baghdad bastard!" Cheney was heard to mutter before climbing into a Humvee and heading back to the Green Zone for a meeting with the oil minister.

War yawn

"It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time."

The above from Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times. He right. Nation-wide battle fatigue has set in.

Went with my father to see Kimberly Pierce's Stop-Loss last night, which is a very intelligent and artful film. Still, I felt antsy throughout the screening, and I winced when some of the familiar arguments against the war were put in the mouths of the beautiful young actors; statements of the by-now-obvious-to-almost-everyone truth that this war in is a very bad business that damages anyone who is involved in it. For all of its sincerity, Pierce's film hardly an eye-opener.

More to my taste would be an absurdist representation of the war on terror, something along the lines of Tony Richardson's Charge of the Light Bridgade or Mike Nichols' Catch-22. A feature film with the wry sense of a Michael Moore documentary. Fewer tears, more jeers.

Rich is right. This war has come to seem like a chronic, wasting disease. The end is not imminent but inevitable and it will be bad. Let's ignore the war just as we ignore the inevitability of our own death, lest we be paralyzed by the contemplation of it. In the corner of our minds is the vague hope that Bush's departure from Washington will somehow result in our troops coming home. This hope persists even though neither of the Democracts likely to replace him are guaranteeing that withdrawal will happen immediately upon their achieving the office. And if McCain wins? So long vague hope.

on Honor

What is honor? a word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? air. A trim reckoning! -- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1


I grow weary of the cult of the soldier in wartime. Weary of hearing people praise the soldiers for having served "honorably." How is it possible to serve honorably in a dishonorable war? An illegal war of colonial conquest? It would be like saying one has served honorably in a group action that, under close analysis, resolves into a gang rape. How can anyone who serves in this abomination of a war come out of it unsullied?

What can we say of our soldiers that is true? We can say that they've been tricked into serving in a dishonorable war -- have been fooled by words such as "duty" and "honor" and "freedom" and "democracy." We can pity them for their misuse and abuse, for being put in harm's way for no good reason and for a host of bad ones.

In my eyes, the most honorable soldiers in this war have been those who, possessed of the intelligence to see this war for what it is, have refused to continue to serve and have done so at the risk of their freedom. Now there is true honor. There is true courage. There is true patriotism.

Am I saying it is impossible for a soldier in Iraq to behave in an admirable way? Of course not. The soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers is acting courageously, and we admire courage. Yet we find ourselves wishing that he had never been put in the horrible situation where he had to make this fateful decision. We rightly blame the warmongers who put him there.

Rich man's war, poor man's fight. Never truer than now, than with the fight in Iraq.

Mencken-esque

"Nobody ever went broke," observed the journalist H.L. Mencken, "underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Perhaps it is this piece of wisdom that John McCain and other Republicans have in mind as they insist that President Bush's surge tactic in Iraq has been successful and that now "We're winning!" By convincing the American public that we are indeed winning the war in Iraq, McCain and his pals hope to win the presidency this fall.

Granted, there has been a drop in the overall level of violence in Iraq in the past few months. Increased security due to the surge may in part account for this. A more significant factor is our paying eighty-thousand Sunni insurgents three-hundred dollars a month each not to kill us. Also part of the deal is that we get these men jobs in the Iraq army or police forces. That the predominately-Shiite government is balking at embracing these traditional enemies makes it not only possible but probable that sometime soon they will return to their old ways, then the violence will spike up again. In other words the decrease in violence is most likely just a lull in the violence -- the calm at the eye of the bloody storm.

We're winning? Just a few days ago Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki welcomed with open arms Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad --one of the "axis of evil" sort to whom Bush refuses to speak. That the Shiite government in Iraq is on very friendly terms with Iran and will be heavily influence by Iran in the future is without doubt. So it is for this that we've sacrificed four thousand lives (and counting) and half a trillion dollars (and counting)? An Iraq that's essentially a satellite state, not of the U.S. (only in Dick Cheney's dreams . . .), but of Iran?

John McCain has always relished his reputation as a "rebel." If he sincerely believes we are now winning the war in Iraq he's a rebel all right -- a rebel without a clue. Let's hope the American public is not so clueless come November.

The war in Iraq and the failure of democracy

The question has arisen: why is it that the War in Iraq, the central issue of the midterm elections, has been displaced by the Economy in 2008? Is it because, as some right-wingers have suggested, the Surge is working and things are getting better in Iraq, so people have stopped worrying about the conflict and moved on to domestic issues?

I doubt it. Rather, I think it is because people saw that making the war the central issue in the last election had no discernable effect on the war. The Bush administration simply thumbed its nose at the people's will, continued to fight the war as it damn well pleased. In short, the voters have decided that, when it comes to the war in Iraq, their votes don't work, mean nothing. In other words, they've seen that, just as it is in Iraq, democracy in America is a bit of a joke.

p.s. From a Washington Post story of 13 March: "During the last week in January, 36 percent of those surveyed said they were most closely following campaign news, while 14 percent expressed the most interest in the stock market and 12 percent in the death of actor Heath Ledger. In contrast, 6 percent said they were most closely following coverage of Iraq. "

we're winning?

"For every complex problem there is a solution, which is simple, neat, and wrong"
--H.L. Mencken


Lately Republican candidates for the presidency have been crowing about the effect of Bush's "surge" strategy in Iraq, some going so far as to claim "We're winning!" Granted, there has been a decrease in violence lately that can be attributed in part to the increase in U.S. ground troops. But how does one make the leap from this to the conclusion that victory is at hand?

Most on the ground in Iraq see the present lull in violence as just that -- a lull, a temporary situation. Why? Because the conditions which created the sectarian violence in the first place remain. Sure, we can pay Sunni tribesmen ten dollars a day not to kill us, but what if we can't follow through on promises of good jobs in the military and government -- an idea which the Shiite dominated government resists? What if Moqtada al-Sadr changes his mind and ends the ceasefire he's presently imposed on the Mahdi army? What if the Kurds, at the moment preoccupied with border problems with Turkey, return their attention to the de-Arabization of their territories and to control of the Kirkuk oil fields? Iraq has hardly been de-fused by the surge; listen closely and you can still hear the tick-tick-tick.

Let's just suppose the impossible happens and the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds all join hands to sing Kumbaya. Does that mean the United States can claim a victory? Consider: the present death toll for U.S. forces in Iraq stands just shy of four thousand. We have had five times that many wounded. Harper's reports that one in four veterans who have served two tours of duty now has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Also that the projected total cost of medical care for U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is five hundred billion dollars -- a number that matches the total military spending on both wars so far.

Given these staggering statistics, what possible positive outcome in Iraq could be consider worth the cost? "Pyrrhic victory" hardly characterizes it. Out -and -out disaster is more like it.

another drug war casualty

A few days ago there was a drug raid in Lima. During the raid a young woman, Tarika Wilson, and the year-old baby she was holding were shot by a police officer. The mother died; the baby, though shot in the shoulder and hand, survived.

The war on drugs waged by our federal, state, and local governments has been, and continues to be, a disaster – a very expensive disaster. Over the years hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on drug interdiction, with the result that rates of drug use and abuse have remained for the most part unchanged. We incarcerate thousands of otherwise unoffending people on drug charges, most of these charges brought against users of marijuana – a drug considerably less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. As destructive as drug abuse can be to individual lives, more pernicious to society as a whole is the war on drugs itself. Like Bush’s current “war on terror,” it makes things worse, not better.

The answer to the drug problem is simple: legalization. If we make drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin legal in the way that hard liquor is legal, we destroy the black market in drugs – and eliminate the extreme violence associated with this market. If drugs are made legal, then no more drug raids, which means no more “collateral damage”-- by that euphemism I mean the harm inflicted on innocent bystanders such as Tarika Wilson and her baby.

Legalize drugs, then the immense amount of money we currently spend on enforcing drug laws, prosecuting drug criminals, and incarcerating those criminals could be spent on providing treatment for drug abusers and educating the general public on the dangers of abuse –a far more effective and humane way of dealing with drugs in society than interdiction.

Some fear that legalizing drugs will lead to a dramatic increase in drug use and abuse. Here a comparison with an early war on drugs can be instructive. When Prohibition went into effect, it created a black market in booze – created, as it were, Al Capone. People who wanted to drink found ways around the law. When Prohibition was finally repealed, there was not a dramatic increase in alcohol use and abuse. Those who were not drunks before did not decide to become drunks just because the law changed. Why not assume that the same results will follow legalization of street drugs?

Over the years the use of drugs has, as a result of prohibition, come to be associated with criminals and crime. Politicians, therefore, are reluctant to consider drug legalization for fear that they will appear soft on crime. We citizens therefore need to make politicians accountable for all the misery and mayhem the current drug prohibition causes. Only then will they begin to act sensibly.

shock and awe rats!

An interesting article on aggression in last week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review. The article cited results of behavioral studies done on rats. If a rat is placed alone in a cage and receives electric shocks from the floor, it will at first jump, throw itself against the walls of the cage, do everything in its power to escape the painful stimulus. Eventually, however, it will no longer attempt to evade the shock, will just sit there and take it. When an autopsy is done on these subjects, it is found that during the experiment they experience an abnormal growth of the adrenal glands and develop gastric ulcers.

Scientists found, however, that if two rats are placed in the same cage and shocked, they will respond by attacking each other and continue doing so as long as they are in the cage and being shocked. When these rats' bodies are later examined, it is found that they do not experience adrenal gland growth or develop gastric ulcers. The conclusion to be drawn? Having someone there to take it out on -- as it were -- helps keep the rat healthy, whereas just sitting there and taking it will, over time, make the rat sick. (Not unlike Freud's view that being civilized -- that is, sublimating aggressive instincts -- makes man neurotic).

An interesting analogy can be drawn here between those unfortunate rats in the shock cage and our soldiers currently serving in Iraq. The soldiers regularly experience "shocks" from the insurgency, but, because they find it impossible in many cases to distinguish the insurgents from the general populace, they have to just sit there and take it rather than strike back. One wonders if soldiers in this predicament have a higher incidence of adrenal and gastric disease -- or perhaps a higher incidence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

honorable death

From today's Washington Post:

The commandos were soon spotted by three goat herders, who were initially detained but later released. They are believed to have given away the team's location to Taliban fighters.

A contingent of more than 50 fighters attacked from three sides, forcing the Seal team to begin bounding down a mountainside into a ravine. After more than 45 minutes of heavy fighting, with his radioman wounded, Murphy realized that the only way he could contact his headquarters for reinforcements would be to move into exposed terrain to get a signal.

"In the face of almost certain death, he fought his way into open terrain to gain a better position to transmit a call. This deliberate, heroic act deprived him of cover, exposing him to direct enemy fire," the medal citation reads.

As Taliban fighters shot at him, Murphy made the call and "calmly provided his unit's location and the size of the enemy force" while requesting urgent support. At one point, he was shot in the back and dropped the transmitter, but picked it back up to finish the call, the official account said.

Murphy continued to shoot back at the Taliban fighters but was severely wounded. His team was running out of ammunition. By the end of the brutal, two-hour firefight, in which an estimated 35 enemy fighters were killed, Murphy and two members of his team were dead. A fourth team member managed to escape and was later rescued.

What strikes me most about this story is not Murphy's exposing himself to fire to call for help, although that is remarkable. What strikes me is that Murphy and his team decided to let the three goat herders go, even though he knew they would probably alert local Taliban to the team's presence. His other choice, of course, was to kill the men. He chose not to kill civilians and paid with his life. Compare this to some of the trigger-happy private contractors in Iraq, those who do not hesitate to pull the trigger on civilians, even women and children, if they feel threatened by them.

just suppose

Reportedly President Bush periodically meets with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, this to offer his condolences and thank them for their loved ones' service. Imagine if one of the grief-stricken mothers were to step up to the President, say to him "You lying sack of ----, you killed my son!" and slap him hard across the face. Would she be wrestled to the ground, placed under arrest, and later sent to prison for physically assaulting the Chief Executive? Perhaps. It would be a tough call.

One thing's for certain: that mother would instantly become a heroine in the eyes of millions of Americans. Bumper stickers reading "Slap him again!" or t-shirts sporting "Give him another!" would be seen everywhere. There'd be parades in her honor. Small towns would be renamed after her. And just imagine her popularity abroad! She'd be the toast of London, Paris, Rome -- not to mention all the Middle Eastern capitals.

As for her running for political office? Hell, I'd vote for her in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?

blackwater massacre

From today's New York Times:

The events in the square began with a short burst of bullets that witnesses described as unprovoked. A traffic policeman standing at the edge of the square, Sarhan Thiab, saw that a young man in a car had been hit. In the line of traffic, that car was the third vehicle from the intersection where the convoy had positioned itself.

“We tried to help him,” Mr. Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out: ‘My son, my son. Help me, help me.’”

Another traffic policeman rushed to the driver’s side to try to get her son out of the car, but the car was still rolling forward because her son had lost control, according to a taxi driver close by who gave his name as Abu Mariam (“father of Mariam”).

Then Blackwater guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets, according to the police and numerous witnesses. Mr. Ahmed’s father later counted 40 bullet holes in the car. His mother, Mohassin Kadhim, appears to have been shot to death as she cradled her son in her arms. Moments later the car caught fire after the Blackwater guards fired a type of grenade into the vehicle.

This reality, juxtaposed to Prince's cool-as-a-cucumber demeanor before the House committee, his cocky self-assurance. Remorse for what his employees had wrought in Nisour Square? Not a jot. Remorse a sign of weakness, after all, and he an ex Navy SEAL, a tower of strength.

Note to self: gag reflex nearly gone from overstimulation. Must seal eyes and ears.

oil and feathers for whistleblowers

Much has been made of the mismanagement and corruption that cripples the Iraqi oil ministry. Before trying to clean up that house, perhaps we should look into cleaning up our own. The below from a NYTimes article on our government's attempt -- or non-attempt-- to get oil companies to pay royalties they owe for drilling on public lands.

Particularly striking were complaints by two auditors in Oklahoma City, Randall Little and Lanis Morris, who said that senior officials had refused to demand $1.5 million in back interest from oil companies caught underpaying, saying that requiring the companies to calculate their own bills would be a hardship. But the officials said the Interior Department could not get its own systems to do the calculations.

Mr. Little told investigators that the oil companies were getting a “free ride” and that “the taxpayers ought to be outraged.” After the auditors filed their lawsuits, Interior officials removed Mr. Little and Mr. Morris from their jobs at the Minerals Management Service and sent them to work below an entry-level technician at the Bureau of Land Management.

And the neocons wanted to hand over the Iraqi oil fields to Big Oil, expecting not a peep of protest from the Iraqi people?

Disgusting is Right

What larks, eh Pip? The Senate resolution to condemn MoveOn for exposing Petraeus as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration. Bush saying that he thought the ad "disgusting," thought the attack on Petraeus "an attack on the military itself." What a surprising response.

The Surge is working my arse. Working to what end? To temporarily displace some corner boys in Baghdad? At the cost of how many American lives, how many hundreds of millions of dollars?

I'm glad MoveOn has moved its focus back on the war. Was myself disgusted by how in the last presidential election the organization backed off criticism of the war, thinking that doing so would help Kerry win. Took the midterms to make them see what should have been obvious two years previously: It's the war, stupid!

There once was a General Petraeus
Who they said would never betray us
But the war that he pimped
Gave Uncle Sam a bad limp
And in general served to dismay us

blackwater blackguards

Apropos the presence of security contractors in Iraq, these two short poems from WWI. First, A. E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

Now, in response, Hugh MacDiarmid's "Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

What are we to make of the privatization of combat? The fact that our government is not sure how many hired guns are running around Iraq, "somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000," none of these subject to Iraqi justice (a tip o' the hat to Paul Bremer) or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A law unto themselves.

long silence

My long silence in this forum due to depression and disgust. Re: the war, things stand no better today than in March. So much for the Democratic cavalry that came charging over the hill last November.

Could I grow any more weary of hearing politicians say that the problem with the war was mistakes made at its inception? Like saying a gang rape could have gone a lot better if not for the fuck ups at the start. This war has been criminal since its conception. Criminal and stupid.

We continue to fetishize our mighty military. What's the point in repeating that we have the most powerful military in the world if that military is impotent in the face of this kind of insurgency? How many more of our soldiers need to get blown to pieces by IEDs, how many more fall the victims of snipers -- and how many more innocent Iraqi families die at our checkpoints -- before we recognize this impotence?

Iraq is faced with giant problems, but these are obviously not problems the American military can solve. Let's get out of there.

juxtaposition

From the NYTimes:

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, confirmed a report by the Pentagon on Tuesday that insurgents had put two children in the back seat of a car loaded with explosives to get the car through a checkpoint in Baghdad. An unknown number of Iraqi civilians were hurt or killed when the car exploded, including the children, Colonel Garver said.

Meanwhile, beneath a bright sky, thousands of residents of Baghdad celebrated the first day of spring, a holiday called Nowruz, by going to the zoo.

the invertebrate & the conscience free

The war party's strategy is clear enough: whatever the opponents of the war propose as a means of hastening its end, the hawks will construe as a betrayal of the troops. What we need do first, therefore, is expose this rhetorical strategy. Make it clear that the people who put our troops needlessly in harm's way will exploit our sense of loyalty to those troops to keep them in harm's way indefinitely. We cannot allow ourselves to be so bullied. The war's opponents need to develop some backbone and take the high ground on the matter of our soldiers. It is, after all, precisely our concern for the troops -- for their welfare and that of their families -- that most strongly motivates our opposition to this war. We are attempting to save their lives, plain and simple.

***********

In a speech delivered by Dick Cheney in Sydney, Australia, he referred to the Iraq war as "a remarkable achievement." That it certainly is. In years to come historians will remark again and again on this achievement, much to our country's shame. What a fiasco it has been, from start till present! An almost-unbearable burden to those Americans possessed of a social conscience. As Neil Young puts it in song, people of conscience are "living this war every day." Happy the man who can put it out of his mind and continue with his daily routine.

snatching victory

Yesterday listening to a right wing pundit who heads an organization the aim of which is to punish those Republican congressmen who do not continue to support Bush's war. He complained about the "defeatism" that is permeating this country. He exhorted the American people to get behind the President and the troops in order to "snatch victory from the jaws of defeat."

I find the pundit's metaphor faulty. Victory is no longer in the jaws of Defeat. Defeat has chewed Victory, has swallowed Victory, has digested Victory, and is presently preparing to excrete Victory onto the dusty ground of Iraq. If we snatch Victory now, we snatch it from the bowels of defeat. A rather unsavory clot of Victory that would be.

I suggest the pundit attempt to snatch a bit of reality from the jaws of delusion. The war was never winnable. It's time to bring our soldiers home.