As the usual right-wing demagogues wind themselves into pretzel postures of false outrage for being denied the right to use instruments of government to impose their religious rituals on those who do not so celebrate, it’s time to point out that despite their hypocrisy, pseudo-sanctimony, and just plain cultural bigotry, there is a hidden kernel of truth in their simple-minded sloganeering. For there is an actual war on Christmas, and it is going on right before our eyes. But they don’t see it, and they certainly wouldn’t want anyone to talk about it, because it’s taking place in Iraq, and it is the fault of their political hero, George W. Bush.

As the New York Times explained, in October 2006:

Christianity took root here near the dawn of the faith 2,000 years ago, making Iraq home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The country is rich in biblical significance: scholars believe the Garden of Eden described in Genesis was in Iraq; Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a city in Iraq; the city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah visited after being spit out by a giant fish was in Iraq.

Both Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians, the country’s largest Christian sects, still pray in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

They have long been a tiny minority amid a sea of Islamic faith. But under Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s million or so Christians for the most part coexisted peacefully with Muslims, both the dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites.

One of the oldest Christian communities in the world, for the most part peacefully coexisting. And then came Bush.

But since Mr. Hussein’s ouster, their status here has become increasingly uncertain, first because many Muslim Iraqis framed the American-led invasion as a modern crusade against Islam, and second because Christians traditionally run the country’s liquor stories, anathema to many religious Muslims.

And the Times says the result has been threats, church bombings, kidnappings, and murders, with anywhere from tens of thousands to a hundred thousand fleeing the country.

In March of this year, USA Today reported:

The flight of Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims from their homes under threat of violence has earned much attention. But Iraq’s Christian community has also been targeted and is steadily dwindling as well.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says Christians comprise some 40% of the Iraqi refugees.

Other Iraqis who are forced from their homes often relocate to another city or neighborhood, but Iraqi Christians who have to flee often leave the country, said Dana Graber, an Amman-based officer with the International Organization for Migration. “They feel even more vulnerable because they have few, if any, safe communities to where they can escape,” she said.

Long an integral part of Baghdad’s diverse ethnic and religious communities, Christians have lived side by side with their Muslim neighbors for generations, said Abdullah al-Naufali, head of Iraq’s Christians Endowment.

But as Iraq’s violence flared after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, churches and Christian homes were targeted, al-Naufali said. Ten of Baghdad’s 80 Christian churches have closed, and more than half of Baghdad’s Christian population has fled, he said.

And the Associated Press:

While we’re looking the other way, democracy in Russia is about to die. Accoding to the Guardian:

The Kremlin is planning to rig the results of Russia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday by forcing millions of public sector workers across the country to vote, the Guardian has learned.

Local administration officials have called in thousands of staff on their day off in an attempt to engineer a massive and inflated victory for President Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party. Voters are being pressured to vote for United Russia or risk losing their jobs, their accommodation or bonuses, the Guardian has been told in numerous interviews with byudzhetniki (public sector workers), students and ordinary citizens.

Doctors, teachers, university deans, students and even workers at psychiatric clinics have been warned they have to vote. Failure to do so will entail serious consequences, they have been told.

Analysts say the pressure is designed to ensure a resounding win for the United Russia party and for Putin, who heads its party list. The victory would give him a public mandate to maintain ultimate power in the country as “National Leader” despite being unable to stand for a third term as president in March.

In September, Putin dismissed Russia’s government and appointed an ally as prime minister, while the chairman of Russia’s upper house of parliament urged him to run again for president, in 2012. On October 1, Putin hinted that he might retain power by moving from the president’s office to the prime minister’s. And now this rigged election.

For a much more comprehensive view of Putin’s dismantling of Russian democracy, you can visit my link-laden earlier diary: Losing Russia.

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Now that all is going so well in Iraq, and the flower strewing appears imminent, the New York Times has discovered what might just be a small problem:

As Iraqi refugees begin to stream back to Baghdad, American military officials say the Iraqi government has yet to develop a plan to absorb the influx and prevent it from setting off a new round of sectarian violence.

Oops.

And according to the reporters on the ground, the recent media hype has been media hype. And despite the recent reduction in violence (all the way to 2005 levels, not anywhere close to the actual levels before Bush invaded), the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country has nearly doubled, this year. At a cost of a record number of American troop deaths, for this war, for a single year. And the coverage has completely ignored the fact that militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr called a unilateral six-month cease-fire, at the end of August, which might just be a factor. But the bigger, and largely ignored, story is the refugee crisis.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are more than four million Iraqis who have had to leave their homes; the New York Times reported, in August, that more have fled since the escalation; the San Francisco Chronicle reported, almost a year ago, that 40% of Iraq’s middle class had fled; and the Guardian reported, last summer, that a third of the population is in need of emergency assistance. In short, as the Chronicle article pointed out, this is the Middle East’s worst refugee crisis since the Palestinians fled Israel, in 1948; and we all know how well that has turned out.

As the Times continues:

The Iraqi government lacks a mechanism to settle property disputes if former residents return to Baghdad only to find their homes occupied, the officials said. Nor has the Iraqi government come forward with a detailed plan to provide aid, shelter and other essential services to the thousands of Iraqis who might return. American commanders caution that if the return is not carefully managed, there is a risk of undermining the recent security gains.

Um, yeah. Potentially millions of people returning to homes that are now occupied by others might just be a problem. Particularly given that ethnic cleansing has left the country utterly Balkanized. As Fareed Zakaria recently explained, on ABC News:

one of the dirty little secrets about Iraq is that Iraq has increasingly been ethnically cleansed. It’s sad to say, but the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans.

If you look at Baghdad, it is essentially a very cleansed city. It is, the Shia and Sunni communities have been separated by the river. You look increasingly around the areas that were once intermixed. They’re no longer mixed. That explains, by the way, one of the reasons why violence has been reduced … So, it seems unlikely, when people say bad things are going to happen if we leave, bad things have already happened, where were you for the last four years.

It doesn’t seem that likely that we’re going to end up seeing some kind of massive genocide. The ethnic cleansing has happened.

So, many of those returning refugees might just be returning to homes occupied by people they consider enemies.

And here’s the kicker, also from the Times article:

Famous varmint hunter Willard “Mitt” Romney has been reported to have said he would exclude any Muslims from his cabinet. According to Monsoor Ijaz, in the Christian Science Monitor:

“I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that “jihadism” is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, “…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”

Romney, whose Mormon faith has become the subject of heated debate in Republican caucuses, wants America to be blind to his religious beliefs and judge him on merit instead. Yet he seems to accept excluding Muslims because of their religion, claiming they’re too much of a minority for a post in high-level policymaking. More ironic, that Islamic heritage is what qualifies them to best engage America’s Arab and Muslim communities and to help deter Islamist threats.

Apparently, Romney doesn’t understand that our government isn’t constructed along strict demographic lines. Maybe someone should ask him if he thinks it should be. For one thing, that would mean more women than men in both houses of Congress. Which would be a good thing, although it’s likely Romney wouldn’t agree. As for the stupidity of Romney’s bigotry, go read Ijaz’s article.

Furthermore, as Trapper John pointed out, Romney’s an opponent of Affirmative Action, so the position he bases on his bigotry is also hypocritical. And, of course, Romney has tried to weasel out of the situation by claiming a case of bad reporting. Well, TPM Election Central has now discovered that this wasn’t the first time Romney has expressed his bigotry:

As you know, Romney is in a bit of a spot because of an  account in the Christian Science Monitor by an Islamic businessman who claims Romney said that he “cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified” for a Muslim. Today Romney  denied this version of events, saying that he had actually been asked whether he thought he needed a Muslim in his Cabinet to effectively counter Jihad, not whether he opposed the idea of having a Muslim in his Cabinet.

But as we reported earlier today, we located two GOPers in Nevada who say that Romney had in fact been asked a similar question and given a similar answer at another event three months ago. George Harris, a state GOP official, told us that he asked Romney at a private fundraiser if he would have any Muslims in his Cabinet. According to Harris, Romney’s reply was “most likely not.”

We’ve now discovered that there’s a contemporaneous account of this episode in something called Liberty Watch Magazine, which Harris publishes.

So, Romney is not only a bigot, he’s also probably a liar. Act surprised.

The only question is whether being a bigot against Arabs and Muslims will help or hurt Romney, in the Republican primaries.

It’s time to add another star to the flag. We’re never leaving Iraq. Ever. The Sun will go red giant in about five billion years, and we’ll still be in Iraq.

TPM Muckraker:

So it begins. After years of obfuscation and denial on the length of the U.S.’s stay in Iraq, the White House and the Maliki government have released a joint declaration of “principles” for “friendship and cooperation.” Apparently President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed the declaration during a morning teleconference.

As TPMM  points out, the agreement doesn’t explicitly discuss a military presence, and when it does refer to our protecting a “democratic Iraq”:

A “democratic Iraq” here means the Shiite-led Iraqi government. The current political arrangement will receive U.S. military protection against coups or any other internal subversion. That’s something the Iraqi government wants desperately: not only is it massively unpopular, even among Iraqi Shiites, but the increasing U.S.-Sunni security cooperation strikes the Shiite government — with some justification — as a recipe for a future coup.

In other words, Iraq’s “government” will remain our puppet. Should they have the temerity to attempt to do anything of which we disapprove, we can simply threaten to withdraw our protection. Needless to say, this will not be popular with most Iraqis, but when have their opinions- or lives- mattered, anyway?

When MLDB diaried this, this morning, his linked article was a little different from the one I read. Here’s what I consider key, as reported by the Associated Press:

The two senior Iraqi officials said Iraqi authorities had discussed the broad outlines of the proposal with U.S. military and diplomatic representatives. The Americans appeared generally favorable subject to negotiations on the details, which include preferential treatment for American investments, according to the Iraqi officials involved in the discussions.

As I said in MLDB’s diary:

Let’s be clear: this is Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. Let’s be doubly clear: we, the taxpayers, will be paying for an exclusive security force whose sole mission will be the protection of the private corporations who will own and operate Iraq.

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Whatever the reality behind the statistical studies of civilian deaths in Iraq, some hard facts are known. In an online chat, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, and author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, gave some hard answers. As recounted on the Editor & Publisher website:

Since Judith Miller was let loose to wander and watch the aspens turn, Sheryl Gay Stolberg has become the New York Times’s official Bush Administration sycophant. In an embarrassing front page article, she lets us know that Bush will spend his last year in office doing the warm fuzzies.

As President Bush looks toward his final year in office, with Democrats controlling Congress and his major domestic initiatives dead on Capitol Hill, he is shifting his agenda to what aides call “kitchen table issues” – small ideas that affect ordinary people’s lives and do not take an act of Congress to put in place.

Over the past few months, Mr. Bush has sounded more like the national Mr. Fix-It than the man who began his second term with a sweeping domestic policy agenda of overhauling Social Security, remaking the tax code and revamping immigration law.

Isn’t that sweet? She tells us it’s kind of like what President Clinton did, omitting the part about President Clinton actually getting things done. She says Bush went to Maryland to announce protections for a couple of types of fish, he asked lenders to help homeowners refinance, he gave the FDA new powers to recall foods, and he had the military open more air space, to enable faster domestic air travel. What a guy!

With a Mideast peace conference planned for the coming week and a war in Iraq to prosecute, Mr. Bush is, of course, deeply engaged in the most pressing foreign policy matters of the day.

That’s nice. Because his refusal to engage in any Mideast peace process, upon first taking office, is part of the reason the violence and land-grabs exploded, in the last several years, while both sides elected their most extreme governments ever. And then there’s that pesky war. Good thing the man’s still on top of things! But, still, he has this domestic agenda, as an attempt to make nicey-nice with the public!

Stolberg then blithers for several paragraphs, quoting Republicans talking about Bush remaining relevant, sprinting to the finish, and being aggressive. There’s also another comparison to the way President Clinton used smaller initiatives to help people.

“People in Washington laughed when Mr. Clinton would talk about car seats or school uniforms,” said John Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff. “But I don’t think the public laughed.”

Nor does the public appear to be laughing at Mr. Bush.

You have to love that last sentence. No, people aren’t laughing at Bush; they’re too busy loathing him. You see, President Clinton pursued smaller issues because he cared about people, not because he was trying to distract people from a disastrous war, war crimes, domestic spying, the complete politicization of government, a flagging economy, and every other level of presidential failure possible.

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The Associated Press reports:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, said this week he supports Democratic legislation that calls for most troops to come home within a year.

The remarks will be aired Saturday, as part of the weekly Democratic radio address, and right wing blowholes will undoubtedly begin emitting noxious fumes about General Sanchez hating America. Let the facts speak for themselves: General Sanchez was there; he knows what he’s talking about; the gasbag pundits sit in hermetically sealed sound studios spewing lies.

The legislation, passed by the House, blocked by Senate Republicans, and threatened with a veto by Bush, would have paid for further combat operations, while setting a goal to end combat operations by the middle of next December. It wasn’t even a hard demand to end combat operations, but even just setting such a goal was too odious for the chickenhawk warmongers of the Republican Party.

The Pentagon, of course, announced on Tuesday that they will begin laying off up to 200,000 civilian employees and contractors, unless Congress passes a bill Bush will sign. Nice framing, that. What the Pentagon really means is that they will start laying off 200,000 civilian employees unless the spoiled brat Bush gets his way.

General Sanchez takes a certain blaming-the-victim angle to his explanation, pointing out that our troops are sacrificing life and limb for an Iraqi government that continues to fail to govern. Of course, after blowing their country all to hell, failing to repair the damage, and inciting a civil war, while the majority of foreign fighters entering the country to add to the mayhem come from our ostensible allies, it’s probably not the easiest thing in the world for the factions of our puppet government to settle millenia-old differences. Even so, there’s also a pragmatic realism to the general’s comments, for the Iraqi political leaders are continually failing to meet the benchmarks that are supposed to measure their progress. They are, in fact, not doing the job our troops are supposedly there to give them a chance to do.

“There is no evidence that the Iraqis will choose to do so in the near future or that we have an ability to force that result,” he said.

Sanchez added that the House bill “makes the proper preparation of our deploying troops a priority and requires the type of shift in their mission that will allow their numbers to be reduced substantially.”

Meanwhile, the cost to our troops has once again been revealed to have been understated. USA Today reports:

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon’s official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

There’s not much more to say, except this: end the war and bring the troops home!  

The grand jury investigating the September massacre of civilians by Blackwater guards is also investigating several other “private security firms.” According to the Washington Post:

FBI investigators have reportedly concluded that the killing of 14 of the 17 civilians was unjustified under State Department rules on the use of force. But the case is muddied by the question of what laws, if any, apply to security contractors operating under military, State Department and civilian contracts.

Because massacring civilians is one of those areas of legal mud. The question is whether laws applying to private contractors working for the Defense Department also apply to contractors working for the State Department. And although the military has brought charges against numerous official service personnel, they have brought none against private security contractors. Because whether or not mass murder is legal depends on who is doing the mass murdering, and for whom they work. The current grand jury investigation indicates that might soon change.

The Iraqi government has said it knows of at least 20 shooting incidents involving security contractors, with more than half a dozen linked to Blackwater.

The problem, of course, is that legal mud.

For instance, contractors were immunized from Iraqi laws under a June 2004 order signed by the U.S. occupation authority. That ruling remains in effect.

Because the U.S. occupation authority believed what everyone working for the Bush Administration believes: some people are above the law. And that belief apparently remains. That ruling remains in effect?!

In addition, investigations are complicated by questions about evidence, jurisdiction and the availability of witnesses.

And we can all stop and ponder the meaning of the words “availability of witnesses.” Any guesses?

“If they’re going to try to indict, they’ve got a lot to overcome,” said Patricia A. Smith, an Alexandria lawyer who represents two former employees of Triple Canopy, a private security firm based in Herndon, in a civil lawsuit. The former employees say they were wrongfully terminated after reporting that their Triple Canopy team leader fired shots into the windshield of a taxi for amusement last year on Baghdad’s airport road.

For amusement.

The two former guards lost their case, but are appealing. The company was ruled to have acted “inappropriately,” and three guards were fired, including, of course, the two who reported the shooting. But no investigation was conducted. By any legal authority. Neither U.S. nor Iraqi. Smith says that as far as she knows, no subpoenas have even been issued. Undoubtedly, more legal mud.

Reading the comments in OPOL’s diary, last night, I was struck, once again, by the sheer dumb luck with which some of us have been blessed. Some, in that thread, discussed their experiences in prison, and it made me wonder how many of us have made mistakes, in life, but managed to avoid serious consequences from them. How many of us have done things that shouldn’t be illegal, but are, without getting caught? How many of us did not live through an era when the government could have grabbed us off the streets for not being willing to go fight a war that never should have been fought- and where we had to choose how to protest and oppose that fact? Luck. But it goes beyond that.

One of the things that seems to define we Democrats, liberals, and progressives, as opposed to the Republicans and conservatives, is that we understand the concept of luck, or random chance. Many Republicans and conservatives tend to think they are entitled to their good fortune, and a good portion even seem to think their good fortune was ordained directly by the Divine. Those who do not have good fortune seem to think they are being punished, or that they can pray or do some sort of penance, to essentially buy good fortune. That’s a fundamental difference between the way they perceive reality and the way most of us perceive it.

To believe you are entitled or ordained to have good fortune is to believe that others- the vast majority of the people on the planet- were entitled or ordained to have bad fortune. It obviates the need for social responsibility. If the good goes to the just and the holy, then those denied the good deserve what they get. It’s actually a pathological way of viewing the world, yet it is taken for granted as legitimate.

When I was thirty years old, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was a type of cancer that has a high survival rate, but it meant I had to undergo brutal chemotherapy and radiation treatments. In the midst of those treatments, when I was bald and frail and in constant pain, a friend asked if I ever wondered “why me?” The thought hadn’t occurred to me. As I told my friend, the thought had actually struck me: why not me? One in three Americans will, at some point, contract cancer. Some of it can be traced to clear causes, and some can’t. It’s random. It just is. Why not me?

Many of us have been very blessed in life. Many of us have had very mixed luck. Many of us have had terrible luck. Many of us have been struck by true tragedies or traumas. I would like to say that we all deserve the good, but I’m more of a realist than that. None of us deserves the good, and none of us deserves the bad. Life is not about just desserts. Life is about what we learn, what we think, what we feel, and what we do. All we can do is try. Try to be better people. Try to make this a better world. Try to muddle on, despite life’s many setbacks.

I do believe that one of the things that defines most Democrats, liberals, and progressives is the recognition that we are all in this together. Those who are more fortunate have a responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. We all have the responsibility to try to make this world a better place for all, just for our briefly having been here. I think that’s one of the basic reasons why all of us are here, on this site. We have many personal differences, many angry arguments, and many differences in background, lifestyle, taste, and fortune. But we all want to make the world a better place, for everyone. From issues of war and peace, economic and social justice, environmentalism, and everything else, the core of our ethos seems to include the concept that no one is entitled, and no one is ordained. Unless we all are. Either way, it’s up to us to make it happen.

This can be a cruel, cold world. Only we can make it warmer and more welcoming.

According to the Associated Press:

Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

Surprised?

As DWG diaried, on Wednesday, a new study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reports that:

The prevalence of reporting a mental health problem was 19.1% among service members returning from Iraq compared with 11.3% after returning from Afghanistan and 8.5% after returning from other locations (P<.001). Mental health problems reported on the postdeployment assessment were significantly associated with combat experiences, mental health care referral and utilization, and attrition from military service. Thirty-five percent of Iraq war veterans accessed mental health services in the year after returning home; 12% per year were diagnosed with a mental health problem. More than 50% of those referred for a mental health reason were documented to receive follow-up care although less than 10% of all service members who received mental health treatment were referred through the screening program.

Now, let’s be clear about something: anyone who makes it through basic training is pretty damn tough. Tougher than most of us can imagine. It is not easy to break a soldier. It is not easy to drive a soldier to desert. It takes a special breed of irresponsibility and failure to drive up desertion rates. A special breed of irresponsibility and failure from above. Like from the very top of above. Like from the ostensible Commander-in-Chief.

As CBS News reported, in July:

About 38 percent of soldiers and 31 percent of Marines report psychological conditions such as brain injury and PTSD after returning from deployment. Among members of the National Guard, the figure is much higher – 49 percent – with numbers expected to grow because of repeated and extended deployments.

And this list of links explains why: