Category: War

This is a Quick posting as I just Uploaded the Video’s and am running around getting ready for work.

Congress Vows Action On Vets’ Suicides

‘Make VA go to the soldier’

Tomorrow December 12, 2007, there’s a hearing on Stopping Suicide and Ending Homelessness: Mental Health Challenges Within the Department of Veterans Affairs by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee,

Ilona Meagher, of PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within and author of Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America’s Returning Troops, is scheduled to be one of the ones to testify at this Congressional hearing, as many already know. If you have the chance, and C-Span carries this hearing please watch! Ilona has a short send off post at her site, seems though she’s caught in the Mid West ice storm, here’s hoping this Important New Voice on PTSD can make it to DC!

I’ve long been a fan of noted blogger clammyc.  He is a tireless and eloquent patriot blogging for the cause.  He is also a pioneer in the field of blog radio and a soon-to-be new father.  After following his writing for a year or more I finally met him face to face at YKOS in Chi-town this past August.  In the course of our conversations there he mentioned that he had a trip to Atlanta coming up in the fall.  I told him to get in touch if he had any free time.  

One of my favorite concise summations of what’s wrong with this country came from film director Philip Kaufman, in a 1990 article in Time Magazine. Kaufman’s film Henry and June had been slapped with an X rating for excessive eroticism, despite the fact that said eroticism was a fundamental part of the story, about the writers Henry Miller and Anais Nin, and Miller’s wife, June. Ironically, of course, Miller’s books had also been censored by the officious false morality of Puritanical America. But Kaufman understood that something larger, and more insidious, was at play:

“You can cut off a breast,” says Kaufman, “but you can’t caress it. The violent majority is dictating to a tender minority.”

I was eleven in ’63…when they killed John Kennedy. That was the end of my innocence, and the end of America’s too. 

I shouted out,
“Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all
It was you and me

Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil

This is troubling, not because it is unexpected but more due to the fact that many have predicted it and watched as their dire predictions came true. From CNN Money:¹

With oil prices setting records over $90 a barrel – and $100 looking ever more likely – experts say there’s a good chance drivers will see $3 gasoline before the end of the year.

“Three dollar gasoline in this market is unavoidable,” said Stephen Schork, publisher of the industry newsletter the Schork Report. “At this rate, we’re going to see $4 a gallon.”

If you think that’s bad, make the jump and read more…

Don Rumsfeld was charged with war-crimes today. Bushco’s connection to Mid-East terrorism and pork may be the next story to blow.

Wapo

Retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, a former NATO commander Bush appointed last year as his special envoy to work on the issue, left the job recently because of what several sources described as his frustration at the administration’s failure to devote serious attention to the problem. Ralston, vice chairman of an international consulting firm led by former defense secretary William S. Cohen, did not return several calls for comment.

There’s far more at stake…

I posted this on big orange, but it is probably better suited for DD.

Having to travel this week, I picked up a Time magazine for some low impact mental aerobics.  Thumbing through the October 22 edition, I came across an article by Andrew Marshall, entitled “Anatomy of a Failed Revolution.”  The subhead was depressing:

A correspondent looks back on a week of hope and despair in Burma’s brief, shining – but ultimately doomed  – uprising

I could feel the despair rising in my own chest as I prepared to digest one man’s post-mortem of yet another attempt by repressed people to peacefully attempt regime change.  We know the Buddhist monks chanted the mantra:

Let everyone be free from harm
Let everyone be free from anger
Let everyone be free from hardship

We know the monks were gunned down in cold blood.

I just frontpaged a short piece over on ePluribus Media called “About that weapons cache…” — Good News and Bad News, but it’s important enough to repeat in full here…

Great news, folks! This just in from Reuters:

19 tons of explosives found in Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. forces in Iraq discovered nearly 19 tons of explosives in a weapons cache north of Baghdad this week, one of the biggest finds of its kind, the U.S. military said on Saturday.

[…snip…] More at link in title

Isn’t that wonderful? 19 tons!

Of course, if the Bush Administration hadn’t lost 380 tons of explosives just over three years ago, we might have something more significant to crow over. (Make the jump…)

I am a huge NPR listener, especially on my commute and on Saturday, when “This American Life” is on.  Today was part of a pledge drive, since they are “listener-supported” public radio, so this was a repeat.  My internet connection wasn’t working, but I wrote the name “Conrad Crane” down on an envelope, because he warned that it was folly to invade Iraq and not plan for the Reconstruction.  From his study of history, he knew that what would befall our country, the Iraqi people and their neighbors would dwarf what had been experienced under the government of Saddam Hussein.

As soon as my internet connection was up, I discovered Rod Dreher at BeliefNet had written “Conrad Crane Told Us So” after hearing the original NPR podcast.  Concrad Crane knew .. and so did the man I photographed in late 2002.

From Rod’s piece:

I get “This American Life” via podcast, and listened to the latest one this morning. It was a stunner. One of the segments was about the work of Conrad Crane, a historian at the US Army War College, who with colleague W. Andrew Terrill produced this February 2003 monograph. It was a document, based on study of historical experience, intended to guide the American occupation of Iraq, by warning the military what would happen if they did, or failed to do, certain things. Like the TAL correspondent said, it reads like a letter from the future predicting exactly what did happen in Iraq. (See PDF at end of article) Note especially the warning that to disband the Iraqi army would be to annihilate one of the only sources of unity in the country, and could send its soldiers straight into the arms of sectarian militias.

This is not a new story; James Fallows reported on it a couple of years ago in The Atlantic.  The point is, nobody in the administration can say they weren’t warned about what could happen in Iraq. They were. They chose to ignore it because it didn’t suit their ideological vision. Nothing that happened in Iraq after the end of the first phase of the war surprised Conrad Crane. It shouldn’t have surprised President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, or any of them. They chose not to believe it.

It seems that Rumsfeld et al chose to disbelieve it because if historian Crane was right, then he, Rumsfeld, was wrong in his theories about how the US military needed to be transformed. So he — and the commander in chief he served — chose theory over experience. The arrogance simply begs belief.

Joseph Ralston: the former Nato Supreme Commander and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was supposed to prevent a Turkish invasion of Iraq. As I noted in my preceding diaries on Ralston, here and here, Bush appointed Ralston one year to prevent the building crisis threating to engulf the region.

Neo-cons are freaking because they know that Bush support for PKK terror is actually making it harder for the US to attack Syria and Iran…

The MSM is clueless. How clueless? Fox and the Wapo ran identical stories, neither noting that Ralston ran away from  his responsibilities months ago…