Category: Iraq

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  

This world in arms is not spending money alone.  

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  

Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

The United States Military Industrial Complex has might.  General and former President Eisenhower understood this.  He warned Americans.  Abundant might does not make right; it only advances the notion of righteousness.  Patriotism is promoted through militarism.  His words fell on deaf ears.  The sound was hollow in contrast to the drone of drumbeats.  At the time, Americans were as they are today; dedicated to the customs we think characterize democracy.

We see this in many a war and peace policy.  Questions are asked of the government and the people. Testimony is taken.  Think tanks assess Foreign Policy. Conclusions are drawn and decisions made.  Still, in 2010, a few within the electorate wonder as General Eisenhower had.. With Al-Qaida Fading, Why Expand the Afghan War?

 As the House convenes today, Tuesday, August 10, to vote on some Senate last minute leftovers, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs shows the House members hesitating on voting for more stuff how to communicate effectively with the voters when they resume their 6 week August vacation and fundraising break.

http://thehill.com/homenews/ad…

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.

Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington “in America,” and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.

In the spirit of bipartisanshipthingee, I’ll quote Fox News now on what happened next:

http://www.foxnews.com/politic…

Tues Aug 10

WASHINGTON — In a rare moment of bipartisanship Tuesday, the House approved $600 million to pay for more unmanned surveillance drones and about 1,500 more agents along the troubled Mexican border.

Getting tougher on border security is one of the few issues that both parties agree on in this highly charged election season. But lawmakers remain deeply divided over a more comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem, and it’s unclear if Congress will go beyond border-tightening efforts.

The House passed the bill by an unrecorded voice vote after brief debate.

In fact, although Pelosi was supposedly calling the House back into session during break to vote on a “jobs” bill, ( which went flying under the radar as some Senate amendment to a House Amendment to a Senate Amendment,)   the HR 6080 Emergency Supplemental for Border Security for Fiscal Year 2010 was the very first thing they debated and suspended the rules and passed by voice vote today, at 10:54 am EDT.  You can see the Clerk of the House’s record here, look up Aug 10, 2010, because there will be NO ROLL CALL VOTE RECORD of this.  http://clerk.house.gov/floorsu…

text of bill from THOMAS here:  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/…

In a perhaps unintentional and obtuse twist of sardonic wit and possibly complete unawareness of the irony of his own words, Commander of United States Forces – Iraq (USF-I) General Ray Odierno said on Sunday in an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that the 50,000 US troops that will remain in Iraq along with “a significant civilian presence” after the US ‘withdraws’, will help Iraq thwart “interference from outside countries”.

Really. You can’t make this stuff up. If fiction it wouldn’t qualify as humor.

United States forces under President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in an unprovoked attack in 2003 and have occupied the country since. By some counts more than a million Iraqis have died as a direct result of the US invasion and occupation.

Odierno was former primary military advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from November 2004 to May 2006, and has long argued against withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq. He assumed command of USF-I’s predecessor, Multi-National Force – Iraq on September 16, 2008 and took the reins as Commander of U.S. Forces Iraq on January 1, 2010, under President Barack Obama.

Odierno’s ironic comments in the interview followed only a few days after President Obama publicly backtracked on his 2009 pledge to withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq by September 1, 2010:

The ‘Agent Orange’ of these occupations, that’s literally as some of these soldiers are suffering from exactly the same extreme physical ailments of the same chemicals, and more, of the defoliants only this time they were sucking in smoke and air from these burn pits, as are the citizens occupied and especially downwind and the ground contamination left from the burns!

Ailing vets sue over smoke from trash fires in Iraq, Afghanistan

Obama addresses a conference of Disabled American Veterans, August 2, 2010

“Does Obama sound like Bush?” asks the Christian Science Monitor, and answers…

Obama is indeed carrying out an agreement reached by the Bush administration that laid out the timetable for withdrawal.

Gareth Porter at Asia Times Online provides a little more context.

Seventeen months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq by September 1, 2010, he quietly abandoned that pledge on Monday, admitting implicitly that such combat brigades would remain until the end of 2011.

Obama’s apparent pledge of withdrawal of combat troops by the September 1 deadline in his February 27, 2009, speech generated headlines across the commercial news media. That allowed the administration to satisfy its anti-war Democratic Party base on a pivotal national security policy issue.

At the same time, however, it allowed Obama to back away from his campaign promise on Iraq withdrawal, and to signal to those political and bureaucratic forces backing a long-term military presence in Iraq that he had no intention of pulling out all combat troops at least until the end of 2011.

He could do so because the news media were inclined to let the apparent Obama withdrawal pledge stand as the dominant narrative line, even though the evidence indicated it was a falsehood.

Time Magazine was likewise skeptical about how much change Obama has imposed on the Bush paradigm.

It’s not hard to see why many skeptics see little more than a rebranding message in President Obama’s announcement that U.S. troop levels in Iraq will soon stand at 50,000 and that their mission would be to “train and advise Iraqi security forces, conduct partnered and targeted counterterrorism operations and protect ongoing U.S. civilian and military efforts.”

For one thing, that’s what they’ve been doing for quite some time now, in keeping with the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) concluded between the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government. The SOFA moved U.S. troops out of Iraq’s cities last summer and ended independent U.S. military operations – today they’re required to operate in tandem with Iraqi forces.

And apart from daily bombings and political assassinations, Obama’s perky optimism about American “accomplishments” in Iraq is also belied by many inconvenient factoids.

“Much of the violence has occurred because there is no government, because nobody knows what the future is,” said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has periodically advised top U.S. commanders in Baghdad.

No government?

In the inconclusive March 7 elections, the heavily Sunni-backed Iraqiya coalition led by former premier Ayad Allawi won 91 seats compared to 89 for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s mainly Shiite Rule of Law coalition, but neither won the 163-seat majority necessary to govern.

As the political wrangling for allies draws out, insurgents have continued their deadly attacks in what appears to be an attempt to take advantage of the political vacuum to re-ignite sectarian tensions.

But so what if Iraq doesn’t have a government? At least they have a flag!

Suspected Al-Qaeda fighters killed five Iraqi soldiers in a brazen dawn attack Tuesday at a western Baghdad checkpoint and planted the terror group’s black banner before fleeing the scene, officials said.

It was the second time in a week that Al-Qaeda’s flag has appeared at the scene of an attack.

Has all the bloodshed, death and destruction counted for so little?

Yes.

I can think of no better way to emphasize the current theft of our nations treasury at the expense of its youth than to use the words of Major General Smedley Butler in November 1935.

Never Ending War

We are not suppose to win, we are not suppose to lose …. We have always been at war with East Asia. This post is going to largely stand on its own from the research I have turned up.

WASHINGTON, Nov 2, 2009 (Reuters) – The U.S. government does not know exactly how many contractors it employs in Afghanistan, a U.S. commission said on Monday, raising basic questions about oversight of wartime operations.

Contractors in Afghanistan outnumber U.S. troops there and scandals involving misconduct by employees of private firms on the U.S. payroll in Afghanistan and Iraq have prompted calls by Congress for greater accountability.

[..]A traditional manual count by the U.S. military’s Central Command turned up nearly 74,000 U.S. Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan as of June 30 — more than twice the number shown in another survey by the Pentagon.

A more recent count from July 2010

[..]The Department of Defense has more contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than it has uniformed military personnel, another newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service reminds us.

“The Department of Defense increasingly relies upon contractors to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has resulted in a DOD workforce that has 19% more contractor personnel (207,600) than uniformed personnel (175,000),” said the CRS report

At 57% of total Defense Department workforce, the number of contractors represents “the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States,” the study concludes.

Its the same Old Story (no date)

Currently in Afghanistan, there are 121,000 U.S. contractors and 68,000 U.S. troops. As a result of the coming surge, another 30,000 troops and 56,000 contractors are expected. But U.S. lawmakers are afraid that the mistakes that plagued military contracting in Iraq will be repeated in Afghanistan. Will the shadow armies be required to protect the Afghan civilian population? What are the chances that military contractors could cause major damage to America’s mission in Afghanistan? Will the Obama administration be able to prevent the waste, fraud and abuse seen in Iraq?

[..]Recently the CIA announced that it had stopped using Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) to conduct raids and other special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but some press reports say Xe Services are still at the center of a secret program in Karachi, Pakistan, where they plan assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members, among other operations.

Gareth Porter is an historian and investigative journalist and US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Porter is author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Porter talks with Real News Network’s Paul Jay with a dissection of Obama’s Iraq ‘withdrawal’ smoke and mirrors kabuki.

Iraq, Rapidly becoming the Forgotten War!!

There have been 4,733 coalition deaths — 4,414 Americans, 2 Australians, 1 Azerbaijani, 179 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, 1 Czech, 7 Danes, 2 Dutch, 2 Estonians, 1 Fijian, 5 Georgians, 1 Hungarian, 33 Italians, 1 Kazakh, 1 South Korean, 3 Latvian, 22 Poles, 3 Romanians, 5 Salvadoran, 4 Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, 2 Thai and 18 Ukrainians — in the war in Iraq as of August 4 2010, according to a CNN count. { Graphical breakdown of casualties }. At least 31,897 {31,860 last month} U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. View casualties in the war in Afghanistan

Wikileaks Afghan War Diary 2004-2010

It seems that Wikileaks has posted a massive (1.4 GB, 10x larger than all the other files on the page combined) heavily encrypted file on it’s dedicated “Afghan War Diary” page labeled simply “Insurance”.

Possibly in response to the harsh rhetoric issuing from the US DoD regarding Wikileak’s founder, Julian Assange (including the rumored price on his head), sometime last Sunday afternoon the new file was quietly uploaded with no explanation.