BTC News: If It Says 'News,' It Must Be True » Iraq

Blogs on Parade: “They’re Wrong About Everything” edition

Weldon Berger — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:49:39 +0000

I have been lazy about referring the two of you to other blogs. I keep forgetting that it’s perfectly legitimate in this business to just quote stuff and then say I wrote something, which makes me feel better about not having written anything. Here are some things that people I like have found other people to be fantastically wrong about.

Jack Crow on the threat to traditional marriage:

If you’re looking for what degrades or corrupts the, heh, marriage bond, you ain’t ever going to find it the affections and affectations of homosexuals. But, you will find a whole lot of sundered wedded union in the wake of deployment, military industrial centralization and the austerity which follows war upon war. That shit is disruptive. The gays, not so much.

I already mentioned this in my own universally praised assessment of the State of the Union speech, but the IOZ take on the Obama invocation of the US as the “indispensable nation” deserves immortality.

Did he say anything interesting? Jobs, mortgages, jobs, business, taxes. I seem to recall some generic bellicosity toward Iran and I definitely remember hearing that hoary Albrightism, “the indispensable nation.” I have always enjoyed that phrase. It suggests a single, sad bag of Cheetohs resting lazily between the coil and the glass, refusing to fall into the hopper, and a single, sad, very fat man banging a futile palm against the other side of the vending machine.

And anyone who says otherwise is probably wrong about everything else, too.

Way back when, the day after he got elected, I characterized Obama as the compassionate conservative that people goofily pretended George Bush would be. Avedon Carol thinks I was wrong about that.

Remember, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he failed, and he failed because people – with liberals leading the charge – fought back, to the point where even registered Republicans realized what was going on and called their GOP Congresscreeps and let them know they’d never get another vote from them if they signed on to this outrage. Now Obama is trying to wreck Social Security, and where are those people? Well, they’re not telling people to call their Congressmen, because they are still too busy telling us how awful the Republicans are, as if only the Republicans were doing anything outrageous.

Left I on the News scientifically proves that Syria’s Bashir al-Assad is just like Hitler.

Today on the news, a Syrian defector was talking about the “genocide” taking place in Syria, where an alleged (but hardly proven) 5000 deaths (of both opposition forces and government troops) have taken place. I have yet to hear on the news anyone applying the word “genocide” to the 1.3 million Iraqis who have met their fate at the hands of the U.S. government.

You’ll have to read it to get the context for the 1.3 million, but no matter which way you lean there are lots of people in Iraq whose fates turned all the way bad when the US invaded.

And so on. Coming soon, it turns out that at some point in the not-too-distant future, the machines did in fact win.

The IMF wants me, plus, Iraq Who?

Weldon Berger — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:56:31 +0000

The latest scam spam in my inbox is a letter from a high-ranking official of the International Monetary Fund telling me to deal only with him in recovering my money from Nigeria. What is it with Nigeria?

Okay, so the war in Iraq is over, according to Obama. This is because the Iraqis rejected his energetic pleas to let him keep some troops in the country—”Okay, not 30,000. How about 10,000? 5? 3500? Okay, fine, we’re leaving, but don’t blame me if we have to come back in with guns a-blazing …”—rather than observing the exit plan humorously agreed upon by the Bush administration.

But even with that we’re not leaving, not if you count the 16,000-strong crowd manning the murder holes in the State Department’s gigantic downtown Baghdad bunker. By way of comparison, that’s almost as many people as staff every other US embassy in the world combined, minus Afghanistan.

US journalists by and large exhibit an astonishing lack of curiosity about the rationale behind the behemoth. Even discounting the enormous ~~mercenary~~ security force, the personnel equivalent of perhaps four Army brigades, the embassy will house roughly double the number of diplomatic (and spy) personnel as the next largest embassy, the swollen one in Kabul. Why? Especially when you consider that it’ll be years before any of them can leave the embassy without an escort from a bunch of the 10,000 or so ~~mercenaries~~ security folk.

It’s good that Obama didn’t simply ignore the agreement and keep as many troops in the country as he wanted. Members of the previous crime family running the government would no doubt have worked harder to find a way around the issue that ultimately scotched the occupation.

It’s sort of funny, though, that the Iraqi refusal to bow to US wishes and immunize US personnel against local prosecution for war crimes and other breaches of decorum should somehow redound to Obama’s credit in the eyes of the people who applaud him for getting the troops out. He didn’t want to end the occupation, and the only reason he did was because he couldn’t allow US troops to be held accountable for their actions by the people who are ostensibly meant to benefit from our presence, those being “The Iraqi People,” as in “Thanks to the sacrifice of our troops, The Iraqi People have a shot at [insert something that sounds nice here].”

The end of the occupation doesn’t mean an end to US military involvement in Iraq, of course. There’s quite a lusty little arms deal in the works, which the US Departments of War and State assure everyone won’t be used to any nefarious purpose by the various nefarious parties in government.

They know this because there remain 150 US military personnel in the country to monitor how the weapons are used, and they’ll rat out anybody among the Iraqis who does anything unwholesome with their American weapons. It’s the same human rights regime we’ve imposed so successfully upon Israel lo these many years. And the Saudis and so on.

America: Our guns have goodness built right in.

The case for invading Iraq: Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team is on it

Weldon Berger — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:14:14 +0000

If you were to set out building a fantasy Bad Foreign Policy team, one that could reliably saddle you with the most foul, murderous foreign policy disasters imaginable, the place you would want to start is here, at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). That’s what the Bush administration did, staffing their foreign policy and national security establishments with signatories to the now-dormant organization’s statement of principles.

Donald Rumsfeld is among the signatories, as is Rumsfeld’s former top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. Dick Cheney is another, as is his former top deputy, the convicted felon Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama is there; so is Jeb “Aw, Geez, George, now I’ll never get to be president” Bush. And so is 5-time NBA champion, actor, alien and recent Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, Dennis Rodman.

No, wait: Dennis isn’t that crazy. It was some guy called Peter Rodman, who maybe or maybe not should be dead, but definitely is so.

The other Rodman’s untimely death explains his absence from the PNAC-powered foreign policy posse that Mitt Romney, the increasingly Gumby-like leader of the GOP presidential pre-primaries, is assembling in apparent anticipation of the 2000 general election.

Eliot Cohen, another PNAC signatory and Bush administration factotum, is all in for Mitt. So is former Bush administration undersecretary of state for democracy, Paula Dobriansky. Robert Kagan, whose family is to neoconservatism as Alec Baldwin’s is to acting—or would be if all the Baldwins were the awesomely delusional but very modestly-talented Stephen Baldwin—is on board. (Kagan’s dad, Donald, is the actual PNAC signatory but they keep the crazy in the family.)

Former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber, who embodies the “not quite rising to the level of overt criminality” school of legislative conduct, is a PNAC alumnus. (Involuntarily retired Minnesota senator Norm Coleman is not, but does bear the distinction of being the only member of Congress ever to lose to a Saturday Night Live cast member.) Weber is also a bigfoot lobbyist whose firm has been supporting Pakistan’s efforts to keep Congress from cutting US military and financial assistance to that country.

The Romney list is simply a rogues gallery. Whoever wasn’t intimately involved in plotting and marketing the most stupid and destructive foreign policy adventure in US history was cheering it or profiting from it or both. The only significant names one doesn’t find on it are those who, like John Bolton, probably see Romney as irreparably weak-kneed on diplomacy and defense.

Among the more peculiar choices to fill out the team is Dan Senor, the one-time spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which for those of you who weren’t paying attention at the time is what the US occupation government in Iraq was called. Senor managed a seamless transition from the coruscating narratives created by Baghdad Bob, Saddam’s spokesman during the invasion, to his own less dazzling but equally fictional descriptions of post-invasion success.

Norm Coleman may qualify as the most bewildering member. Not only isn’t he a PNAC graduate; a quick glance at his CV seems to indicate that his only significant foreign policy experience derives from his successful mayoral quest to establish a new National Hockey League franchise in St. Paul, an endeavor necessarily involving diplomatic relations with stick-wielding and sometimes ill-tempered Russians and Canadians. If there is such a thing as an ill-tempered Canadian. Rex?

There are the Michaels Chertoff and Hayden, the former a proud father of the PATRIOT Act and the Bureau of Internal Security and now, the proprietor of the Chertoff Group; the latter, the longest serving head of the National Security Agency, with a minor in CIA and now, a partner in the Chertoff Group. Ever feel like you’re being watched? It’s probably the two of them.

Dov Zackheim was embedded in the Pentagon in one manner or another for nigh on 30 years. As a Rumsfeld deputy for Pentagon planning he helped develop the strategies for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. Promoted to Pentagon comptroller, he oversaw the disappearance of billions in shrink-wrapped pallets loaded with hundred dollar bills during the Iraq occupation and then abruptly resigned a year after the invasion; he is of course another PNAC veteran. He has written a book called “It Wasn’t My Fault: How Other People in the Bush Administration Fucked Everything Up.”

It’s an impressive group. The people in it who fucked up did so in the biggest possible ways, and the ones who executed their responsibilities well are probably worse.

And here we are apparently on the cusp of another Iraq crisis. A heroically corrupt state just this side of failed, Iraq’s government is joining with Iran’s in helping Syria’s to weather that country’s belated Spring, and the two have negotiated a number of mutual trade and assistance pacts during the past several years.

There is as yet no official word on whether or not the current Iraqi government is a party to the recently discovered “plot” by “Iran” to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in the US through the good offices of a Mexican drug cartel, which was inexplicably willing to bring its operations forcefully front and center to every US law enforcement and intelligence agency for the sake of about 12 hours worth of profit.

Given the pedigrees of the Romney foreign policy team members, though, job the second on their to do list, after nuking Iran, will be the invasion of Iraq and the installation of a pro-US government.

Because one simply can’t be too careful.

Paging Ahmed Chalabi. Dr. Ahmed Chalabi to the white courtesy phone please …

Thanks to the ever vigilant Malignant Bouffant for tipping me to the caper.

Today, we are all cheese-eating surrender monkeys

Weldon Berger — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:40:37 +0000

The New York Times editorial board chooses the not-quite-successful-yet six-month effort to kill Muammar Gaddafi or chase him out of Libya as an occasion to scold our NATO friends; Barack Obama runs recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan through the scrubber; David Ignatius gives Tom Friedman a run for the money.

In an editorial entitled “NATO’s Teachable Moment“, the Times editors decry the degree to which the UK and France had to rely on the US to fill gaps in the NATO supply of munitions and accessories such as AWACs (Airborne Warning And Control System) aircraft during the six-month campaign against Libya. It is evidence, they say, that those countries are overly and unfairly reliant on the US war machine.

They also resurrect former US secretary of war Bob Gates’s hilarious warning that NATO countries “risked becoming militarily irrelevant unless they stepped up investment in their forces and equipment.”

To Gates and the editorial board, that’s a shameful future. But I ask you: could there possibly be any more cheerful fate in this day and age than to become militarily irrelevant?

The editorial closes ominously, with the editors asking, “If it was this hard taking on a ragtag army like Qaddafi’s, what would it be like to have to fight a real enemy?”

Let he who is without sin cast the first drone

It’s a question that the editors might just as well have asked about our own military. After more than eight years in Iraq and two months shy of ten in Afghanistan, and despite trillions in war department spending, we’ve created an all but failed state in the one place and a narco-state in the other; dependents we’re incapable of supporting.

What would it be like to fight “a real enemy?” Say, I have an idea: let’s all not find out.

The Times editors aren’t the only ones captured by a delusion or trying to sell one. Barack Obama used a speech at the annual American Legion conference to coin an awful designation, the “9/11 generation”, for military veterans of the past decade. Congratulations, veterans! We had the Lost Generation, the World War II generation, the Pepsi Generation and now, the 9/11 Generation.

Let’s hope the tag doesn’t stick. Who wants to be associated with an era characterized by a freakishly successful terrorist attack followed by a national psychotic break that engendered two wildly unsuccessful and violent occupations that have cost the US trillions and have most of the world saying “Fuckin’ Americans …”? Not to mention the torture and the surveillance state on steroids and the prosecutions of whistle blowers and whatever. Not to mention Operation Infinite War.

In the president’s view, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over in a matter of weeks. It’s only the mopping up that’s taking a decade and change. He praised the veterans for toppling the Taliban and the Iraqi governments post haste. He said that they are “a generation of innovators” who have “changed the way America fights and wins at wars.”

“At wars” is a peculiar locution; it seems more suited for games. “At checkers, “at chess,” “at circumventing the Constitution” …

What’s really peculiar, though, is the “wins” part. It seems a bit on the dissociative side unless, like checkers or chess, the more pieces you collect the better you’re doing. In that sense we’re doing well; we have way more wars, or at least way more places in which we’re visiting serious violence upon the occupants, than we did when we started. So maybe the expression isn’t as odd as it seems.

The president said that US troops have “taken on the role of diplomats and mayors and development experts” and have “learned the cultures and traditions and languages of the places where they served.”

Mayors? If he says so; it seems weird to call a soldier from an invading/occupying army a “mayor.” The other things are true of some military personnel; many prefer to stick with the business of blowing things up and killing people, which is after all why we’re in those countries and also why diplomats and development experts are required among our soldiers. We wouldn’t need them if weren’t killing the people and blowing up their stuff.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius—who is basically Tom Friedman with a sine wave—is begging questions apace with his betters and the best of his peers. He has a column up about potential hard feelings between incoming CIA head David “The Risen God” Petraeus and CIA analysts who say the US is stalemated in Afghanistan. Petraeus is more bullish on our prospects there because he’s the one who engineered the current state of affairs. Ignatius boils the conflict down to this:

How Petraeus manages this inevitable friction — reassuring the analysts while remaining faithful to his own views — will be closely watched within and outside the CIA.

In other words, the question isn’t whether or not Petraeus will blow off his analysts; only whether or not he can prevent an open rebellion among them when he does. Judging from his success in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could be in for a bloody few years at Langley.

Unlike Friedman, Ignatius has sources other than a lone, continent-hopping billionaire cab driver. His take is no doubt accurate. What makes it stupid is his failure to note that the relationship as he describes it is guaranteed to be completely dysfunctional. Is that a good thing? a bad thing? Apparently, it’s simply what it is, a thing too big to notice or judge.

Here’s a direct quote from Petraeus or Leon Panetta or some sacrificial general from sometime in 2012: “We’ve said all along that we face a challenging environment in Afghanistan and that our plans to draw down the number of US troops in the country have always been tied to conditions on the ground. That said, we’re making progress and we will continue making progress.” And then something about our Afghan allies stepping up to the plate.

Obama continues to insist that all US troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year. At the same time he continues to negotiate the terms of an extended US presence. Perhaps he will change the designations of those who remain behind. Perhaps he will call them “Ambassadors of the 9/11 Generation” or “Mayors Emeritus.” Then he will have been honest, you see, as he will have been honest about the continued presence of mercenaries and government paramilitary personnel who were never formally “troops.”

Meanwhile, bully for England. Bully for France. The US reintroduced large scale wars of choice to the world and invested considerable time and resources into bribing and bullying our allies to accept the new order. By rights we ought to foot the bill for the consequent wars even when they’re not, strictly speaking, our own. Alternatively, we could renounce the practice and save everyone a bunch of money and, incidentally, preserve the lives of the people in those far off lands.

Ha ha.

So, well, okay: Maybe Obama really is toast.

Weldon Berger — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 06:07:00 +0000

Yesterday I wrote this somewhat carefully considered thing about how Obama’s reelection prospects aren’t as bad as a lot of people think because he’ll have many boatloads of money and the only official GOP candidates who aren’t too obviously insane to win in the general election are saddled with a Mormon problem that will probably doom them in the primaries. That could change, but so far none of the Republicans who don’t have those problems seem to think they can win, so they’re not running.

What never occurred to me is that Obama might run on his record; I just assumed he would run a two-pronged effort to paint Republicans as the slavering sociopaths they are while he proposes popular legislation that he can’t and probably doesn’t want to get passed. I forget that some people still take him seriously, and that presumably he and his staff do as well.

I posted yesterday’s effort at the Smirking Chimp as well as here, because people actually see the stuff I post there. Quite a few people have commented on it, and among them was a proud Obama supporter who came up with something that, the more consideration I give it, seems quite insane. I reprint it here; the original is here.

I love that President Obama is more like James Bond than wannabe cowboy Bush.

Let’s see….President Obama -
- took out Somali pirates
- ACA
- Saved GM (and made a profit)
- troops out of Iraq
- troops out of Afghanistan
- killed Bin Laden
- Egypt – dictator gone
- Tunisia – dictator gone
- Libya – dictator gone
tons more here – http://theobamadiary.com/2011/08/22/a-word-from-tally-4/

And no need for a farcical parade in a flight suit on an aircraft carrier in front of a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner that all turned out to be a lie.

I don’t need President Superfly.

Ghandi, MLK, and Mandela didn’t need to get all mad either.

And no, I don’t want Obama running around yelling, “Look at what I did!” or “My way or the highway!” I hated when Bush The Smirk did that, and I certainly don’t want President Obama doing it.

I prefer a POTUS with some class and grace, especially in the face of such monstrous, well-funded, and downright hatefully ugly opposition.

Yeah – I’m totally IN for Obama 2012.

Er … James Bond?

The subject line of the comment reads “WTF”. This is probably in celebration of the Obama campaign refrain, “Winning The Future.” But of course the more widely recognized use of the acronym is to mean “What The Fuck?”

So: James Bond? What. The. Fuck.

Presumably that’s a reference to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which the president carried out accompanied by the lovely but ultimately doomed daughter of a treasonous Pakistani intelligence official. And, I guess, to his daring late night rescue of a container ship captain who was kidnapped by Somali pirates. We all know the story: The president, armed only with a speargun and what proved to be a defective limpet mine, glided lithely through the shark-infested waters …

And so on. The thing to remember about Bond is that in the end, he’s the Queen’s man who takes the Queen’s shilling and does the Queen’s work no matter how dirty it gets.

It bears endless repeating that Obama absolutely has not removed the US troops, contractors and mercenaries from Afghanistan and Iraq; he is instead negotiating extended stays in those hospitable climes on their behalves, and expanding his theater of operations to … well, to everywhere.

President Superfly? Well, why the hell not? As we see in the campaign literature, he’s got a plan to stick it to the man. Barack Obama? Not so much: He is the man, or at least the man’s man. I’m actually sort of torn on the question of whether or not a world weary coke dealer/president looking to get out of the game and into something less destructive would be a bad thing for the country; I’m inclined to think that on balance, we could do worse. Especially with respect to the War on Some Drugs. And there’s no denying that Youngblood Priest had keen negotiating skills.

I’m not clear on which Obama was behind the overthrow of Mubarak and Ben Ali in Egypt and Tunisia, respectively. Was that Obama/Bond or Obama/Martin Luther King? And which of them has the Al Khalifa family’s back in Bahrain, where protesters against the despotic ruling family have met with unequivocal equivocation from the US? Can you say “US Navy Fifth Fleet,” boys and girls?

King and Gandhi, Gandhi and King … It was Gandhi who coined the famous saying that “Change must come from the barrel of a gun,” and both he and King were life-long advocates of extended aerial bombardments causing frequent but deeply, sincerely regretted collateral fucking damage. Neither they nor Nelson Mandela, the former head of the African National Congress military wing, are known to have had an angry moment in their lives.

President James Martin Luther Mohandas Bond Obama: Always cool, able to step up and drain the three under pressure or calmly oust suddenly inconvenient despots in countries with coveted natural resources. No muss, no fuss, no need to bother Congress, asking no other question but “What Would Gandhi Do?”

I was watching the movie “Crossfire” tonight. The director was Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten screenwriters and directors blacklisted in 1947 by the movie industry for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. One of Dmytryk’s friends and fellow blacklistees was Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter and novelist who wrote “Johnny Got His Gun,” and later wrote and directed the film version.

“Johnny Got His Gun” is, I think, the most horrifying novel I’ve read. The story’s protagonist is a World War I soldier who survives an artillery round explosion on the last day of the war with his mind intact but with the loss of his limbs, sight, hearing and speech. The novel describes his gradual recognition of his circumstances and follows his evolving understanding of the nature of the mechanics of war. Here’s an excerpt from a section in which Johnny is thinking about the men who make war and the ones who actually do the fighting in the wars those other men make.

Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight. So they were masking the future they were keeping the future a soft quiet deadly secret. They knew if all the people all the little guys saw the future they would begin to ask questions. They would ask questions and they would find answers and they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight they would say you lying thieving sons-of-bitches we won’t fight we won’t be dead we will live we are the world we are the future and we will not let you butcher us no matter what you say no matter what slogans you write.

We are the immortal we are the sources of life we are the lowly despicable ugly people we are the great wonderful beautiful people of the world and we are sick of it we are utterly weary we are done with it forever and ever because we are the living and we will not be destroyed.

If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us who die. It will be you… Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives.

And part of the horror of the book is that these are the thoughts of a man with, literally, no voice and no face and nothing to fight with.

You can’t read those things and understand them and internalize them, and send someone off to die and someone off to kill. You can’t set poor man against poor man. You can’t even write stupid shit boasting about the James Bond president assassinating Osama and knocking off Gadaffi and blowing up some schmoes in Somalia who likely as not took to piracy when they lost their fishing grounds to foreign fleets.

But we’ve moved way beyond “Johnny Got His Gun”. The men who make wars aren’t any longer masking the future or keeping it secret. It’s so far out in the open now that a good liberal, a good Democrat, can write a mash note praising the style of her warrior, her man, her murderer, over that of the last one without even questioning the underlying premise. It’s so far out in the open that it has become the open, just as have the astonishing acts of thievery and greed that characterize this country’s rulers.

And oh, yeah: That profit the president made on GM? On the backs of the workers.

Winning the future. What the fuck.