Was the Iraq war worth it? --UPI video

Although several of the respondents are clearly buying into the myth that the US presence is preventing greater instability, at least the UPI is asking people a question that remains mostly unspoken on American television news.

briefly(10June08)

BBC News: "Iraq's reconstruction probed" (video, 2:40)
here's one quote:

"The American public have little idea of the fraud and waste of their tax dollars. Seventy court cases are subject to a US gagging order, preventing discussion of the allegations against some of the biggest names in corporate America."

It's somewhat annoying to me that the BBC has disabled embedding of this video(posted on their channel at Youtube), but perhaps it's just as well if you haven't yet had a chance to see Rob Payne's excellent essay, "Road to Iran", directly below, as I don't want to distract you overmuch from it-- so go read it.

100 years...or more

More from The Real News and Winter Soldiers

Winter Soldiers: Clifton Hicks and Steven Casey

The Real News main site, and their Youtube channel.

15 mar 2008

testimony from "Winter Soldier"(more here)

As you may already know, the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition had a large demonstration scheduled for the mall in DC for this weekend, to commemorate and protest the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which they discuss here(see below, from their bulletin):

Regarding the March 15, 2008
Fifth Anniversary Mass March on Washington DC:
In December, the ANSWER Coalition sent out an email that contained an announcement from the Year5 Coalition (that included 17 anti-war organizations) about plans for a mass demonstration in Washington DC on March 15, 2008.

This announcement was the culmination of several national meetings hosted by Cindy Sheehan. The purpose of the Year5 Coalition was to create the maximum unity between many anti-war coalitions and organizations so as to mobilize a huge outpouring of the people in Washington DC on the fifth anniversary of the start of this criminal war and occupation.

The ANSWER Coalition was committed to doing everything in its power to support the effort to unify the movement for a massive mobilization. The fifth anniversary is a critical time and will be marked by protests around the world. Saturday March 15 was chosen for a huge march on Washington because the following weekend is Easter weekend and it was considered much more difficult to bring people from all over the country to DC.

Not all anti-war groups concurred that it was a good idea to carry out a mass march in DC on the 5th anniversary. That was the stated position of UFPJ for instance. But 17 organizations did issue a call for the March 15 national march in Washington DC. The day following the announcement by the Year5 Coalition a public letter was sent and circulated by the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) asking that there be no national mass march in DC or any protests at all in DC against the war from Thursday March 13 through the weekend ending Sunday March 16. The IVAW explained that it was planning its own event called Winter Soldier (that will take place in a DC suburb in Maryland.) Winter Soldier is an indoor event that will feature the live testimony from Iraq veterans and others about war crimes committed in Iraq. IVAW asked that there be no mass march during their four days of testimony.

Is this tactically astute? I don't know. I wonder, just as I wondered if the real reason the ANSWER people called off the march was because they were afraid that with the increased restrictions the government has instituted on demonstrations at the mall, the demonstration would either turn counterproductively tepid, or violent, and the request of the Winter Soldier group merely gave them cover. Besides, why should the Winter Soldier group insist that there be no march? The corporate media tends to downplay the marches as much as they can anyway, and they might have even given "Winter Soldier" more coverage as an example of "well-behaved" protest as a counter-example, if they just waited and had their events after the A.N.S.W.E.R. protest. Who knows?

I haven't been to a protest march, but I wonder if a lot of the people who put them down do so because they've never participated in one. As far as the question of whether or not protests are effective, I wish I knew a way to measure this objectively-- I am agnostic about it myself. Davis Fleetwood has some thoughts about protests, here, apropo of the 9.15.2007 protest[video].

Monday 3-3

Xymphora writes:

Counterpunch continues its pathetic campaign of attempting to explain the abject failure of the traditional left (as exemplified by editor Cockburn) by blaming it on 'conspiracy theory'. We know that the real reason for the failure of the anti-war movement is the conscious decision by its leaders to abuse it for the partisan political purpose of getting Democrats elected. The worst thing that could happen for the Democrats is for Bush to authorize an end to the American presence in Iraq before the next election. The anti-war movement is a failure because it is really a pro-war movement.

(also, "Freud on Zionism")

(Emphasis mine. Although I disagree with his broader view of Counterpunch think he's right in the more particular view, insofar as the left has given up principles for tactics.)


King of Zembla: "It's Not Bad Apples, But Bad Barrel-Makers"


from Nir Rosen's "Myth of the Surge", in Rolling Stone:

"Before the war, it was just one party," Arkan tells me. "Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good." He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. "In Saddam's time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.

Juan Cole:

McCain (and the US corporate media) manages to avoid noticing that Turkey has staged a major incursion into Iraq and still has ground troops there and is refusing US requests to withdraw! Ironically, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the Turkish chief of staff used McCain's own language against the Bush administration, rejecting the idea of any timetable for withdrawal.

an Iraqdoc 2008 update: Syria

map: US State department

My plans for what I've been calling "Iraqdoc 2008" have been postponed repeatedly, mostly due to personal financial hardship, although I note again the many fine people who've helped me since the Fall of 2005, like Apocalyptic Bill, Rob Payne, Micah Holmquist, Harry McDougal and Bubba. For a while I was unemployed, then precariously employed(well, like millions of us), unemployed again, and just recently, I've attained what appears to be a state of comparatively stable underemployment.

When I hear about a bigshot blogger holding a fundraiser and saying it's because "the bills won't pay themselves" and they're on a free service like Blogger I often feel annoyed*, because I don't think anybody owes a blogger so much as one red cent for holding forth sundry opinions about punditry's topic du jour. It's a little like saying, "hey, pay me to read the New York Times and Washington Post for you, and as a bonus I'll tell you what to think about the topics discussed in the articles." (I note that the people asking for money in such terms often run ads as well.)

Yes, undoubtedly there's an element of jealousy in my response, and if I insist that I'm trying to do something more altruistic or high-minded with the funds I ask for, I recognize I've done nothing to tangibly demonstrate this so far. In November 2007 I last discussed this project, saying that my financial picture wasn't so good, and that I was reluctant to try to raise money just then since I'd probably just spend it on living expenses at that point.

Well, 2007 was pretty rough for me, and I did dip into the funds people donated for non-documentary expenses like food and the light bill, etc. I'm sorry if I let anyone down who's helped me out, but it was a difficult time. Within the next 30-45 days I will replenish the Iraqdoc fund back to where it was before, less the price of a mini-DV camcorder that I got some time back for 115 bucks and a used 3.0 megapixel still camera I got for 22 bucks.

Also: my plans at this point are to go to Syria in May, for 2-3 weeks, to document the Iraqi diaspora in Syria. I've found a contact person who's said she will help me as possible, which is a great blessing.

In the meantime, I will post at least two more films to my Youtube channel within the next 30 days, to give persons thinking of helping me a chance to see something more tangible by way of reasons to invest in me, whether financially, which I still need, or simply advocating on my behalf through your own websites, etc. I will also follow Karena Espuela's sound advice that I seek out a newspaper, preferably an independent one, to help me defray the costs.

If I do go to Iraq eventually, which I still mean to do, it would be only some time after returning from Syria and making the first documentary available. (I also imagine the initial Syrian trip will give me a much better idea of what I need to do to go to Iraq afterwards, as well as give me more of a voice to raise funds for the second project.)

My intention is that the Syrian Iraqdoc and any subsequent Iraqdoc projects be freely available to download, with the stipulations that I'm given attribution and that they not be sliced and diced to make derivative works by others without my consent.


Finally, on a sort of side note, I'm still going to add some links to myblogroll for "B.A.D.", so please don't automatically assume I decided not to add you if you've added me and still don't see your link. If you're not sure if I know that you've added me, assume I don't know and leave me a comment or just email me. This also applies to anyone who may have blogrolled me some time back of whom I'm not aware. So let me know.



*I don't feel that way about Arthur Silber or Gary Farber, both of whom strike me as sincere(and are often better writers than the bigshots).

from Alive in Baghdad

I'll be gone for a few days, returning next week.
(I meant to post this last week...)

In the meantime, go check out the short documentaries at Journeyman Pictures(most under 1 hr). The following link is to their latest, on far-right groups in Russia(21 min.)

v. primitive

this is the second version of my first video. I tried to make some of the transitions less abrupt, and added a couple of items, and the length went from 2:37 to 3:00. Constructive comments are welcome, even if you don't care for it. It's mainly an editing exercise, as I noted before, but I tried to impart a narrative as well.

"greetings from Kabul"(and an Iraqdoc update)

photo courtesy irwfp.org

No, I'm not in Kabul, but presumably our friend Mr. Karzai is. I've included the above image because I'm using it in a short film I'm working on, which I mean to post on youtube in a few days, mainly to refresh and maybe improve my fallow and primitive video editing skills.(I removed the caption for a wee bit of suspense.)


I'm not soliciting funds for the Iraqdoc project right now, because if you sent me money presently I'd use it to pay for niceties like food and dsl. Fortunately I've got rent and electricity covered, so I'd say others have it far more dire than I do, and I expect to actually make some money in the 3-dimensional world in December.

Anyway: at present I plan to go to Syria in March 2008, for 6 to 10 days, to cover the Iraqi diaspora. Then if I can raise funds when I come back I would go back in May for 2-3 weeks, going to Jordan and Lebanon, or to Iraq if it appears funds and conditions allow it. Or maybe in the opposite order, as far as the 1st three countries go: to Lebanon and Jordan in March, then to Syria and maybe Iraq in May.

I've come to the conclusion that one of the things I need to do in order to realize these projects is to post some short films on the internet, so that I can demonstrate my editing skills, video and audio mixing, plus my ability to weave together a coherent and compelling narrative.

My Iraq war

Recently both Arthur Silber [here, and here]and Chris Floyd have discussed our shared if diffuse responsibility for the possibly impending war with Iran. Unnecessary war number 2 or 3 under George Bush, jr, depending on your point of view I suppose. Of course, I also suppose there still are people who believe all our post 9-11 wars have been wars of necessity, just as there must be people who believe we were attacked because "they hate us for our freedoms."

Also, Dennis Perrin has recently discussed his view of the Iraq war and how it has changed in the past few years[pt 1]. [and part 2 and part 3] I've resisted navel-gazing related to my view of the war for some time, partly because of a certain self-consciousness, but also out of a desire to leave myself out of political posts as much as possible, to offer objective arguments unrelated to my personal history, etc. But now I feel I should also offer an accounting of how I've viewed the Iraq war, then and now, and how I think my Arab-Americanness plays a role in my views.

My last posts discussing it at any length were here, "Saddam's Last Night"(December 2006) and "Leaving Iraq, pt 1"(March 2006). I first discussed my view of the (then pending) Iraq war in early April of 2002 in a BBC forum, which I was surprised to see was still available, here:



Tuesday, 9 April, 2002, 12:28 GMT 13:28 UK Should there be military action against Iraq?

Neither Bush nor the Democrats have the resolve to attack Iraq and see through the consequences of an ouster of Saddam Hussein. Most Americans who may be in favour of Saddam's ouster are unwilling to concede the responsibility to help a post-war Iraq rebuild itself. My impression is that most Americans favour a viscerally rewarding and superficial solution and I fear that we will just bomb the hell out of Iraq's infrastructure and leave her people desolate, with only token, guilt-salving efforts at reconstruction. If we do this we will have made our problems in this region much, much worse. We already seem to be headed in this direction in Afghanistan.
Jonathan Versen, Dallas area, Texas, US

Then in February of 2003 I wrote:

Sunday, February 23, 2003

I would very much like to believe that Bush is serious about liberating the people of Iraq, but I cannot trust him. I don't believe George W. Bush means to liberate the Iraqi people. I believe he means to remove Saddam but keep the Baath party and its apparatus in place, including the secret police. He will betray the Iraqi people just as his father did, while taking credit for their supposed liberation. Why else would Turkey's consent be so important? They can't wait to invade the north and suppress the Kurds. And how can we take Bush seriously as a liberator when he publicly speaks of using nuclear weapons against Iraq?

I am a democrat, not a republican, but if Bob Dole were president and said he wanted to liberate Iraq , I would be willing to believe him. In my eyes George W Bush is unprincipled and untrustworthy-- he only wants to go to war to distract people from our sour economy and our failure to capture Bin Laden.

***

flash-forward to November 2007: today I wince at much of what I wrote in the early days of my blogging(Feb 2003 was my 2nd month blogging at HZ). And although I think I would be more skeptical about the hypothetical of a Bob Dole in his 2nd term dealing with Saddam, I do think the proposition, tentatively glimpsed, that George Bush the 2nd represented a different kind of Washington oligarch was accurate, one who was blithely unconcerned about the long-term consequences of his actions in a way that was markedly unlike more traditional politicians-- like his father. The somewhat overpraised Iraq study group report from last year reminded us of this difference, as did Junior's disdainful response to it.

But in 2002 and early 2003 the main thing I had to go on was Bush Junior's style(for lack of a better word). I remembered the Chinese spy-plane incident from early 2001 and how you had Colin Powell speaking like a traditional pol, contrasted with GWB shooting his mouth off like a crazy man as if he was trying to escalate the situation(and undermine his secretary of state, sometimes in concert with Cheney). Bush behaved more like a normal president in the fall of 2001 in his initial reaction to 9-11. Whether this was just him in tightly-scripted marionette mode, I suppose we'll never know for sure.

Then 2002 rolled around, and he had to revert to the mean of being George Dubya Bush, and we were treated to the "axis-of-evil" speech. The war in Afghanistan was, what, barely three months old and he was apparently bored with it, and wanted to have another war.

When I wrote my comment in the above-referenced BBC forum, I still hadn't fully grasped just how destructive and different Bush,jr and the neocons were from traditional American oligarchs. I felt certain that whether it was Bush senior's old cronies in the White House dictating the script or just political inertia dictating that things be done the way they'd always been done, that if Saddam was removed from power by Junior, he would've been replaced by a Saddam-clone who was just as brutal to his people but friendlier to Washington. (I imagine a Dole invasion would've been like that too, although I'm also thinking Dole would've been content with the Afghanistan adventure.)

Of course if that happened, all the people who would die in the war, Americans and Iraqis, would've died just so that the US government and Dubya could show the world how tough they were, and life in Iraq would eventually be pretty much the same except for the lifting of sanctions and the no-fly zones.

The figure generally touted for how many deaths were caused by the sanctions regime is approximately 500,000 deaths. (I note we didn't really talk about that in 2002-2003 in the mainstream US press.)

Anyway, going with the 500,000 deaths* figure for 1990-2003: the only argument for war I could see in 2003 was the alleviation of the sanctions, because I believed it was otherwise politically impossible to persuade the American public that the US should just allow the sanctions to be lifted and not worry about Saddam. In other words, the only rational argument I could see for the war was,

"Look: you Americans are profoundly racist or misinformed or naive, or some dank mixture of all three, and there's seemingly no overcoming that. Since you want this disgusting, stupid war and your revenge on the Arabs, at least after you win and destroy Iraq you'll feel guilty and lift the damn sanctions and in terms of lives saved in the conquered postwar, post-sanctions Iraq, eventually, the war will mean fewer net deaths, as opposed to say, the alternate of maintaining the sanctions for another 20 or 30 years(??!) and not having a war. Maybe."

I wanted to write something like that in 2003 but felt ill at ease doing so, even anonymously.** Now, I recognized that using that sort of rhetoric can only serve to antagonize people. Additionally, it's something I would like to believe is not actually true, or at least only true of a disreputable subgroup. Even today I'd like to believe isn't true, although many things that have happened since then makes me feel as if the national debate is coarsening, and various genies are being encouraged to leave their bottles. I will post some additional thoughts about this subject in a couple of days.




*and actually that's per the Lesley Stahl interview with Madeline Albright in 1999, so it's really for 1990-99, come to think of it.

(**I was signing myself just as"Hugo" 1.2003--7.2005)

Iraqdoc 2008

In the past I've postponed my plans to go to Iraq from the summer of 2007 to the fall(i.e., now) and now I am postponing again, to February of 2008. The main reason is money. I estimate I need another $4500-5000 more than what I presently have. My plans have also changed, insofar as I now mean to go to Jordan and Syria, and I don't think I will make it into Iraq. In the meantime, I've been working on some other posts, which I will put up soon.

artifact for a wednesday

Today I finished an article I am foolish enough to try to get published, so I've been neglecting HZ. I would like to discuss al-Sadr's announcement that there's going to be a six-month cease-fire for the Mehdi Army, as well as the Iraq withdrawal plan that John Podesta's think tank just released, but not today. Very soon, though. I'll also discuss my plans for Iraqdoc 2007 next week.

Dick Cheney-- a tv snippet

The moveon.org people sent me an email about this video, which is also available at their site, here, and of course directly at youtube. I'm beginning to think it should be called UbiquitousTube, but then again marketing savvy has never been my strong suit.

I'm also reminded of a thing I've reflected on from time to time-- that the Dick Cheney of the 80's and early '90s seemed like a less truculent fellow than the guy who became vice-president and told Patrick Leahy to eff off and went out of his way to wear disgracefully inappropriate garb at a memorial service at Auschwitz not so long ago.

Not only does Cheney of April '94 say completely different (and far more reasonable) things than does the 21st century Cheney, but, however much the ideologue in me balks at saying this, he actually seems kind of collegial here. Is it just me, and if not, do you also wonder what happened?

Now and then

(photo: AP/Vahid Salemi) caption: Rabe'e Naghizadeh, a victim of chemical attack on July 22 in 1988 by Iraq during its (1980-88) war against Iran, complains about her problems in Zardeh village, 420 miles (700 kilometers) west of the capital Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, June 26, 2007. The attack took place as the villagers and hundreds of pilgrims from other parts of Iran had gathered outside a shrine in Zardeh to attend a religious celebration.

AP story: ZARDEH, Iran -- Nineteen years after their mountain village was targeted by Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons, survivors still recall the attack that killed 275: Villagers wheezing, staggering blindly and vomiting blood, as birds dropped lifeless from trees.

via Helena Cobban , who adds:

Interviews with survivors of the mid-1980s Iraqi CW attacks against Iran that killed 5,000 Iranians then, and thousands more since. Those attacks were carried out with knowledge & tacit support from Rumsfeld, etc. But no 'justice' for the survivors...

Sarah Robinson, in Orcinus:

Truth & Reconciliation, Part I: Reconciling the Wounds of Lynching

Truth & Reconciliation, Part II: James Loewen on Sundown Towns
from part II:

"When I started researching this subject, I expected to find three types of sundown towns," Loewen recalled. "I expected to find small towns that were all-white because they'd expelled their black populations; suburbs that were all-white because they excluded blacks (and usually Asians and Jews, as well) from the very beginning; and then a third class of places that were all-white simply because African-Americans never got around to coming there.

"And what I discovered was that this third class is virtually non-existent. If you're an American who grew up in an all-white neighborhood, you need to realize that it was, almost certainly, all-white by intentional design."

There was a time when there were very few cities in America that didn't have a significant black population. "Between 1863 and 1890, they did live everywhere," Loewen asserts. Freed slaves spread far and wide throughout America, seeking to put down roots in places Jim Crow couldn't reach them. But reach them it did: within just a couple of generations, these towns began systematically harassing their black populations in a wide variety of ways designed to get them to move elsewhere.

"Between 1890 and 1940, there came what I call "the great retreat," said Loewen. Throughout the west and north, small towns and large cities -- some as large as St. Louis and Omaha -- expelled their African-American populations. ...
[...]
The term "sundown town" refers to the signs that some of these towns put at their city limits, which typically said things like "Whites Only After Dark." (Some of them were far less polite.) ...
[...]
Loewen, who encourages anyone with details about specific sundown towns to register their stories at his website, ticks off names and places in a rapid-fire staccato. Pierce City, MO drove out its black population in 1901. ... Anna, IL drove out its African-American population in 1909, and is still all white to this day.

Emphases mine. I usually try to avoid such lengthy excerpts, but I want very much to persuade you to go and read all of these pieces.(Part 3 in the works, apparently.)

No, it is NOT Hammer time

Vast Left discusses MC Hammer's unfortunate "anti-war" song(via Avedon.):

If MC Hammer can help save our troops with his new video, "Bring Our Brothers Home," why should I quibble?

Well, because it's deeply dishonest.

Still, I agree with the chorus, which is actually pretty catchy:

Bring 'em home
Bring our brothers home
Too much dying
They've been gone too long
People crying
That this war is wrong
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

Also, the endless montage of war footage and flagged-draped caskets is quite moving. How could it not be?

Unfortunately, Hammer has been Hannitized for our mutually assured destruction.

I have to agree with "Vast Left." Hammer has bought in to the idea that domestic criticism of the war is "hating the troops." Another sample:

Man it must be hard
With all the things you're going through
Got the world on your shoulders
Everybody watching you
Keep us all safe
And out the same mouth we hate you.

and Hammer seems to be saying that the problem with the war was just that we stayed there too long:

You did what we needed
In our darkest hour
While our peoples was dyin'
In them burning twin towers
Never before have we seen it like this
The enemies we looking for
Was living in our midst
So we brought it to 'em
And we hit 'em where it hurts
Stuck they heads in the sand and knocked they dicks in the dirt
They know what it is, sir,
Job well done
Now pick up the phone and tell our boys
Come on home.

"Stuck they[sic] heads in the sand and knocked they[sic] dicks in the dirt, They know what it is, sir, Job well done?"

Apparently he's decided to be a racist to boot. Too bad. The title is "Bring Our Brothers Home," and you can look for it if you are determined; but like hell I'll embed the Youtube video here.

I wonder how many people will also decide, years down the road when(and if) the Iraq occupation is finally over, that it was the right thing to do, but we "just stayed over there too long." For all I know it may already be a common sentiment among the blood-n-guts crowd that keeps buying those damn bumper stickers. (If I displayed a bumper sticker that said "I support the troops, except the deranged and sadistic ones," I imagine I'd be compromising my safety, even though it strikes me as a pretty reasonable sentiment. What if I also specified "And I support extensive mental health treatment for the deranged ones?" No, I think it still would be unwise...)

Anyway: as I said the other day, our mass media operators seem pretty determined that people don't make connections and don't put the pieces together, and Hammer's view is tailor-made for giving a way for people to unreflectively square the sheer waste of the war with the aims of the once and future war machine. It's not that different, if you stop and think about it, from John Kerry's "message" in 2004 that the problem with the war was that it was prosecuted badly.

It wasn't always this way. Remember when Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won the lead acting Oscars for Coming Home? I'm not saying the Oscars are or ever were a meaningful measure of film art (clearly they're not, and if they ever manage to be it's only coincidentally so), but they are a measure of what the Hollywood elite holds up as valuable, and it's unimaginable that a film like Coming Home, were it made today, would receive that kind of conferred legitimacy. Today Hollywood courts Hillary Clinton and (to a lesser degree) Obama, with their "all options on the table" talk viz-a-viz Iran, and even in the last cycle they wouldn't touch Howard Dean when he still seemed viable in late 2003.

If you want another reason to see Hammer's view as small and mean, consider this, from another era:


(larger image here.) photo courtesy "Rom Tobbi"

(a total of about half a million soldiers died at Gallipoli in a few months' time, roughly half on each side, the British and French, and the Turkish. The custom of sending soldiers' bodies back to their home countries is a comparatively recent development. Incidentally the man who wrote the words fought there too.)

a possibly prematurely pulled poll

correction-- I still get the Big Brother poll when I use Mozilla, but I'm getting the Iraq funding poll with MS IE, and it doesn't seem to matter if I use the US or International edition. So you can still(1pm CDT)go vote(scroll down a bit, and on the rt. side.). I don't get it, but there it is.

earlier this morning, this poll(above;click on image for slightly bigger screenshot) was running on the front page of CNN's web site. When I read about it at The Sideshow and clicked over, it was already gone. I did some poking around in the bowels of CNN.com, and found it, but also found I could no longer vote. This puzzled me, because in the past I've seen CNN internet polls allowing votes for 24-48 hours sometimes. The poll that is now on the front page is about the Big Brother teevee show, which is undoubtedly more important.

a mid-month miscellany

illustration by W.W. Denslow, 1903. Rutgers.edu

Mark Kleiman on another example of

'why so many of us find the idea of "liberal media bias" risible.'

and, here:
"Make that almost no disclosure"


Dana Gardner, "Microsoft: a law firm pretending to be a software company"

Two longish but worthwhile posts from Helena Cobban:

"Global security after Iraq" and "Global security after Iraq, part 2"

a snippet from part one:

It is worth re-reading the whole of this excellent article that the Guardian's Ian Kershaw published in February 2003. In it, Kershaw compiled the judgments that Avi and eleven other historians offered on the question of whether what Bush (and Blair) were facing in Iraq was another "Munich"-type challenge, or the first act of a Suez-type debacle.

Almost every time I post I feel I'm leaving something out. For example, I sometimes feel regret that I've never written about the situations in Afghanistan, or Darfur or Somalia, or the apparently deteriorating situation in Pakistan.

Earlier this week Rob wrote about the American predisposition towards incuriousness-- I fault the national-level press more than regular people, insofar as I think it's especially damning how the current unrest in Pakistan, the only Islamic country with actual nuclear warheads, is virtually invisible on the nightly news, presumably because their little general is a Bush ally, while the media is happy to carry water for the political forces who want to get people all worked up about war with Iran.

This is mainly, I suspect, because their president is an obnoxious loudmouth whom our president finds irksome. I occasionally wonder if Ahmedinejad is normally mild-mannered, but saw how Hugo Chavez managed to stave off an oil company jiggered recall election and how, seemingly unfathomably, George Bush,jr managed to get re-elected, and made a conscious desicion to be a chest-beating blowhard, having seen it work so well for the other two guys. I also think Chavez carries it off the best of the three, but it may be that I'm just flattered by his parents' choice in names.

signs

graphic courtesy Ravenmn



from Democracy Now: "Howard Zinn on The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism"

via Rob, from Realitique, who says "what's sad is that everyone doesn't already know this."

Joe Bageant: "Redneck Liberation Theology:Why are leftists so damn afraid of God?"

Robert Shetterly, in Common Dreams: "The Moral Obligation to Lose The War"

end of the month miscellany

Earlier today Rob wrote about the contracting out of the Iraq war(below).
Some coincidences: (1)I've discussed Iraqi contractors at HZ before, here:

"Are they EVER called mercenaries?" May 2006

and here,
"30 per cent off the top" May 2004

and (2) Later in the day Karena wrote back to me regarding my plans to go to Iraq, and told me about Jane Stillwater, another blogger who did in fact go to Iraq, and was sponsored by a Texas newspaper. (In fact, she just got back.)Karena writes:

she tried for a year to get to Iraq and finally The Lone Star Iconoclast, the Crawford, TX newspaper, sponsored her. They did not pay her, but they paid her expenses and most important, they gave her a press pass. Before that, she was not considered a "legitimate" press person because she wrote opinion instead of fact, but with the press pass she got in.

I'd never heard of Jane Stillwater before. I just visited her blog, and here's something from an item from last week, in which she interviews an (ex)Iraqi contractor and evidently discusses the same article Rob references:

"After four months living in a tent pitched over an old bombed-out bunker, blood and pus started coming out of my eyes. It really scared me and I tried to get back to the states to get treated. But the moment I left Iraq, KBR canceled my health insurance. I used to be able to hang 160 sheets of drywall a day. Now I can hardly help the neighbors move their front room couch."

The contractor was very unhappy with KBR. "They promised me that I was going to get a COBRA but it never came through. I need an operation, I have severe nerve damage in my arms. I don't sleep because my hands and arms are so sore. I can take a lot of pain but this is constant. This is too much. If I ever get my hands on the KBR employee who canceled my insurance, they'd have to put me on four-way restraints!"

The contractor has lost three inches off of his biceps. What happened over there? Depleted uranium? "I wouldn't be surprised. Iraq is the most polluted country in the world. It scares the hell out of me." Then he added, "I think part of my nerve damage comes from wearing 56 pounds worth of body armor for 12 or 15 hours at a time because rather than up-armor the trucks, they up-armored the drivers."

He thought that the KBR operation was a circus run by buffoons. "They were only in it for the money."

"Do you think you will ever go back to Iraq?" I asked him. "I can't go back. I'd never pass the physical." He then gave me the names and numbers of several friends who had suffered the same experience. Scary.

After I got done talking with the contractor, I biked downtown to get a copy of the Berkeley Daily Planet, featuring an article about the Blackwater mercenaries. Even MORE scary! According to reporter Jeremy Scahill, "In February 2006 Donald Rumsfeld issued the Pentagon’s quadrennial review which lays out the Pentagon’s vision for years to come. There he classified Blackwater and other contractors as a legitimate part of the total force making up the U.S. war machine." So. The neo-cons are hopefully anticipating the day when they can contract out our entire Army -- not just the quartermaster department and the KP. I wonder if the troops know about this?

the rest is here:
"Blackwater mercenaries, West Point graduates & other contractors' tales"