While GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul is doing all he can in this election cycle to gin up a debate about U.S. foreign policy and a measure of the costs and benefits involved, the debate about Iran, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel’s security has been taking place in a gravityless environment.
Mitt Romney’s opening foreign-policy opus at the Citadel criticized President Obama for defense cuts and promised to boost America’s defense commitments abroad, to boost military spending on hardware and ships in the Pacific–to do everything we have been doing but more.
Where are the dollars going to come from?
I am one who thinks that war with Iran is far off and in the near term unlikely–unless Israel makes a tremendous mistake by triggering and forcing a geostrategic move by the United States, a choice that could very well ultimately dismantle the close U.S.-Israel relationship (another alternative: Forces inside Iran that would benefit from a war cause an escalation that produces a potential nightmare in the Persian Gulf and region).
That said, fewer and fewer people agree with me–and various of the GOP presidential candidates seem to be competing with each other to tell U.S. citizens how quickly they would deploy American military and intelligence assets to undermine Iran’s supreme leader and his government.
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Wars cost lots and lots of money– and if a substantial chunk of the GOP crowd wants these wars and feels that it is in our national interest to have them, then by all means they should start lining up some of the wealthiest in the country who are helping to agitate for these conflicts to pay more in taxes for them.
Memo to the “liberal media:” The next time you’re in front of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich or any of the other conservatives who are advocating for aggression against Iran, ask them how they plan on paying for it. Hello!
Here we have the former British MP, George Galloway, in a radio interview, blasting “James in Suffolk” for advocating “strategic strikes” on Iran. I’m a fan of Galloway because he opposed the invasion of Iraq and in the end he was correct in all of his predictions as to what would happen if the invasion occurred.
I’m promising you this: Do not imagine that Iran will treat a strategic strike any differently from a full-scale invasion. Trust me on this James, I know what I’m talking about. If we bomb Iran, Iran will bomb us back, and amongst the places it will bomb us is here in the center of London. Innocent people will die. Don’t imagine for one second that the deaths will be restricted to Iranians in the north of Iran or anywhere else. Any attack on Iran will be met by a full scale response by Iran, everywhere and anywhere. Trust me on that James.
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I’m telling you James, and you seem strangely unmoved by it, Iran is not a broken-backed country. Don’t imaging this as some cheap, broken down, darkest, African, impotent, defenseless country that you are oh so [inaudible] seeking to talk us into bombing. Iran will respond ferociously everywhere if we attack Iran.
In March of 2008, the “liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was asked to write about the mistakes he made in supporting the invasion of Iraq:
Photo: The Washington Post
In the following days, as the horror started to be airbrushed—no more bodies plummeting to the sidewalk—the anthrax letters started to come, some to people I knew. And I thought, No, I’m not going to sit here passively and wait for it to happen. I wanted to go to “them,” whoever “they” were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of “them” was Saddam Hussein. He had messed around with anthrax; he had twice started wars in the region (Iran and Kuwait); he had massacred the Kurds and the Shiites; used chemical weapons (no doubt about that); had had a nuclear weapons program (also no doubt about that); and was violating U.N. resolution after resolution (absolutely no doubt about that, either). Saddam was a sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.
That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war in Iraq. It did not take me all that long, however, to have second thoughts—and I expressed them in my column. It was clear that Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden, that Iraqi intelligence had not met with Mohammed Atta in Prague, and that while Iraq once had a nuclear weapons program, it no longer did. That left chemical and biological weapons, and neither represented much of a threat.
[...]
I was not only unprepared for the revelation that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever, but—even more stunning—that such seasoned hands as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, to name just three veterans of past presidencies, would prove so cosmically incompetent.
In his column today, Cohen repeats the same mistakes: America’s red lines in the sand on Iran: “The ultimate remedy is Iranian regime change. … This looming crisis is not only about Israel. It’s about America, too.”
The “liberal” media is jumping on the war bandwagon. Last night Chris Matthews on MSNBC said, If you can’t think of anything worse than Iran with a nuclear weapon, “Strike ‘em.”
in an alleged secret long-term plan to establish a one-world government.
Pretty funny when we see that while citizens in Syria are being massacred by the hundreds by their own government, sadly, the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council can’t agree on what to do about it.
A U.N. Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria ended in acrimony and a veto by Russia and China on Saturday, hours after the Syrian military attacked the ravaged city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the bloodiest government assault in the nearly 11-month-old uprising.
[...]
The Security Council voted, 13-2, in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, which calls for Assad to cede power to his vice president and a unity government to lead Syria to democratic elections. But passage was blocked by Russia and China, which opposed what they saw as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty.
Occupy and other groups are rallying today in New York City to protest sanctions on Iran, the murder of Iranian scientists, and the increasingly hostile rhetoric coming from the United States and Israel concerning Iran.
The intrepid reporter Tim Pool is sending out pictures of some of the signs people are carrying (see them at his link above). This is my favorite so far:
Ain’t that the truth.
Interesting isn’t it that the usual crowd that screams about cutting government spending isn’t screaming about not going to war again. When it comes to cuts, they only want to cut the programs that benefit we the people. Defense contractors? Not so much.
So now Romney thinks he’s going to gain traction with the public by criticizing Obama’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan next year?
Republican front-runner Mitt Romney slammed President Obama on Wednesday night over Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s announcement that the United States would end its combat mission in Afghanistan next year.
Speaking in Las Vegas, Romney said that announcing a timetable to end the combat mission showed the president’s “naivete.”
“The secretary of Defense said that on a day certain, the middle of 2013, we’re going to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan,” Romney said, according to reportsfrom Las Vegas.
“He announced that. So the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it. Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with and tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops?” Romney said. “It makes absolutely no sense.”
Romney concluded that Obama’s “naivete is putting in jeopardy the mission of the United States of America and our commitments to freedom.”
“Our commitments to freedom?” Really? I think Americans are sick and tired of being at war and paying for war and they want the “mission of the United States of America” to focus on “commitments” here at home.
Sen. Tom Coburn is blocking legislation that would provide $20 million a year in federal funding for the National September 11 Memorial & Museumat [sic] ground zero…
An Afghan man killed his wife for giving birth to a third daughter rather than the son he hoped for, police in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province have said.
The victim, 28, known by the one name of Storai, was strangled by her husband, a local militia member, and his mother on Saturday “in revenge” for bearing the couple’s third daughter three months ago in Mohasili village, police said.
If it has patriotic value, the Edward Marc candy shop can make something chocolatey out of it. (The Marine Corps logo? Semper Fi, fat boy.) Inexplicably, the chocolatier is one of the first things a visitor sees after coming up the escalator from the Metro entrance. This edible model of the building costs only $1.95.
The World’s Deadliest Tchotchkes
By far the most meta store in the Pentagon. From windbreakers to shot glasses to snapback baseball caps, the gift shop turns the movie version of the Pentagon — the fantasy one where it’s all war-planning, all the time — into cheesy collectables to hawk to the out-of-towners and class trips that take the daily guided tours. If only they made a sweatshirt with an image of an idle lieutenant colonel waiting to be promoted.
Filed under: We the People, Wars, Terror, Financial Crisis, Corporatocracy, Fear and Our Tax Dollars.
France said Friday that it will accelerate the pullout of its combat forces from Afghanistan by one year, to the end of 2013, and in concert with Afghanistan urged NATO to hand over all combat operations to the Afghan army by the same date.
President Nicolas Sarkozy made the unexpected proposal with the visiting Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, standing at his side. The French-Afghan initiative, which would speed up the agreed NATO timetable by one year, dramatized growing uncertainty—in Afghanistan as well as NATO countries—over the wisdom and effectiveness of the U.S.-led military campaign to force the Taliban to submit to Karzai’s U.S.-supported government.
A quickie here as a follow up to the posts I’ve put up about “American exceptionalism” of late:
Let’s burn this image into our brains. Is it any wonder our society is collapsing from within (see link above) given it spends so much money on the military relative to the rest of the world?
We’re letting everything else go — bridges, schools, housing, medical care — but hey, we can bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!
Oh, on that note:
Iran’s is not a big enough proportion of world arms spending to show up on this graph, which doesn’t show countries that are lower than 2% of the global total.
VoteVets.org has a question for potential Commander in Chief Mitt Romney:
Mitt Romney. He still refuses to release his taxes. We simply don’t know if Mitt Romney has been paying his fair share. If he only pays a 15 percent tax on his capital gains, his tax rate would be lower than most of our career military and retirees. If he has money offshore and pays no tax on that, then as a percentage of his overall income, he might be paying a lower rate than anyone in our military. Join our petition below, calling on Mitt Romney to release his taxes.
At a time when our men and women in uniform are putting their lives on the line for America, and paying taxes, we need to know if Mitt Romney is making a fair contribution to America, our troops, and our veterans. We need to know if, as a multi-millionaire, he is paying his fair share to provide for our troops in the field, and their care when they come home. It would be extremely disconcerting to have someone running to be Commander in Chief who is paying a lower tax rate than the majority of our troops and military retirees.
Support our troops. Sign the petition asking Mitt Romney to come clean here. They have a right to know how the financial status of their potential leader compares to theirs.
An investigating officer has recommended that Army private Bradley Manning face court-martial on multiple criminal charges related to the downloading of nearly 1 million war logs and secret diplomatic cables. Manning is accused of taking the files and them passing them on to WikiLeaks.
If he does face a court martial and is convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Almanza, who presided over a preliminary hearing for Manning just before Christmas, said today that there’s reason to believe Manning broke the law. Almanza said Manning should face formal charges of theft, computer violations, aiding the enemy and causing intelligence to be published on the Internet.
His recommendation will now be reviewed by higher levels in the military.
“On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran the United States turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.”
“I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran the United States, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.”
Check out this May, 1966 photo of Mitt Romney protesting in favor of the Vietnam War:
Romney’s moment at a ’60s protest was reported in some newspapers the next day with a mention that the son of Michigan Governor George Romney — who would later turn against the Vietnam War — had been spotted at the event. The photo was also mentioned by the Boston Globe in 2008, with a partial image of the event clipped from a newspaper front page. The paper wrote in its definitive series on the former governor that, “Among the long hair and ragged clothes of his classmates, Romney stood out both for his smart appearance and his ardent support of the war.”
Romney did not, however, serve in Vietnam. As a Mormon missionary, he was considere “‘a minister of religion” by the church and was exempt from the draft.
The reserve sheriff’s deputy who captured a man suspected of being the city’s most dangerous arsonist is a volunteer who earns $1 a year and only recently qualified to patrol alone, authorities said Tuesday.
Shervin Lalezary,
a 30-year-old Beverly Hills real estate attorney, was patrolling at 3 a.m. Monday — three hours after the official end of his 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift — when he pulled over a Dodge van in Hollywood.
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“He believes in the community service aspects of the reserve deputy,” Whitmore said. “This is part of the job for him and he doesn’t want to talk about himself because he believes he’s part and parcel of a larger effort.”
Lalezary was born in Tehran and moved with his family to America about 25 years ago.
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“This is one of the most significant arrests anyone can make — regular or reserve,” the sheriff said Monday. “And this will follow him for the rest of his life.”
So, “they” say we should bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran but woohah, they have real people there.
A friend sent me a link to this interesting tidbit about Iran possibly exaggerating its ballistic missile capabilities. It seems to me this is something we should bear in mind while listening to the fear mongering about nuclear this and that coming from Washington and Jerusalem. And this is from Fox no less:
At first, Iran claimed it had launched three long range missiles; a pronouncement at the end of ten days of war games in the Strait of Hormuz designed to test the patience of western nations as they weigh how to sanction Iran’s oil exports.
“We are able to announce that our shore-to-sea missile systems are so powerful that we can hit any target, any time, if it’s necessary” announced Habibulah Sayari, Iranian Navy Commander.
Seyyed Mahmoud Moussavi, Iranian Military Drills Spokesman, stated “Both missiles hit the intended targets successfully.”
It turned out the missiles weren’t that long range after all.
The Qhader missile, introduced in September, has a range of just 124 miles. The U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet in Bahrain is 150 miles from Iran. Israel is four times farther.
“We’ve seen that they’ve photoshopped, for example, photographs of missile tests before to make it look more impressive than it actually is, so I would take all this with a grain of salt. I think this is mainly posturing. It’s gamesmanship. And it’s again meant to send a message that the Iranians aren’t simply going to sit back while their oil is sanctioned,” said Michael Singh, Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The good folks over at Mother Jones have put together a timeline of the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq — from August, 1992 through March, 2003.
I found it rather upsetting to be reminded of the lies and deceit but it is interesting nonetheless. How we got there and the web our Dear Leaders wove in order to convince us an invasion was necessary is something we should never forget, lest it happen again.
For example, this is the second to last entry, dated March 18, 2003:
Washington Post article headlined “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq” notes, “As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports.” Story is buried on Page A13.
Oh, and P.S. — Al Jazeera has a post up (video) titled: US Post-Iraq Legacy: The War is Finally Declared Over After Nine Years , but What are the Experiences and Lessons Learned by US Soldiers. I haven’t watched it yet but here’s a link, FYI.
TVNewser is reporting today that two new morning shows will debut on CNN on Monday, one starring Ashley Banfield:
Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty Images Entertainment
CNN will be launching its new 4-hour morning show Monday, the day before the Iowa Caucuses. Soledad O’Brien will anchor the 7-9am hours from Des Moines Monday and Tuesday with Ashleigh Banfield and Zoraida Sambolin anchoring the 5-7am hours from New York.
Remember when Ashleigh Banfield was a pariah in medialand because she criticized its abysmal coverage of the Iraq war?
Banfield, in a speech at Kansas State University [in 2003], had lashed out at “cable news operators who wrap themselves in the American flag and go after a certain target demographic.”
Banfield also claimed in her speech TV should have shown the gruesome results of coalition force in Iraq.
“We didn’t see what happen when Marines fired M-16s,” Banfield said. “We didn’t see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?”
Reporters embedded with troops said there was little or no opportunity to film the “blood and guts” of the war due to logistical reasons. Many did not see much combat action.
Banfield’s address also suggested some cable TV networks skewed their coverage to please advertisers.
“It was a grand and glorious picture that had a lot of people watching,” Banfield said, “and a lot of advertisers excited about cable TV news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not sure Americans are hesitant to do this again – to fight another war, because it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor.”
I thought she was a terrific reporter and I liked her even more for the guts it took to speak out. Glad to see her back (though I don’t know if even she can make me watch CNN again). Hopefully she’ll show the same spunk she had in 2003. I hope that hasn’t been intimidated out of her.
Another indication of just how screwed up our political system is:
National security advisers to the Republican presidential candidates have ties to defense, homeland security and energy companies that have received at least $40 billion in federal contracts since 2008.
Five of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 41 national security and foreign policy advisers have links to companies that last year alone received at least $7.9 billion in federal contracts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government analyst Christopher Flavelle. Of that, $7.3 billion came from the Department of Defense.
Romney and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who are leading in the polls, have advisers who sit on the board of directors of BAE Systems Inc., which has received at least $37 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2008, the most of any of the companies with ties to Republican national security advisers.
William Schneider, an adviser to Gingrich, and Michael Chertoff, who counsels Romney, serve on the board of the U.S. subsidiary of BAE Systems Plc, Europe’s largest defense contractor. The American company makes the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle and provides information technology systems to American intelligence agencies and repair services to the U.S. Navy.
This is crazy. A “national security adviser” who works for a defense, homeland security or energy company can’t possibly provide objective advice. They’re going to “advise” their candidate to go the route that sends the maximum amount of our tax dollars their way. I mean, if you make weapons and security devices, all you see are threats.
Hardened stares, averted gazes – these are the portraits documenting the changes war inflicts on its serving soldiers.
While the pictures – of Dutch Marines before, during and after deployment in Afghanistan – may not be shocking at first, they subtly hint at the soldiers’ inner transformations.
They are the work of Dutch photographer Claire Felicie, who followed 20 marines between October 2009 and September 2010 to see if their faces were altered by their experiences.
Each of the men, from the 1st Battalion, 13th infantry company of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, was photographed before, during and after six months service in Afghanistan.
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Felicie, a photographer for ten years, started the project when her son Tristan joined the Marines and told her one of his friends was being posted to Afghanistan.
I thought, “Will there be a change on his face because of the war?” I decided to portray some Marines to see.’
U.S. Congress today passed a $662 billion defense authorization bill for 2012 which aims to control costs of the Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) F-35 jet and mandates that members of al-Qaeda be placed in military prisons.
The U.S. Senate approved the final bill today by a vote of 86-13 and it goes to President Barack Obama for his signature. The House approved the measure yesterday by a vote of 283-136.
The defense authorization act, which sets military policy and spending targets for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, also includes a provision to impose sanctions on Iran’s central bank.
So, we’re going to spend $662 billion on defense? Defense against who? Defense against what?
This is a horrific story and it occurred under George W. Bush’s watch. You know, when the American flag was ubiquitous and politicians were criticized for not wearing a flag pin on their lapel. When we were continuously reminded how much conservatives respected the troops (as opposed to liberals who allegedly didn’t).
Yeah, that’s right. That’s when this sickening thing happened:
“The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged, before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show.
“The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. There are no plans, they said, to alert those families now.
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The landfill disposals were never formally authorized under military policies or regulations. They also were not disclosed to senior Pentagon officials who conducted a high-level review of cremation policies at the Dover mortuary in 2008, records show.
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“This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.”
Flora, Illinois was competing with at least 33 other communities to become the site of a new prison. Unemployment was high. In a bid to promote the town as a prison site, Flora’s former police chief recorded a song titled “All We Want’s A Prison,” but the town failed to win its bid.
So sad.
Corporations set the stage such that we beg them to come to our towns. They demand tax breaks and subsidies and this and that, all in the name of jobs, jobs, jobs. We give them those things, nixing parks and schools and roads, etc., and when they’re done sucking the life out of us, poof, they’re gone.
Bottom line is we make fools of ourselves while we in essence set ourselves up to let them make fools of us.
Check out this new video from Brave New Foundation about the myth, created by the defense industry, that cutting military spending will cost jobs, jobs, jobs:
These guys are nothing less than domestic terrorists.
I’m thinking that a time is rapidly approaching when use of the terms “police department” and “peace officer” will become obsolete, replaced instead by something like “army” and “soldier.” Here’s why:
The U.S. military has some of the most advanced killing equipment in the world that allows it to invade almost wherever it likes at will.
We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.
Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the “1033 Program” that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.
1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period.
And just think, this is all being paid for by you and me. We shell out the money, the defense contractors get rich, and then the stuff they sell to the government is used against us.
It’s the military industrial complex gone berserk.
