Posts filed under ‘Wars’
Everyone’s a Terrorist in Afghanistan — Except When They Aren’t
Apropos of the post below, this is my Tweet of the Day:
The United States Sets Itself Back Ten Years in Afghanistan
A few weeks ago American soldiers made the unthinkably stupid mistake of burning a pile of Qurans in Afghanistan.
Today we hear about an American soldier who allegedly had a “breakdown” and entered Afghan “homes in the middle of the night and opened fire on his victims in a killing spree. A relative of the deceased added that he then ‘poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them’.” Sixteen innocent civilians, including nine children and three women, were murdered in their sleep.
AP
Understandably, the Afghan people are furious.
I heard a “military analyst” on MSNBC this morning say that we are spending a billion dollars a week in Afghanistan. A billion dollars. Yet these two incidents alone have rendered the money and effort we’ve expended in that 10-year-old war meaningless. Not to mention the death and destruction suffered by everyone involved.
The U.S. Owns 11 of the World’s 21 Aircraft Carriers
An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations. They have evolved from wooden vessels used to deploy balloons into nuclear-powered warships that carry dozens of fixed wing and rotary-wing aircraft.
Aircraft carriers are typically treated as the capital ship of a fleet and are extremely expensive to build and important to protect: of the nine nations which possess an aircraft carrier, six of these navies possess only one such ship. Twenty-one aircraft carriers are currently active throughout the world with the U.S. Navy operating 11 of them as of June 2011.
We have sick priorities as to how we spend our tax dollars.
Struggling Public Schools Selling Seats to Foreign Students
Wow, I hadn’t heard of anything like this before now:
There are just seven pairs of boots lined up outside the kindergarten classroom in this fading farm town. Just eight crayon drawings are taped to the wall outside second grade.
Enrollment is dropping at the Grant-Deuel School [in Revillo, South Dakota], as at so many rural schools. Fewer students means less state funding and a slow extinction.
But Superintendent Grant Vander Vorst has an improbable plan to save his little school on the prairie – by turning it into a magnet for wealthy foreign students. This year, 11 students from China, Thailand, Germany and elsewhere account for nearly 20% of high school enrollment, bringing cash and a welcome splash of diversity to an isolated patch of the Great Plains.
Grant-Deuel is not alone. Across the United States, public high schools in struggling small towns are putting their empty classroom seats up for sale.
In Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, and Lake Placid, New York, in Lavaca, Arkansas, and Millinocket, Maine, administrators are aggressively recruiting international students.
They’re wooing well-off families in China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and dozens of other countries, seeking teenagers who speak decent English, have a sense of adventure – and are willing to pay as much as $30,000 for a year in an American public school.
The end goal for foreign students: Admission to a U.S. college.
I haven’t thought much about it yet but this hits me as just plain sad. When I read stories like this I instantly think about all the money we’re spending on wars (something like a couple million per week in Afghanistan alone) and I shake my head and think about how totally f*cked up our priorities are.
We’re in Afghanistan in Part to Protect Women and Improve Their Lives, Right?
So much for that:
Afghanistan’s president on Tuesday endorsed a “code of conduct” issued by an influential council of clerics that activists say represents a giant step backward for women’s rights in the country.
President Hamid Karzai’s Tuesday remarks backing the Ulema Council’s document, which allows husbands to beat wives under certain circumstances and encourages segregation of the sexes, is seen as part of his outreach to insurgents like the Taliban.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan prior to the 2001 U.S. invasion, girls were banned from going to school and women had to wear burqas that covered them from head to toe. Women were not allowed to leave their homes without a male relative as an escort.
[...]
Among the rules: Women should not travel without a male guardian and women should not mingle with strange men in places like schools, markets or offices. Beating one’s wife is prohibited only if there is no “Shariah-compliant reason,” it said, referring to the principles of Islamic law.
It has suddenly become a lot harder to include the part about improving women’s lives when trying to justify why we’re still in Afghanistan.
Apologies to the People of Pakistan
This is outrageous and in my opinion immoral:
An alliance of 200 US aid groups has written to the head of the CIA to protest against its use of a doctor to help track Osama bin Laden, linking the agency’s ploy to the polio crisis in Pakistan.
The country recorded the highest number of polio cases in the world last year, a health catastrophe that threatens to spiral out of control.
In July the Guardian revealed that the CIA used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, in the hunt for Bin Laden. In the weeks before the 3 May operation to kill Bin Laden, Afridi was instructed to set up a fake vaccination scheme in the town of Abbottabad, in order to gain entry to the house where it was suspected that the al-Qaida chief was living, and extract DNA samples from his family members.
However the ruse has provided seeming proof for a widely held belief in Pakistan, fuelled by religious extremists, that polio drops are a western conspiracy to sterilise the population.
Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I thought polio was wiped off the face of the Earth decades ago. My father had polio and I remember getting the vaccine via a vaccine-soaked sugar cube in elementary school. Insofar as the vaccine was/is so easy to give and it’s so effective, again, I though we were done with it. Obviously not.
So if the CIA wanted to set up a ruse in order to “gain entry to the house where it was suspected” Bin Laden was living so it could “extract DNA samples from his family members,” why did it have to be a fake vaccine scheme for God’s sake? Pakistan has the highest number of polio cases in the world but, again, we set up a FAKE scheme? Why not provide the real thing? I presume the CIA got the DNA off the tip of the needles with which they were giving the fake vaccines so again why not — God, I’m pulling my hair out here — give the real vaccine?
Geezus. I don’t get it.
Apologies to the people of Pakistan.
Obama’s No Different Than Bush When it Comes to Bombing Iran
June 19, 2007: Bush Says All Options on Table on Iran:
U.S. President George W. Bush reiterated on Tuesday that all options were on the table in dealing with Iran’s nuclear challenge.
March 4, 2012: Obama: All Options Remain on the Table to Prevent a Nuclear Iran:
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday that the entire world has an interest in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and that all options remain on the table to keep Iran from going nuclear.
Interesting huh, that the “imminent threat” of Iran getting a nuclear bomb has been going on for five years?
Democrats and progressives freaked out when W talked about bombing Iran but that isn’t happening now that Obama’s saying the same thing. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Get Rush Off Of Armed Services Radio
Let’s get Rush off of Armed Services Radio. Our tax dollars shouldn’t support humiliating the women in our military.
Conservative Tucker Carlson Suggests the U.S. “Annihilate” 75 Million Iranians
Tucker Carlson
said this last night on Fox’s “Red Eye:”
I think we are the only country with the moral authority [...] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.
Outrageous on so many levels, one being the laughable statement that the U.S. “doesn’t seek hegemony in the world,” and the other being that he’s talking about annihilating 75 million people as casually as if he’s talking about squashing a fly.
This is the kind of thoughtless, mindless drivel we heard prior to the invasion of Iraq. Do we really want to watch that movie again?
America the Boneheaded
You probably heard about this:
Quran Burning Angers Afghans; U.S. Vows Probe
KABUL, Afghanistan – More than 2,000 angry Afghans protested outside an American air base on Tuesday after they learned that copies of the Quran (Koran), the Muslim holy book, were burned in a pile of garbage at a sprawling U.S. military base north of Kabul.
“Die, die, foreigners!” the demonstrators shouted. Some fired rifles into the air. Others threw rocks at the gate of the base.
Are we boneheaded or what? After ten years in Afghanistan — ten years! — we’re still doing monumentally stupid things like burning the Quran? We’re spending something like a million dollars a week trying to bring “stability” and “democracy” to that country but we stumble and burn their holy book and voila, we’re set back five years.
Geezus. We’re like the proverbial fish swimming up-stream, going nowhere.
32 Senators Formally Clear Way for War on Iran
My God:
A group of 32 senators from both parties unveiled a new Senate resolution Thursday that would establish the sense of the Congress that containing a nuclear Iran is not an option.
The resolution, which will be formally introduced later today, “strongly supports U.S. policy to prevent the Iranian government from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and rejects any policy that would rely on efforts to ‘contain’ a nuclear weapons capable Iran,” and “urges the president to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Lieberman emphasized that he doesn’t want to foreclose diplomatic options, but said that if Obama decided to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, he would have strong bipartisan support in Congress.
I hear the Israeli lobby and the military industrial complex speaking through these Senators. Never mind what the American people want. Just yesterday CNN released a poll showing that 82% of Americans think diplomacy or “no action” is the way to go:
Americans Favor Diplomacy Against Iran
CNN/ORC International poll released Wednesday indicates that only 17% of the public wants the U.S. to use force, with 60% saying diplomatic or economic action against Iran is the right response, and 22% saying no action should be taken at this time.
Pro-Lifers Are Against “Murder,” Sometimes
Dana Perino is a Fox News “personality” and a former Press Secretary to George W. Bush. This would be Perino talking about the birth control/Catholic church “controversy” and it is my Tweet of the Day:
Good question Dana.
BTW, Perino has zero credibility IMHO as this is a another direct quote from her (November 24, 2009): “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
No wonder Fox hired her.
Iran Might Retaliate if Attacked? The Chutzapah!
What’s with countries who don’t do what we want, dammit:
The Iranians Are Going to Kill Us
Ah yes, the brainwashing begins:
The Iranian Threat to New York City? How long before we start hearing about mushroom clouds?
Question for Conservatives: Who Is Going to Pay For a War On Iran?
Steve Clemons asks a good (and obvious) question:
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.
[...]
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!
George Galloway on Why It Would be Insane to Attack Iran
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.
[...]
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.
Self-defense James.
(Via.)
“Liberal” WaPo Columnist Didn’t Learn From The Mistakes He Made in Run-Up to the Iraq War
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.”
About the U.N. Establishing a Global World Order
There are people out there who think programs that encourage bicycling are being orchestrated by the United Nations
Photo: Wikipedia
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.
Bomb Iran? No!
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.
Good Luck With That Mitt
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 reports from 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.
Yo Mitt. Good luck with that.
Tom Coburn Hates America
This would be Republican Senator Tom Coburn:
Tom Coburn Blocks 9/11 Museum Funding
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…
Photo: AP
Coburn hates America and he’s dissing our dead. Not only that, where’s his flag pin?
Huh? Huh?
I’m thinking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.
Afghan Man Murders Wife For Giving Birth to a Girl
I guess Laura Bush’s mission to lift Afghani women up and out of the Stone Age failed.
This is horrible:
Afghan man strangles wife for having baby girl
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.
Shopping at the Pentagon
Yep, it’s true. There are shops at the Pentagon. Given the nature of the corporatocracy we live in, I don’t know why I’m surprised:
America’s Most Dangerous Mall: Going Shopping at the Pentagon
Take a tour at the link above.
Here are some of the high low lights:
Chocolate Rain (of Terror)
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.
The Coalition of the Withdrawing
Maybe the US should take a lesson:
Photo: Philippe Wojazer/AP
France Will Speed up Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan by One Year
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.
It’s No Wonder the United States is Imploding
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.
Vets: Is Romney Paying His Fair Share to Provide For Our Troops?
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.
Bradley Manning to Face Full Court Martial
Ugh, this is sad news:
Bradley Manning
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.
So, who caused more harm to theUnited States, Bradley Manning or the Marines who appear on video urinating on dead Afghanis?
I say the Marines.
