Letters to the Editor
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The total clusterf**k that is the "war on terror"
is fueled, at least in part, by the willful ignorance and/or deceit of so-called "serious" and experienced policy makers and legislators. These people people used ideological survey applications to staff the various agencies and departments with little Monica Goodling types who didn't understand the languages, cultures, or history of the people and region.
At the start of this fiasco George W. Bush and and the rest of the Mayberry Machiavelis couldn't be bothered to know the difference between a Sunni, a Shiite, or a Sikh (What's the difference? They all look the same to me). So, I find it quite alarming that John "Bomb Iran" McCain is so cavalier about his own demonstrated ignorance. He is a U.S. representative in a foreign land making statement that can have broad implications in terms of war and peace. If he can't untwist his tongue and speak coherently he, he should STFU.
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Shepherds Pie
I want it. Publish in your next post...
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Well, Gary Owen
you are a veritable fount of useful info. I now have a new hero in my pantheon, Mai Van On. What a beautiful human being he was. What a real hero. Now I know who the real hero is.
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Americans Simply Will Not Admit This Country's Policies Are War Crimes.
The people who started this war knew (as Madison Avenue has proven many times) the average American is not too savvy. Where else could you sell a drink and boast that it contains 10% Fruit Juicewithout someone asking what is the remaining 90%. I thought "High C" success was phenomenal until I read another drink "SunndD' contains 5% fruit juice. steve USN WW2
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Thanks
Thanks for covering Kurtz. I was planning to blog on that, and write in a question today, but my home computer's died. I'm glad other folks got to it. Meanwhile, the list of journalists who have made excuses for McCain is growing ever longer.
I'll add that what's particularly galling about Kurtz is that he slams Clinton and Obama in his original statement, and Obama had already criticized McCain on his statement the previous day. Furthermore, the Americablog post Kurtz linked even mentioned that McCain had made the gaffe multiple times, but Kurtz chose to ignore that. As usual, he quotes some liberal blogs, but selectively, sometimes missrepresenting them in the process and ignoring key points. In general, he recycles right-wing talking points days after they've been debunked by major liberal blogs. It's pathetic, but it's dangerous because he still wears an undeserved label of being "objective and fair."
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@ Scientician - "Stoopid Iraqis"
Thanks for the post about Petraeus blaming Iran (again!) for training Iraqi's who to use mortars and rockets.
It is a well known fact that throughout the 8 year long Iraqi war, the Iraqis never used mortars or rockets. In fact prior to the 'liberation' of Iraq, there were no rockets or mortars there, just WMD, huge stacks of them, reaching into the stratosphere.
What I want to know is, who believes this stuff? I have never fired a mortar, but it doesn't look particularly difficult. Does anyone really believe that the Iraqis need Iranian help to fire a goddamn mortar? The EFP's (explosively formed projectiles) are little more difficult, but as I said in an earlier post, these things are not exactly cruise missiles.
Maybe McCain meant to croon, "blame, blame, blame, blame Iran..." That's the first verse anyway, we know the second.
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Jkalos, on heros
Thanks!
The Vietnamese defense of their country against first the French and then the Americans was, in fact, truly heroic. Mr. On was a real mensch. And he was a hero.
To save another's life at the risk of your own is the apogee of heroics.
Flying a plane several miles up in the sky, dropping bombs on people you can't even see? Maybe not so much.
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Jane Smiley... another who was <i>right</i> about the war...
writes in her HuffPost blog:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/why-i-was-right-about-ira_b_93116.html
about how her line of reasoning led her to disbelieve everything that Bush/Cheney, et al. said before and during the run-up to the war.
I've written before that not enough people read enough literature. Otherwise, an adventure like the invasion and occupation of Iraq would not have proceeded so briskly, and without any "authorized" challenges. Jane Smiley does more than read literature; she actually writes novels, i.e., she understands the inherent logic that must be present in any narrative.
Some excerpts from her post:
Slate is running a series in which former liberal hawks either excuse themselves for, or, in the case of Andrew Sullivan, apologize for, their former support for the invasion of Iraq. Others have weighed in, too -- Anne Marie Slaughter, here on the HuffPo, and a few, so I hear, in the New York Times. So far, no one has contacted me, always against the war, and asked me why I was opposed. I guess they are tired of hearing from me. But I had a logic and a history, too, and maybe I should be consulted about what's next. Therefore, I am offering my own case history. I was against the Iraq War by Christmas, 2000, just as, we have found out, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush were for the Iraq War before the 2000 election.
[snip]
In other words, I was against the Iraq War because I distrusted the motives of its architects, because the story they cooked up was full of holes, and because when they were telling that story, their body language revealed their bad faith. I was also against the Iraq War because I could imagine myself as an Iraqi. Let's say China decided that regime change in Sacramento was necessary, so they landed an army at San Francisco and Los Angeles and carpet bombed us into throwing Arnie out. Would I embrace them? Would any American embrace them? The shock of invasion would certainly arouse anger and resistance. So, I saw, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had no realistic understanding of human nature to add to their other personal failures.
[snip]
But, say the converted liberal hawks, now what?
Here's what. First, we recognize that the Bush administration committed a crime in the name of the American people. Then we do what it takes, both psychologically and financially, to repair the crime. The very first thing that this means is that every American who has in some way profited from this crime must relinquish the fruits of the crime. That means the oil companies. That means the contractors. That means the US government. We cannot keep anything that the Iraqis owned before we took it away from them. We cannot have their land. We cannot have their oil or its profits. We cannot have any sort of power over them. Here is what is preventing the US from leaving Iraq -- the US still wants something from Iraq and the Iraqis that we have no right to. It is the desire to salvage some part of what the Bush administration thought would be easy to claim that is keeping us there, and it is the unspoken complicity of the Democrats and the "prowar liberals" in this that makes it so hard for them to accept the failure of the enterprise.
There's more... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/why-i-was-right-about-ira_b_93116.html
It's worth promoting posts such as Smiley's, not just because she is both ethical and sensible, but because she exposes the lie that there are no good suggestions for "what's next" from Liberals. Hah!