Letters to the Editor
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No! Please don't!
I briefly considered whether you meant that sarcastically and then rejected it - not sure why. I hate when people overlook sarcasm/irony and hate even more when I do it. I'm going to go bang my head against the table for the next few minutes as punishment.
-- GlennGreenwald
Trust me on this. Protect that brain case. At least put a pillow on the desk first. Head banging gets you no place, but does feel better when you stop. This is the message we need to get across to the Iraq war hawks. We don't want them to start banging their heads on the desk. We want them to stop it. Now!
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Nasturtium W.E.S.
That was the nicest "nastygram" you sent shooter242 fan club readers yet.
`
The land of running horses, fair.... Jim White is scooping gold.
A colobus is a guest here to say, Howdy Glenn!" "Trolls" do not seek another blogging home.
For this blog some live, breathes, pants, sighs, and says "We all the loveliest." And then die? The Tone in DC?
Oedipus Rex in DC.
Oy!
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Pat Buchanan and his ilk...
opposed the war, though I can't stand them personally. But there it is, conservative antiwar advocates.
Like Books? Visit www.newhavenreview.com
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fish, barrel
* Why would it have been better to gamble, that Saddam has no weapons, no bad intent, and is just posturing?
Why was that a gamble? By the same token, you could also say we are gambling that an asteroid will not hit the Earth, or that the dolphins are not actually hyper-intelligent space aliens who are biding their time before slaughtering us with their head-mounted lasers.
Not every possible threat imaginable mind of man represents a "gamble" that must be addressed with force of arms. I'm mildly surprised even you need this explained to you.
The Iraq invasion was not about a sober assessment of the realistic risk posed by Saddam Hussein to the United States. It was about projecting power into a region where the Bush regime wanted to project power, and Iraq was seen as low-hanging fruit due to the degraded state of their military and the hatred of the Iraqi people for the tyrant. The invasion was both wrong (because you don't invade another country just because you wanna) and stupid (because destroying a nation's infrastructure and imposing a colonial rule tends to alienate the populace).
Are you seriously saying the last, painful six years haven't taught you anything... or are you just too titred on a Teusday morning to come up with any original lines to troll with? Hmm?
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Excellent responses to Shooter
but do we really want to feed the trolls? He knows he's mischaracterizing his opponents' position to get a rise out of us. To me it seems that's not worth responding to. Although in fairness, there may be some people lurking for whom the debunking will be helpful information. I guess it's a draw.
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No
We don't want them to start banging their heads on the desk. We want them to stop it. Now!
The problem is that the hawks are banging everyone else's heads on the desk..
I want them to bang their own heads on the desk, hopefully until the little gray cells start to leak out.
If they actually have any left.
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Our Presence Fosters Violence, So Why Do We Remain?
For the details of what's been done in and to Baghdad on our watch - including details of the purpose and effect of the "surge" (starting before Congress rubber-stamped it last year and ending by last fall) - read this excellent article by Michael Schwartz, author of an upcoming book about Iraq:
After a spring and summer of heavy fighting, however, the Americans were hardly close to pacifying the city. In a way, the surge had worsened the situation. Before it began, in many neighborhoods neither Sunni nor Shia militias were dominant; by the middle of 2007, virtually every community had its own mini-government, usually dominated by a militia that was hostile both to the occupation and the central government. To assert centralized authority over the city, each neighborhood would have had to be invaded again.
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Without announcing a change in policy, the Americans functionally abandoned the surge in the late summer 2007 in favor of a "live and let live" program of cooptation. On the Sunni side of the street, the Americans adopted a version of the Sunni "Awakening" movement that had arisen without American encouragement in Anbar Province the previous year, negotiating armed truces with their insurgent adversaries on a community-by-community basis. The Americans conceded to the militias the right to police their own communities, discontinued American offensives aimed at dislodging them, and halted the hated home invasions aimed at arresting or killing suspected insurgents. In exchange, the insurgents were to rein in attacks on American troops and suppress jihadist activity in their neighborhoods, thus curtailing the planning and execution of car bomb and other terrorist attacks on nearby Shia communities.
On the Shia side, the Americans essentially negotiated a ceasefire with the Mahdi Army, announced publicly as a unilateral stand-down by its leader Moqtada Al Sadr. The Sadrists curtailed the planting of lethal roadside bombs against the Americans and no longer sought to ambush American and Iraqi army troops moving through their neighborhoods. The Americans curtailed their raids and offensives in Sadrist neighborhoods and spent far less effort hunting down and arresting Sadrist leaders, except when they specifically broke the ceasefire.
[snip]
Their national spokesmen continued to insist that the country could not begin genuine reconstruction until the Americans left, and that the barriers they had played such a role in erecting -- sectarian as well as cement -- were removed.
Though many Baghdad communities are now experiencing their lowest levels of violence in two years, their situations are neither viable, nor stable. The cement barriers, which help to reduce violence, also make social and economic life nearly impossible. Most Baghdadis are now locked into their individual ghettos, terrified of strangers, often afraid to send their children to schools across barriers and neighborhoods, and unable to reach previously held jobs. Employers, deprived of needed workers and customers, have shuttered their establishments. The economy has largely ground to a halt.
For most of Baghdad, the Iraqi government is simply irrelevant. It has no administrative apparatus in any of these communities or the capacity to restore needed services. Its only visible presence, the Iraqi army, is commanded or controlled by American officers; insofar as Iraqi soldiers do act independently, they follow the leadership of Shia militia commanders, not the central government. In neighborhoods even a few hundred feet from the Green Zone, the Iraqi government does not exist.
[snip]
As early as May of 2006, Nir Rosen, one of the most informed and insightful journalists writing about Iraq, presciently described the American military's unenviable position in this way: "[T]he American Army is lost in Iraq, as it has been since it arrived. Striking at Sunnis, striking at Shias, striking at mostly innocent people. Unable to distinguish between anybody, certainly unable to wield any power, except on the immediate street corner where it's located… [T]he Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy." This description was never truer than today in Baghdad.
http://tomdispatch.com/post/174909/michael_schwartz_how_to_disintegrate_a_city
I wonder if any Members of Congress ever even bother to read such accounts, never mind ever making the effort to formulate questions based on such reports to hold to account the American implementers of such barbaric, futile tactics.
Here's more from the Iraqi perspective:
http://alternet.org/waroniraq/80469/?page=entire
Remember that for those Americans running the show in Iraq, staying is success - their (unspoken) agenda is profit, not peace, and oil deals unfavorable to the future of Iraq require our armed presence, the state and well-being of Iraq and Iraqis be damned.