who's your nanny?

The Two Faces of Obama

Justin Raimondo writes

Obama ran for president as the spokesman for the underdog – the little guy just managing to make ends meet, whose volunteerism and contributions over the Internet catapulted the Illinois senator into the running. Yet the reality is that Obama was corporate America’s candidate from the very beginning, and they showed it by lavishly financing his campaign: the money emanating from Goldman Sachs was quite impressive, and, together with the DNC, Wall Street buried the Republicans, who were outspent by three-to-one [.pdf] (and out of gas in any event). Unsurprisingly, the top echelons of the president’s economic team are filled with former Goldman Sachs officials – and, not coincidentally, that firm is the primary beneficiary of the AIG/bank bailout.

The ruling elites of this country, confronted by the specter of a rising populist anger, have found in President Obama a subtle and skillful anger-management expert. For years they’ve been frustrated in Washington, as their efforts to fight a spreading war met increasing resistance from the American people. Divine Providence smiled down on them, however, as Obama suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Here was an "antiwar" candidate who said we’ve been fighting the wrong war all along – and, upon taking office, immediately rectified that by sending 21,000 more troops to the wilds of Central Asia.

Read the whole thing.

It's Not Called an Empire for Nothing

Barack Obama is set to announce that the timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq has been extended to August 31, 2010, and that "as many as 50,000 Marines and soldiers would remain until the end of 2011."

My prediction? The August 2010 timetable itself will be extended, probably several times, and the U.S. won't simply have a military presence in Iraq until 2011, but at least 50 years after that.

And you just have to love the state's word games. You can't exactly call a timetable to withdraw troops a plan for "withdrawal" when you intend to leave tens of thousands of troops behind.

All of a Sudden, the Wars Are A-OK

I've been meaning to comment on this for the past week, but today Manuel Lora beat me to it. Whereas anti-war marches abounded during the Bush administration, he notes the peculiar absence of Democratic/liberal outrage about the murders that Obama has already carried out.

Lora quotes a friend:

Let's see how many anti-war protest marches there are, how big they are, how many anti-war bumper stickers there are in two years, and how vocal places like Daily Kos (or other ... leftist rags) are about war. Let's see. But as for me, I'm calling it this way right now: the majority of Americans support foreign wars, or at least are not actually anti-war. The ones who were in the last eight years were simply anti-Bush, and I think Obama is going to prove me right on this.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Evan Carnahan: Sacrificial Lamb of Bush's War of Aggression

Will Grigg shares the sad story of Evan Vela Carnahan, an army sergeant used by the U.S. military to take the fall for criminal commanding officers, and explains why the Iraq war was never really about "liberating" a country or protecting America -- it was "pure military colonialism."

Pardon Him!

Then give him a medal.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush, has asked Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a pardon.

I disagree with Mr. al-Zeidi, however, for calling his behavior "an ugly act." On the contrary, it was heroic!

And I Want a 10-Inch..

... never mind.

Is David Limbaugh Delusional, or Just a Useful Idiot?

Conservative columnist David Limbaugh's latest column, "Sorry, but Obama Scares Me," is a perfect example of why Republicans have been thoroughly discredited in the public eye. In their eyes, their America can do no wrong -- when everyone with eyes to see knows that such claims are absurd on their face.

To be fair, Limbaugh offers an accurate critique of Obama's radical leftism, chasitizing him for his class warfare rhetoric, Marxist economic plans, and suspect denials of associations with known militants. In no uncertain terms, Obama scares me, too -- so does McCain -- but Limbaugh's fundamental denial of American government policy makes me wonder if the man's delusional, pitifully credulous, or just opportunistically disingenuous. To wit:

For the past eight years, Democrats have slandered America as an imperialistic country that always prefers force to diplomacy; that attacks nations without provocation to enrich itself and to project its power; that intentionally targets civilian lives; that encourages sadistic torture of enemy prisoners, as opposed to tough interrogation techniques to extract information to save the lives of its people; that eavesdrops on private conversations among its citizens rather than monitoring terrorist communications into its borders; and that abuses rather than goes out of its way to accommodate the savages in Guantanamo's prison. None of it is true.

I realize that being a member of the Republican cult -- much like being a Democrat -- means you have to reflexively disagree with the enemy. But this is a little much.

For starters, America is an imperialistic country -- the most imperialistic country on the face of the earth, actually -- occupying between 700 and 800 military bases worldwide (including the U.S.) with military personnel located in more than 150 countries. In fact, the land occupied by American bases surpasses the acreage comprising North Korea. Moreover, just last year Limbaugh himself lamented the supposed fact that Democrats "always wanted to extend the time for diplomacy and defer the use of force" when dealing with Saddam Hussein (would that this were true). You can argue that the American military should maintain its vast overseas presence if you like, David, but you can't possibly argue that this isn't imperialistic.

As to Limbaugh's ridiculous claim that the U.S. doesn't attack nations without provocation, this is like catching your toddler drawing on the walls with crayon and listening to her simultaneously deny it. We're currently engaged in wars with two countries that did not attack us, and we're threatening to attack even more. David's denial is absurd in the extreme.

As for civilian casualties, even if the U.S. does not "intend" to kill civilians, it nevertheless willingly targets them when sending troops to attack suspected terrorists that are known to hide amongst them. And who can forget Madeleine Albright's infamous admission that U.S. sanctions responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children during the '90s were "worth it?" Even though these figures may have been inflated, it's clear that Albright was indifferent to the slaughter whether the actual figure was 100,000 or 500,000.

When it comes to the torture of enemy prisoners, is David Limbaugh honestly denying the flagrant atrocities of Abu Ghraib (photos - use discretion)? Is he actually defending the American gulag known colloquially as Gitmo, where the U.S. has detained without due process suspected terrorists, about half of whom haven't even been accused of hostile acts? I'd encourage Limbaugh and others in denial to read the incredible story of Murat Kurnaz, or better yet, watch the outstanding documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

And with his ludicrous assertion that the feds voluntarily confine themselves to eavesdropping merely on "terrorist[s'] communications" -- when Congress specifically legalized domestic spying after the Bush administration was caught breaking the law -- Limbaugh reveals himself to be one of the many dupes -- a "useful idiot," to borrow a phrase popular amongst the neocons -- on whom the State rests its hopes in attempting to hoodwink the American public. For crying out loud, the state of Maryland itself has already been caught spying on innocent citizens; does Limbaugh really believe the federal government, with vastly more resources, isn't doing the exact same thing?

To state the glaringly obvious, Limbaugh would have been much more accurate had he penned his words as a reluctant admission of his government's overwhelming use of criminal force both domestically and abroad, instead of simply insisting that none of these criticisms is true. He can traipse through life with blinders on if he likes, but if you're looking for truth, you might want to ignore the ignorant pap emanating from the simple mind of David Limbaugh.

The Lone Anthrax Killer?

Just in case you have the misfortune of reading about the FBI case against Mr. Ivins by CNN or the Associated Press Report, here are two doses of truth serum.

Is the U.S. Army Covering up the Murder of LaVena Johnson?

Elizabeth Higgs has a very disturbing article today on The Rock chronicling the very real possibility that the army is covering up the brutal 2005 rape and murder of Private LaVena Lynn Johnson.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, Private LaVena Lynn Johnson killed herself on July 19, 2005, eight days before her twentieth birthday. Exactly how did she end her life? She punched herself in the face hard enough to blacken her eyes, break her nose, and knock her front teeth loose. She douched with an acid solution after mutilating her genital area. She poured a combustible liquid on herself and set it afire. She then shot herself in the head. Despite this massive self-inflicted trauma, she somehow managed to drag her then fully clothed body into the tent of a KBR contractor, leaving a trail of blood along the way and set the tent ablaze in a failed attempt to cover up her crimes against herself.

This obviously wouldn't be the first time the military has attempted to cover up the death of a soldier, and with steady reporting indicating that sexual assaults against female soldiers have been on the rise, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to conclude that the army would take advantage of an opportunity to play fast and loose with the facts when one of its own is, sadly, unable to give her account of the story.

I agree with Higgs's assumption that military brass has "no real interest in stopping sexual assaults," for if it did, "LaVena Johnson's rape and murder would be included in their statistics."

However, I think the author inadvertantly misrepresents some facts when she writes, "one third of the women who serve in the military are victims of sexual assault by a fellow soldier."

If true, this would be a staggering percentage, but from everything I've read on the topic I am only able to conclude that one-third of women in the military have reported sexual harassment. Certainly this is nothing to write home about, but harassment isn't the same as assault. Unfair though it may be, when a well-built woman walks into a mess hall in fatigues and a t-shirt amongst a couple hundred guys who've been separated from their wives and girlfriends for months on end, she's bound to get a few stares and whistles. It may be impolite and regrettable, but it's often largely innocent.

That said, I don't bring this up in order to be critical of Higgs's important op-ed; I raise the point in order to emphasize the severity of assault in contrast to harassment. You can barely give a woman a sincere compliment these days without being branded a sexual deviant if she decides to misconstrue the incident. Of course, complaints of legitimate harassment should be taken seriously by the military, but assault is another game entirely. It involves intentional, often premeditated physical/emotional abuse and is a violation of one's right to his or her person.

Rape and murder are monstrous acts, but covering up such incidents at the highest levels of government in order to save face, all the while failing to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes, might just be equally sinister.

I join Elizabeth Higgs in urging everyone reading this to call his or her congressional representatives today to demand a proper investigation into LaVena Johnson's death. The U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.

UPDATE (8/5): Elizabeth Higgs, author of the article I cited in this post about the rape and murder of LaVena Johnson, has written me to contest my assumption that she may have been incorrect in misstating that 1/3 of women in the military are victims of sexual assault. She writes:

The Veteran's Administration has done several studies on this and the numbers range from 28% to 41% of women reporting sexual assault while in military service.  The rate of sexual harassment has been estimated by the governments own studies as high as 78%.  (I have read anecdotal accounts by young female soldiers who say there isn't one woman in ten in the military that hasn't been sexually harassed.)

The DoD even has a name for this epidemic: Military Sexual Trauma.

One of the reasons the military is able to get away with sweeping this stuff under the rug is BECAUSE the public is totally unaware of the size of this problem. 

As I explained to Ms. Higgs, my prevailing intention in linking her article was to do my part in advertising this egregious assault and likely cover-up to as many of my own readers as possible. However, I simply haven't seen the 1/3 statistic reported in relation to assaults, just harassment. Of course, that doesn't mean it isn't true. In fact, using Ms. Higgs's own argument that the military is able to sweep this stuff under the rug precisely because the public is unaware of the problem may be one good reason why I'm unaware of them and have had difficulty confirming her numbers.

From what I've been able to find, Military Medicine defines "Military Sexual Trauma" as a category of domestic violence, which "may include domestic violence, where one intimate partner or spouse exerts power over another as a means of control." This definition seems to indicate that this is a type of trauma that can occur both in the home and while in the military. Furthermore, this report by MSNBC finds that "14.6 percent of female and 0.6 percent of male OEF/OIF* veterans visiting the Department of Veterans reported military sexual trauma"; the asterisk references statistics from Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom. It should be noted that this MSNBC report implies that increasing numbers of women are experiencing military sexual trauma-induced PTSD, and that this is a result of being sexually assaulted in the military only. So, perhaps Higgs's numbers are higher than mine because she happens to be referencing studies that include both military and domestic assaults. But that's just speculation on my part. 

I've asked Ms. Higgs to send along some documentation to support her numbers, and I'll be sure to publish them as soon as I get them. In the meantime, please accept my apologies if I have indeed misrepresented these facts. I regret the error and intended no offense to the author. Regardless of the outcome here, it's undeniable that the military is in no uncertain terms shirking its responsibility to not only provide treatment for servicemen and women who are the victims of assaults, but also to do its very best to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

UPDATE II: Here is some new information from Ms. Higgs to support the statistics from her article regarding the percentage of women in the military who are sexually assaulted:

-Rep. Jane Harman introduced a bill recently to halt rape and sexual assault in the military, claiming in part: "Since 2002, 59,690 female veterans reported being raped, sexual assaulted, or experienced another form of military sexual trauma, constituting almost 20% of the women seen at VA facilities nationally, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs," and "... only 181 of the 2,212 (8%) reports investigated during FY 2007 were referred to courts martial -- a figure far below civilian prosecution rates, where 40% of those arrested are prosecuted."   

-Here's a 2007 article from Salon chronicling the "private war" of female soldiers.

-This article from the Vietnam Veterans of America merely states, "Research data indicates that a significant number of reserve and guard members are victimized by sexual harassment and assault while deployed on active duty."

-One VA psychologist says that 15 percent of women during the first Gulf War were raped, and the interviewer points to a 2005 study of the National Guard and reservists claiming that 1 in 4 women is a victim of sexual assault. 

Surprise!

Another casualty of the Iraq war is discarded by the American war machine once his usefulness has expired.

Sad Story of Pfc. Joseph Dwyer

Long Island native Joseph Dwyer, who became a well-known face of the Iraq war after being shown carrying an Iraqi boy to safety in an Army Times photo by Warren Zinn, has died here at home after succumbing to the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

After being lionized by many as the human face of the U.S. effort to rebuild a troubled Iraq, Dwyer brought the battlefield home with him, often grappling violently with delusions that he was being hunted by Iraqi killers.

His internal terror got so bad that, in 2005, he shot up his El Paso, Texas, apartment and held police at bay for three hours with a 9-mm handgun, believing Iraqis were trying to get in.

Last month, on June 28, police in Pinehurst, N.C., who responded to Dwyer's home, said the 31-year-old collapsed and died after abusing a computer cleaner aerosol. Dwyer had moved to North Carolina after living in Texas.

Dwyer, who joined the Army two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and who was assigned to a unit of the 3rd Infantry Division that one officer called "the tip of the tip of the spear" in the first days of the U.S. invasion, had since then battled depression, sleeplessness and other anxieties that military doctors eventually attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Unfortunately, as is the case with so many veterans, Dwyer did not receive adequate medical treatment once his value to the U.S. military expired.

Some readers may recall my article last year, which told the story of southern Maryland native James Emerick Dean, an army reservist who contemplated suicide upon suffering Afghan war-induced PTSD and was ultimately executed in his father's home by Maryland police as a result.

Why Do They Hate Us?

Gee, I don't know.

Obama's Foreign Policy

As LRC's Anthony Gregory notes in the comments section of this post, Obama's foreign policy plan is to revert to pre-9/11 policy that brought on 9/11 in the first place.

The Warfare State

Anthony Gregory on the greatest threat to the individual in our time. It was pretty difficult picking out just one excerpt from such a brilliant essay, but I particularly like this one:

Shock and Awe made me sick to my stomach. Baghdad was a city with a culture, with civil life, with some degree of liberalism even. Of course, most important, there were human beings there. The best thing Michael Moore has ever done was to show footage of Baghdad before and after bombing. Right-wingers hated this scene, because it forced Americans to confront the faces of some of the people their political leaders killed. It’s ironic that these same conservatives stress all the supposed good things happening in Iraq that the media won’t cover, while they seem completely unwilling to discuss the many good things happening in Iraq before Shock and Awe. Many of those good things happened to people who are not alive today.

And while Shock and Awe was in some ways a more precision bombing than Dresden, it was still mass murder. It was still totally immoral in every respect. Had Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, had he even been best friends with Osama, had he been involved in 9/11 it would still not excuse the dispensing of the individual lives of men, women and children – none of them in any way the enemy – who just happened to live in Saddam’s neighborhood.

If bombing a neighborhood in retaliation could be excused, so too can terrorism in countless forms. The terrorism of September 11, insofar as it was a response to US aggression in the Middle East – and, as we know, there was plenty of it for decades – would be considered legitimate by the logic of the defenders of bombings. Surely, Iraq has been more a victim of the US than vice versa – does this mean Iraqis are allowed to do to American civilians what the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq? Of course not. American individuals had a right not to be murdered on 9/11, despite the evils of their government. This principle must be universal. Dropping bombs in a way that predictably leads to innocent deaths is nothing short of deliberate homicide, no matter what your home address.

Heroic Matthis Chiroux

The U.S. army reservist has made good on his promise to resist orders to deploy to Iraq by failing to report for duty with his unit in South Carolina.

Matthis' father Rob, a rocket scientist who lives in the army town of Huntsville, Alabama, said mobilizing IRR members was a form of back-door draft.

"If our country is in such a dire emergency that we need to conscript manpower, congress has to vote to reinstate the draft," the elder Chiroux told AFP.

"But they won't do that because if congress said we need to bring back the general draft, the war in Iraq would be resolved very quickly," he said.

"Moms and dads, who represent millions and millions of voters, would say: wait a minute -- you want to draft my kid? Iraq's got to stop."

I understand the argument made my many that soldiers know the rules of the game when they join the military, that they're legally bound to obey orders, and that such compliance is logistically necessary when it comes to managing personnel and deployment schedules throughout the conduct of war. In short, I realize these guys are contractually bound to fulfill their service obligations.

However, morality trumps contract law. In a moral society, no one would be legally bound to kill others in a war that was started illegally.

Whereas I would guess the vast majority of taxpayers defer to "the rules" and find Chiroux's resistance reprehensible, I find it heroic and just. If we really support the troops, why is it not they to whom we ultimately defer when it comes to the appropriateness of war?

This isn't intended merely to be an exercise in sophistry. I don't know about you, but when it comes to something as serious as war, I want to hear from the guys expected to do the fighting and the dying. It's a pity so many don't.

"Industrial Slaughter"

That's how Chris Hedges describes the current Iraq war, as told by veterans who have served as the foundation for his just-published book (co-authored with Laila al-Arian), Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

In this disturbing article -- adapted from the introduction of Collateral Damage -- Hedges writes the words we don't want to read but must. Here's a glimpse:

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.

"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"

Read the rest. Unless you don't really want to know why everyone fucking hates us.

Will we heed the lesson? Or simply ignore it?

We Don't Need Oil to Plunge

U.S. News and World Report's Kirk Shinkle comes up with six reasons why oil could plunge. The problem, however, is that we don't need oil to plunge nearly as much as we need the dollar to rise.

Shinkle admits that any of the prospective breaks he envisions would still leave oil well over $100 a barrel, but, interestingly, he never mentions the one action that could immediately reduce gas prices: ending the Iraq war.

Today, right now, at this very moment, the U.S. dollar is worth about €0.63. Think back about three years. We all know roughly what a dollar bought back then, when it was trading evenly with the euro. Well, we might be paying $135 a barrel for oil today, but if one dollar were worth one euro, that same barrel would cost us only $85 right now ($135 x .63).

I've mentioned a couple times before that the U.S. spends more than $5 billion a year just to fuel all its trucks, tanks, jets, humvees, you name it, in Iraq. Given that the United States imports over $500 billion worth of oil every year, merely subtracting our obligation for Iraq from the total probably wouldn't make that much of a dent itself in gas prices.

However, it's not so much the fact that we're allocating 1 percent of our imports to one specific locale that's driving up costs as it is the fact that wars are incredibly expensive -- we literally must borrow, beg, and steal to finance them, and when a significant chunk of your bills are paid by inflating the currency by creating more and more money out of thin air, that currency loses value very quickly and prices rise across the board.

And we haven't even bothered to discuss our politicians' plans to continue to increase domestic spending.

(Thanks to BC for the story.)

Moral Duties Trump Contractual Obligations

Twenty-four-year-old Afghanistan war vet Matthis Chiroux bravely refuses to deploy to Iraq.

"I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

I know a lot of people argue that soldiers have contractual obligations to honor their terms of service, as any of us would in dealing with our employers, and to an extent I can understand this assertion. However, no one has a moral duty to honor commitments requiring him to willfully violate the property rights of another, especially in cases of war when the consequences of doing so ultimately bring wholesale death and destruction to innocent victims.

In short, the legal obligation to adhere to man-made contracts is secondary to one's moral obligation to refrain from initiating aggression -- aggression that in this case can only be deemed immoral and criminal given that it is in large part trained on hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens who bear no responsibility whatsoever for the events of September 11.

Chiroux likely faces the full scope of American military wrath as he has chosen to fight this battle in the U.S., but no amount of posturing will be able to erase the state's opprobrium if it decides to prosecute this soldier for appeasing his conscience.

How many immoral crusades would we be able to avoid if those expected to do the fighting and the dying had a legal right to dissent from battles they know are unjust?

White House Moron

It doesn't quite have the ring of my own "Governor Douchebag," but Paul Craig Roberts's critique of the commander-mis-chief is spot on.

I Feel Sorry for the Troops

ABC News reports that soldiers are basing their choice for president largely on which candidate will pull them out of Iraq or at least shorten deployment commitments.

As you might expect, not one mention of Ron Paul, who has yet to drop out of the race. This is most obviously due to the media's refusal to acknowledge his candidacy and the fact that McCain has sewn up the nomination. However, what a statement it would be if all the troops who made Paul the top recipient of military donations wrote his name in on election day.

Interestingly, check out this part of the report (emphasis mine):

Though the military is generally a more conservative group, soldiers like Sgt. Justin Sarbaum are just as eager for a pull-out as the Democratic candidates. Sarbaum said he wondered which presidential candidate would be able to better the U.S. relationship with rogue nations, such as Iran, so that soldiers are not sent off to another war.

I realize that most soldiers who want to come home yesterday are unlikely to write in a vote for Ron Paul because they'd view that as wasting a vote that might otherwise be used to elect someone who actually has a chance at winning. But the sad truth is that neither Obama nor Clinton have any real intention of ending the war in Iraq anytime soon.

Defense contractors have already identified Democrats as occupying the White House the next four years, and quite frankly, for all the talk that Americans are fed up with war, that issue hasn't even broken into the debate yet. And without an express mandate from voters to pull troops out of Iraq immediately, you'd be a fool to expect Obama to give the issue anything more than lip service even if he's elected.

If the troops want the war to end, their best option is to lay down their arms and walk the hell away. That might sound implausible, but it's probably a lot more realistic than getting any of the leading candidates to do it for them.

McCain's 'Abyss'mal Intentions

John McCain says we're no longer staring into the "abyss of defeat" in Iraq, claiming that "we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success."

You see? If only we stay at war! war! war!, one day it all might just work out.

You'd have to be a lunatic to vote for this man.

The War Party Has Mobilized

And just as it smeared Ron Paul, it's now beginning its campaign against Barack Obama, says Justin Raimondo.

Report Finds No Saddam Ties to Al-Qaeda

The Pentagon has decided to cancel a public release of a controversial report finding NO PRE-IRAQ WAR LINK BETWEEN SADDAM HUSSEIN AND AL-QAEDA.

I decided to just go ahead and bold that up in all caps since the same gub'mint that takes all our money to do as it pleases has apparently decided it's too much trouble to ask some GS-5 in the Pentagon to throw a link to the study up on its home page.

Can't let a little bit of reality get in the way of all that pro-war propaganda now, can we?

Iraq Isn't Vietnam

This neat chart by Jim Cox shows that this assertion is true only in the literal sense.

McCain the Militarist

Justin Raimondo says that if a McCain presidency doesn't scare you, it should.

Military Draft On the Horizon?

General Barry R McCaffrey USA (Ret) shares a strategic and operational assessment of current security operations in Iraq in an after action report (.pdf) for the USMA, West Point. In the excerpt below, I'm wondering if McCaffrey isn't offering a veiled endorsement of another military draft in the not too distant future (emphasis mine).

Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the Army thousands of new soldiers (perhaps 10% of the annual input) who should not be in uniform. (Criminal records, drug use, moral waivers, non-high school graduates, pregnant from Basic Training and therefore non-deployable, lowest mental category, etc.)

We are losing our combat experienced mid-career NCOs’ and Captains at an excessive rate. (ROTC DMG’s, West Pointers, Officers with engineering and business degrees, etc.) Their morale is high, they are proud of their service, they have enormous personal courage---however, they see a nation of 300 million people with only an under resourced Armed Forces at war. The US Army at 400,000 troops is too small to carry out the current military strategy. The active duty US Army needs to be 800,000 strong to guarantee US national security.

For the record, the military draft is more tyrannical by several orders of magnitude than virtually any other government program. Even the income tax, which (immorally) legalizes the wholesale confiscation of individual property, pales in comparison to the draft. It's one thing for the government to steal our money under that assumption that it first and foremost belongs to the state; it's something else entirely to do the same thing with our selves (i.e. our lives).

Instead of doubling the size of the army -- an army that may even consist of some personnel it would rather not have -- perhaps we could reallocate our current resources to the United States. I'm guessing 400,000 troops would be plenty if we didn't insist on using them to patrol over 150 other countries around the world.

It's Not Just a Theory If It's True

Here is Cato's Justin Logan on John McCain's preference for keeping American troops in Iraq for 100 years or more:

And we wonder where these conspiracy theories in the Islamic world about the US trying to dominate the region come from…

Hey Justin, they're not conspiracy theories when leading presidential contenders seek to occupy and dominate every corner of the globe. They're called foreign policy goals.

When Is Rape Not a Crime?

Apparently when it's committed by a gang of defense contractors in Iraq tacitly sanctioned by the United States government.

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

Unbelievable.

Is This a Joke?

NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez notes a White House press report today claiming that President Bush is advancing stem cell research by "encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries."

Of the president she has this to say: "It's nice to have one committed to protecting the sanctity of human life."

I wonder what the families of tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians would have to say about that.

The Truth About Iraq

Via Lew Rockwell, Marine veteran Matt Howard speaks out against the war.

This is an outstanding article, however, while Howard appropriately excoriates President Bush for his role as a war criminal, he lets Democrats off the hook for their responsibility in this mess too. Howard writes that we voted in the Dems on an anti-war mandate, but that the Bush regime simply reacted by expanding the war. This is true, but that doesn't absolve Democrats from honoring their campaign promises. In fact, it's important that we realize they merely exploited profound anti-war sentiment last year with no intention of actually putting an end to the war, which can still be accomplished rather easily: by voting to stop funding it.

But that's not going to happen. The defense industry has thrown the majority of its support behind Democrats in terms of campaign contributions and overall political donations, indicating that it believes Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good. Politicians go where the money is. And if defense contractors are going to bet on the Democrats in 2008, it would be foolish to expect the Dems to suddenly turn their backs on an influential interest group should they take the presidency next year.

If you want this war to end, Ron Paul is the only candidate in either party who will actually stick by his commitment to end it.

War is Bipartisan

Democrats suckered many Americans into thinking they'd end the Iraq war if elected last year, but it's clear they have just as much incentive to advance U.S. imperialism as Republicans do.

If you really want to end this joke of a war, you simply have only one choice next November.

Just End This Stupid War Already

If the war in Iraq were so important to our survival, would we really need to be bribing our officers to stay in the military?

Good Enough for Government Work

I really have no idea why people accuse the government of inefficiency.

The massive U.S. embassy under construction in Baghdad could cost $144 million more than projected and will open months behind schedule because of poor planning, shoddy workmanship, internal disputes and last-minute changes sought by State Department officials, according to U.S. officials and a department document provided to Congress.

Is the Iraq War Preventing Terrorist Attacks in the U.S.?

Refuting a recent Cal Thomas column, Charles Hooper says there's no way. I especially liked this part:

Lets take as a given that Thomas is right about the big pool of Islamic terrorists wanting to kill us. How is it possible that the war in Iraq is stopping them? Do they need to drive through the war zone and are just waiting for the fighting to pass? "I don’t want to scratch the paint on my car, Mohammed. Let’s wait for this thing to settle down." Have the American soldiers blocked all the exits from the country? Are the American soldiers too much fun to shoot at? Are the terrorists lost because all the street signs leading out of Iraq are filled with bullet holes? Or can the terrorists leave at any time, but they can’t seem to pull themselves away, as if they are sitting in a comfortable chair watching TV after work? "Yeah, yeah, honey, I’ll go over to America and detonate some bombs as soon as this war ends." None of this seems plausible to me. I fail to find any reasonable way to explain how the Iraq War is keeping these terrorists away from my neighborhood.

Some things I think the Iraq War has been good for? Hmm, let's see: growing the military-idustrial complex; expanding the American empire; keeping terrorism on the front page of the newspaper, stoking fears that encourage Americans to trade liberties for empty promises of government protection; creating even more foreign hatred toward the U.S.; driving non-violent Iraqis from their country; spending the country into enormous debt; and my personal favorite, cultivating an "all war, all the time" mentality that deigns to justify everything from the murder of thousands of innocents abroad to the pathological growth of the police state at home.

The Catalyst

The company that occupies the building adjacent to mine in our office complex has erected a memorial of American flags around its parking lot on this sixth anniversary of 9/11. The building is also draped with a four-story-long flag and bears a sign which states, in part, "We WILL Never Forget."

I'm no so sure about that.

Well, let me put that another way. While we'll all remember where we were and what we were doing that awful Tuesday morning -- while the date of Sept. 11 will most likely cause most of us to take pause to remember the innocents who were murdered that day -- I will bet that the more the government exploits 9/11 to justify its continuing encroachment upon our liberties and imperialism abroad, the less significance the date will hold as years drag on. As Robert Higgs put it yesterday:

During the past six years, 9/11 has often served as an all-purpose instrument in the state's propaganda kit. For the Bush administration, it has provided the answer to every critical question about foreign and defense policies, among other things. If we challenge the wisdom, legality, or morality of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the government's spokesmen and supporters throw 9/11 in our face. If we criticize the enormous run-up in spending for military purposes and for "homeland security," much of it obvious political pork that contributes nothing to the public's safety, the response to our criticism is that the people dare not risk another 9/11. If we express doubts about the wildly ambitious and morally presumptuous U.S. foreign policy of global hegemony, which, in its present swollen form, followed closely on the heels of George W. Bush's embrace of a humble foreign policy with no nation building during the 2000 presidential campaign ("I don't want to be the world's policeman"), we are told that 9/11 changed everything. If we object to the government's multifaceted assault on our civil liberties, the president stridently declares that everything being done is necessary to prevent another 9/11. If we wave our copy of the Constitution and express doubts about the president's claim of overriding power as a "unitary executive," the government's lawyers assert that since 9/11 the nation has been "at war," and hence the president's constitutional power as commander-in-chief trumps everything else.

Just as history has proven that the attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but unprovoked, one has to wonder how we will view 9/11 two or three decades from now the more we learn what our government really did and did not know leading up to the attacks.

Jamie Dean Piece in Salon

Salon's Julia Dahl has a good piece today on the killing of Jamie Dean. Much of it echoes what I wrote on LRC back in June, but it's great to see this travesty of justice/abuse of police power/trampling of property rights getting the attention it deserves.

The Scourge of Empire (Or, Perhaps, Mea Culpa?)

Anthony Gregory has quite possibly written the best article -- speech, actually -- I've ever read. This essay highlights the many inherent contradictions among the arguments for America's wars and the results they've effected, and quite clearly identifies the problem in Iraq as that of empire.

Gregory notes that more than 70 percent of Americans are sick of the war in Iraq. Though there is much about this current conflict to lament, he identifies this fact as something to celebrate, for if it causes folks on the right to adopt a greater appreciation for civil liberties and those on the left to question the effectiveness of big government -- in essence, if it awakens the populace to the importance of libertarianism -- then much future good could come from our latest wars.

This article strikes a particular chord with me as someone who once struggled with the moral implications of going to war in Iraq -- I'm ashamed to admit that at one point I even wrote in its support -- but who ultimately grew to oppose it, along with other government programs and agencies I may have tacitly supported in the past.

There's a lingering sense of shame and embarrassment that accompanies a realization that you were once wrong about something, whatever it happens to be. At least that's the case with me. My primary goal in writing has always been to keep a running account of my stance on particular political issues and to be able to gauge my learning in the process. It's always nice to be able to go back and read your old ideas if your arguments are vindicated by reality after you've written them down; it's not so fun to go back and realize you were wrong, especially when you realize you might now vehemently disagree with the position you initially took.

Anyhow, maybe this is my mea culpa for writings and opinions I no longer agree with, or maybe it's just time to admit to myself that it's OK to change your views, especially if they evolved in earlier days as a result of naivete and misplaced trust in politicians. Suffice it to say, I've come a long way in the past several years upon understanding the inimitable importance of property rights and civil liberties, not to mention the government's addiction to doing its level best to erode them.

For years, I have been haunted by the belief that I should always know what I'm talking about. Clearly, that is subjective to a point and even more absurd on its face -- there is, after all, a reason we value education so highly. Certainly no one knows everything the moment he or she pops out of the womb, but that can be of little consolation once you realize so many people seem to have "gotten it" before you did.

Today, my goal in writing is to remain a consistent advocate of life, liberty, and property. At the very least, I suspect my relatively new awakening to the importance of strict libertarian principles will account for just that.

Unconscious No More

Many people in the U.S. complain that the mainstream media doesn't report all the "positives" about the war in Iraq, but as Iraq journalist Dahr Jamail explains it, Americans don't even have the first clue -- in his words, we are "barely conscious" -- about all the suffering, brutality, and violence that has led to a sense of "tragic hopelessness" in the war-torn country.

Mr. Jamail recounts some horrific stories in this incredible piece, in the hope that we'll at least begin to awake to the grim realities of this unpopular war.

Don't Do It, George

The U.S. government has positioned a third aircraft carrier in the waters off Iran.

The move comes weeks after a flotilla of U.S. warships sailed through the narrowest point in the Gulf to hold exercises off Iran's coast in a major show of force.

Tension over Tehran's nuclear ambitions has raised regional fears of a military confrontation. Recent U.S. naval presence in the Gulf has been the largest since the 2003 Iraq war.

Could anyone possibly think it's a good idea to set Iran up for an unprovoked attack on imaginary nuclear facilities? Even the most die-hard neocon war hawk must realize that our burdens in Iraq and general military personnel crunch prohibit the U.S. from taking any measures short of full-scale (convenient) nuclear attack, which would mean untold thousands of innocent civilian casualties. All to ostensibly prevent ambitions that would take at least a decade to materialize even if true.

For a good anaylsis of the real nuclear threat, see Anthony Gregory's piece today in LRC.

Why Are We In Iraq?

Justin Raimondo says that while you may consider the war in Iraq a failure, Bush and his advisors have gotten exactly what they wanted.

Missing the Point

I realize it can be hard to write about someone's death without giving the feeling that you're exploiting it. But the New York Times pretty much manages to do just that in this piece about Jamie Dean (subscription req'd), which was obviously timed for Memorial Day weekend.

Now here he was, another American soldier, dead. Only Sergeant Dean was killed at the front door of his childhood home, the day after Christmas and three weeks before his redeployment, shot by a sniper representing the government for whom he had already risked his life in Afghanistan. His wife and parents received the news not by a knock on the door, but by gunfire in the neighborhood.

Columnist Dan Barry primarily focuses his shots at the federal government and its war in Iraq. Yes, if more people understood how many soldiers have suffered post-traumatic stress and even committed suicide as a result of their service, perhaps they'd be even more motivated to demand an end to the war (which, ahem, I thought they did during the last election).

But "Iraq" did not kill Jamie Dean. County and state police in Maryland did. Jamie became suicidal after receiving orders to Iraq after serving 18 months in Aghanistan, but the police surrounded him anyway knowing full well he wanted to be left alone. Without being provoked, they initiated lethal force by firing dozens of tear gas canisters into Dean's house. And when Dean did what any other human being would have done in that situation and fired a warning shot into the air, the police simply seized on this justified retaliation and turned it into an excuse to further antagonize Dean and ultimately kill him.

Barry is probably anti-war, or at least opposed to the Iraq war, as are the majority of Americans. But whether intentionally or not, his article more or less smacks of exploiting Jamie's death as a means of opposing the war, when instead it should have focused on the overzealousness of our government police forces and, in this case, an egregious assault on an innocent man's civil liberties.

Militarizing Upstate New York

Apparently, it's par for the course nowadays to send in the SWAT team every time a depressed war veteran contemplates killing himself.

In a situation eerily similar to one that took place last December in Southern Maryland, where the Maryland State Police and county sheriff's departments antagonized Cpl. Jamie Dean to the point where they could justify killing him, a standoff between Eric Podosek and police in Eden, New York (a rural town on the outskirts of Buffalo) ended peacefully.

In the end, Eric Podosek, 26, walked out of his relative’s Sisson Highway home in southern Erie County and surrendered to police without incident.

“This is a good ending,” said State Police Capt. Steven A. Nigrelli. “We had a guy who was reaching out for help, and we’re going to get him help.”

Podosek was intoxicated and asleep inside the home for much of the afternoon ordeal, said Eden police, after interviewing him Wednesday evening.

“I think our main cause here is alcohol,” said Eden Officer Shawn Bishop. “He had been drinking this morning. He was intoxicated.”

Podosek, who is originally from downstate, is an Iraq War veteran, who has been home for about a year and living with an uncle in Eden.

It was unclear what may have been upsetting Podosek. “We don’t know,” Nigrelli said.

The events began to unfold at 12:12 p.m. Wednesday, when Eden police received a call from Podosek’s sister, who lives downstate.

She had just spoken on the phone with her brother, who sounded despondent, and heard gunshots, said Eden police Lt. John McCarthy.

“The sister thought he was going to kill himself,” McCarthy said.

Eden police called in the State Police and Erie County sheriff’s deputies. As many as 60 law enforcement officers from the three agencies were brought in to search for Podosek and check on his welfare.

Sixty law enforcement officers from three police agencies were called in merely to check on the welfare of a man who was believed to be suicidal? Podosek held no hostages, was not a fugitive, and, given the fact that he was asleep throughout much of the ordeal, obviously posed no immediate threat to anyone but himself. But let's call in SWAT anyway.

Thankfully this episode ended much more peacefully for Podosek than it did for Dean, who took a sharpshooter's bullet in his back after police fired upwards of 60 or 70 rounds of tear gas into the house he was in.

New York State Police Capt. Steven A. Nigrelli mentioned that Podosek's situation had a good ending. It most certainly did, and the police agencies involved deserve credit for not escalating the situation unnecessarily. But check out this photo by James P. McCoy of The Buffalo News. Why in the world are our police officers -- peace officers -- dressed in camo fatigues?

Even if this situation did warrant the use of the SWAT team -- from almost any standpoint it most certainly did not -- I thought the police were supposed to stand out from the crowd, that they were expected to announce themselves both vocally and visually as agents of the law -- not blend into the scenery like the military so as to go unseen as they stalk their enemies.

The War the Government Cannot Win

Outstanding piece by Lew Rockwell.

Congress to Vote for Iraq Pullout

Via The Baltimore Sun:

WASHINGTON // Defying a fresh veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Congress will pass legislation within days requiring the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq by Oct. 1, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today.

The legislation also sets a goal of a complete pullout by April 1, 2008, he said.

This is my favorite part:

"I understand the restlessness that some feel. Many who voted for change in November anticipated dramatic and immediate results in January," [Reid] said.

"But like it or not, George W. Bush is still the commander in chief -- and this is his war," Reid said.

I'm all for an Iraq pullout, but the majority leader would do well to remember this is his war too, given that he voted in favor of it and all.

Dr. No on the Iraq War

Rep. Ron Paul says our leaders claim we're fighting in Iraq to preserve our freedoms at home, though the opposite is likely true.

The Surge

Jonathan Rauch explains why Bush's Hail Mary pass probably won't work, but why Congress would be wrong to try to stop it.

Will We See a Troop Revolt?

I bet you can hardly wait for President Bush's live address from the White House tomorrow night, when he'll formally unveil his exciting new plans for our next course of action in Iraq. As for me, I'm just thrilled to know that now that we've finally gotten past the holiday reruns of our favorite shows, I'll still get to watch episodes of Criminal Minds and CSI that I've already seen. From The Washington Post:

President Bush yesterday began promoting his plan to send more troops to Iraq, bringing more than 30 Republican senators to the White House as part of a major campaign to rally the American people behind another effort to stabilize the country.

Senators who met with Bush said the president made it clear that he is planning to add as many as 20,000 U.S. troops to help quell violence in Baghdad. They also said the president is arguing that his new plan has a better chance for success than past plans because of a greater willingness of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to commit Iraqi forces against all perpetrators of violence, including Shiite militias.

Anybody else think we're on the verge of seeing 20,000 U.S. troops start to claim they're gay?

Lest you think I'm joking, I've heard a handful of my friends on IRR say that very thing, only slightly tongue-in-cheek. With our forces already streched thin -- perhaps too thin from the outset -- I'm not sure officers who've already given up their commissions and put their military lives behind them are going to be all that willing to leave their families and good jobs over what most probably feel is a shot in the dark.

On a related note, Nick Gillespie wonders if Bush would embrace a payroll tax hike as a ploy to gather support for his new war plans. And David Weigel has a few suggestions for Bush et al. if they really want to sell a troop surge.

Fallout From Iraq Hits Home

ABC7 reported last night in its televised broadcast that Cpl. James "Jamie" Dean was killed in Hollywood, Maryland yesterday afternoon by a St. Mary's County police sharpshooter after a long standoff that began on December 25th. From the print report yesterday:

[St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron] says Dean's family contacted police last night, saying he was armed and threatening to kill himself. Dean later told police he would shoot anyone who entered the house.

The family told authorities that Dean was despondent about recent orders for him to go to Iraq. Dean had returned in 2005 from a year and a half long tour in Afghanistan.

The print transcript of this story notes that this incident took place in Leonardtown, which is adjacent to Hollywood, but it hits home regardless considering both cities are only about 10 miles or so from my house.

What is especially noteworthy is that the 28-year-old Dean was holed up in the house for 15 hours, but he was in the house alone. That is, no family members were held in the house against their will, so this was not a hostage situation. With the increasing misuse of our nation's SWAT teams, where tactical officers commonly are sent to serve drug and gambling warrants, it may seem at first glance that this standoff was an appropriate venue for the St. Mary's County SWAT unit. But why was a SWAT team summoned simply because a man, alone in a house, was threatening to kill himself? Wanting to commit suicide is not a crime.

Apparently, Dean had fired several shots from inside the house during the course of the confrontation. But the point is that there was a confrontation at all, seemingly due to the arrival of the police, who likely created a violent situation instead of leaving Dean to himself.

The television reporter noted last night that Dean was killed by a police sniper with a single shot as he exited the house with his gun raised. I wondered at the time if that meant he actually had his arms up to surrender and still had the gun in hand, but the print report says that Dean "pointed a gun at a tactical team that was about to use gas to try to force him out of his father's house."

Many details of the episode remain unclear at this point, but if reports are accurate and Dean did have his gun pointed at the tactical team as he left the house, officers fearing for their own safety certainly were justified in protecting themselves. The question, however, is why this situation had to get to this point at all.

Mr. Dean's family obviously called the police because they didn't want their loved one to go through with killing himself, and in all likelihood they were scared. It was Christmas Day, no less. Put yourself in the same situation and you might very well call the cops for help, as well. But the sheriff should have known that involving a SWAT team -- highly trained officers whose job is to kill, not keep the peace -- would likely account for the very outcome Dean's family was seeking to prevent by summoning the police in the first place.

Moreover, as reprehensible as the outcome of this situation is, the reasons behind Mr. Dean's distress and suicidal intentions were just as unfortunate. As the report noted, Dean was summoned by the military to go to Iraq after already having served 18 months in Afghanistan.

But that's all we learn from the newscasts. A colleague of mine is a volunteer firefighter who knows one of Jamie Dean's friends, and it seems Dean simply couldn't handle going back to war for another tour (he was merely a reservist, after all). The friend told my colleague that Dean was a perfectly normal, regular guy -- funny, generous, lighthearted -- before he went to Afghanistan, where he was on the front lines and witnessed horrendous fighting and carnage that terrorized him and psychologically ruined him -- apparently to the point where death was better than having to live through another tour of what he saw over there.

The dreadful irony is that Cpl. James Dean indeed may have gotten what he sought on Christmas Day -- a quick end to unimaginable distress. But everyone needs to know that Jamie Dean was no criminal. From what I've learned, he committed no crime that demanded police intervention. Yes, he reportedly wanted to kill himself. Yes, he shot at the police after they intervened, and thankfully none of the officers were hurt. Tragically, however, in Mr. Dean's mind, it may not have been the final bullet -- preventable as it should have been -- that did him the most damage.

Cpl. James Dean, RIP.

Must. Avert. Eyes!

I actually felt a little dirty after reading this literary handjob on Sen. John McCain by Larry Kudlow.

Yep, the same John McCain who co-sponsored the worst assault on free speech in ages.

Thankfully, a federal court has just overturned some especially tough restrictions imposed by campaign finance law. Now we get to wait and see if the ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court, which condoned this censorship in the first place.

Four More Years

Army says troops will be staying in Iraq until 2010.

WASHINGTON - For planning purposes, the Army is gearing up to keep current troop levels in Iraq for another four years, a new indication that conditions there are too unstable to foresee an end to the war.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, cautioned against reading too much into the planning, which is done far in advance to prepare the right mix of combat units for expected deployments. He noted that it is easier to scale back later if conditions allow, than to ramp up if they don't.

"This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better," Schoomaker told reporters. "It's just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot."

Even so, his comments were the latest acknowledgment by Pentagon officials that a significant withdrawal of troops from Iraq is not likely in the immediate future. There are now 141,000 U.S. troops there.

Depending on who you talk to, it's likely you'll still find widely differing opinions on the status in Iraq three and a half years in. I personally like to get my progress reports from the guys on the ground. For what it's worth, this is an email from a West Point grad, who was called up off Inactive Ready Reserve (special emphasis on the "inactive" part), to a fellow classmate who is getting letters from the IRR and fears he's about to be called up:

I started getting those letters too right before I got called up. I pray that you don't have to come. This place is getting worse and worse. Snipers and EFPs [Explosively Formed Penetrators] are the flavor of the day now, and they are taking some serious casualties around the country. 172nd has lost four guys to snipers (head shots, so they're getting trained out of the country) since they got extended. I can't wait to get out of this place.

I doubt there's anyone serving in Iraq who would rather be there than at home with his family, so I'm not going to pretend that this email necessarily conveys the idea that this soldier disagrees with the war. But what I've heard from several other West Point captains is that they feel like they're serving little purpose in Iraq, merely treading water and hoping not to get blown up while they patrol roads in Baghdad and train Iraqi police. Granted, this is much different than raiding terrorist hot spots on a daily basis in Fallujah and Ramadi, which at least affords you the feeling that you're taking the fight to the enemy as opposed to just waiting to be attacked.

I'm hardly an authority on war, much less the war in Iraq, but one rule I've tried to follow is that I'll give up when the troops do, and this is by no means even beginning to happen yet. The bond of loyalty and brotherhood that exists between our men in combat extends beyond the mere rationale for war, and it's a feeling I'll never have the privilege of knowing. However, I chafe at the notion that we already know we'll be sending troops to Iraq for another four years, but we don't really know when the Iraqi government will be self-sufficient enough that it no longer needs our services.

That alone raises too many questions to tackle in one blog post, but it also makes me feel like four more years is only beginning to scratch the surface.