05.27.05
Posted in Rants at 8:37 pm by Thomas
So Thomas Friedman of the New York Times had a sudden revelation about Guantanamo Bay: Just Shut It Down
Yeah… we fucking told you so!
After spending the last couple of years cheerleading the Bush administration in its race to destroy the international image of the US as a beacon of freedom and peace, Friedman takes his head long enough out of Bush’s butt to realize that the rest of the world is scared stiff of what unearthly bullshit the Americans are going to pull off next.
It’s people like Friedman who have column space in large newspapers who could have prevented the wholesale slaughter and torture of innocents if they would have just put their honestly felt conservative opinions aside for a moment and would have looked at what this administration is all about.
Since early 2002 at the latest it was crystal clear to everybody who wanted to know that the Bush administration was sliding down the well-worn slippery path to fascism.
From its very outset, Guantanamo Bay was not just a prison, it was a concentration camp very much in the style of what the Germans created in the mid-1930s.
And now in mid-2005 Mr. Friedman hops over to London and is astonished that the free press back in civilized Europe is writing about the US as if it were a third-world tin-pot dictatorship. Congratulations. A quick Google search could have told him three years ago that something about that whole let’s-stick-all-muslims-into-mysterious-prisons-routine was wrong.
What is wrong with these people? How could anybody look at the idea of a prison camp outside of all laws and think that this is going to work out ok? Human history for thousand of years has been peppered with incidents of torture and unlawful imprisonment and a fifth-grader could point out the similarities between any one of those cases and what the Bush administration has been doing.
And now we are bemoaning the bad press the US is getting all around the world.
Bad press?
That’s not even the beginning of the problems the US is getting into. For reference I’d like to point to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
(via Daily Kos)
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05.26.05
Posted in Rants at 6:33 pm by Thomas
Associated Press writer Patrick Quinn has filed this report today: 40,000 Iraqis to Form Shield in Baghdad
Among the usual daily litany of bombings, murders and every imaginable kind of violence under the sun, there is this astonishing passage:
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told a small group of Western reporters that next week’s planned crackdown, dubbed Operation Lightning, was designed “to restore the initiative to the government.” Insurgents have killed more than 620 people since his government was announced on April 28.
“We will establish, with God’s help, an impenetrable blockade surrounding Baghdad like a bracelet surrounds a wrist,” Defense Minister Saadoun al-Duleimi said.
Iraqi authorities did not say how long the crackdown would last, and it was uncertain if the Iraq security services are capable of mounting a sustained operation. Except for a few elite units, most police officers are believed to have joined up for the higher pay the job provides — at $300 per month their salaries are triple the average wage.
Iraq currently has 89,400 security personnel attached to the Ministry of Interior, according to the U.S. military. This includes police, highway patrol and some commando units, although the figure may include some who have deserted. Another 75,800 forces are in the country’s military, most of them in the army.
Now I may not be a strategic mastermind, but I’ve been a soldier once and I’ve played many a game of Civilization over the years…
So… Doesn’t this mean that Baghdad is going to be surrounded?
The only reason why anybody would take a substantial part of their forces and group them in a ring around the capital is because the rest of the country has become hopelessly ungovernable.
Even if we take the most optimistic numbers for the government forces, 40,000 men would be more than half of their active combat troops.
These forces have to be top-notch to be able to withstand in a thin ring and will have to come from somewhere else, further weakening the grip on the rest of Iraq.
If the US-backed government intends to keep such a ring operative over a longer period of time – and why would you do something like this temporarily – they will lose control over large parts of the rest of the country. Out in the countryside the insurgents will have the freedom to prepare large assaults against these troops who are essentially pinned down in their positions, unable to move since a retreat would puncture the ring and allow the insurgents directly back into the city.
This is the Iraqi government declaring strategic bankruptcy.
I’m wondering if this has been coordinated with the US generals or if this announcement came as a surprise for them, too.
And while we are talking about announcements… since when are strategic plans like this announced five days in advance? The insurgency is going to be eternally grateful for this early warning, giving them a chance to shift their forces, mine all the possible troop positions and take a few days worth of R&R before they will attack the defensive ring next week.
I can’t imagine any outcome for this scenario that will not end in a desaster of some kind for the US and Iraqi government forces.
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05.17.05
Posted in Sad Stuff at 2:01 am by Thomas
I just read this astonishing article by Ellen Knickmeyer from the Washington Post who was with US Marines while they were on another futile mission along the Iraqi-Syrian border to root out the insurgents.
Read it here: Looking for Battle, Marines Find That Foes Have Fled
This article is so full of amazing quotes, I don’t even know where to begin.
Young, inexperienced and under-educated American Marines are stumbling through the desert, without translators, without the bare minimum of guidance in morals, ethics or local culture.
This is the MTV generation, grown up without a history book in sight. Sent to a fight a war under false pretenses in a land so unimaginably different from their own that they can not recognize their own blunders… they are left in the desert with the dull feeling that somehow, inexplicably, everything seems to go wrong.
They are stuck to fight an enemy they can not see, guided by policies that are based on lies, with no hint of how long their stay in purgatory will last.
They are facing a local population that is dirt poor, but that has inexhaustible supplies of weapons and ammunitions and is tough as nails. Insults – especially religious insults – are taken deathly serious and for thousands of years have led to blood feuds between families. These are not people you want to piss off.
Here are a couple of the hightlights from the article:
With no Arabic speakers among the Marines, no English spoken among the villagers of Arabi, and Lima Company’s already sparse crew of Iraqi interpreters reduced when one quit in mid-battle at Ubaydi, there was no way to tell her the mortar round was meant for others, the nuisance gunmen across the Euphrates. Heavy-caliber weapons fire burst out, Marines firing at something else.
…
Sometimes, the Marines busted up wooden furniture belonging to poor farm families and threw their polyester blankets and clothes in a jumble on the floor. A handful of the hundreds of Marines involved in Operation Matador walked out of homes with a pillow or blanket to cushion the ride in the Amtrac.
…
At the end of a day of searches, Marines generally commandeer houses for the night, shooing the families out in case the Americans’ presence makes the homes targets for attack.
It was clear two years ago that the US military was in way over their head in Iraq. All along there have not been enough interpreters and soldiers have been left completely unprepared for the cultural differences that would await them.
With every passing day of this occupation, more mistakes are being made and violence will cause more violence. It is a race to the bottom that the Iraqis will surely win since they are the ones who at the end have nothing to lose.
It is astonishing that nobody in the US military seems to have studied past guerilla wars. The example that I know best, since I have read and own a rather large collection of books about it, is the war between Japan and China.
Japan had invaded China over a long period of time, slicing off bigger and bigger chunks of the country without much resistance since their weapons technology was far superior to the Chinese. But when they took Beijing and went south and west from there, they became bogged down in a fierce guerilla war with the Communist troops under Mao Tsetung.
The Japanese did not understand enough about the local culture and had zero support from the population. The Communist fighters chose the time and place of every attack and then melted into the countryside without a trace. While the Japanese had air support, tanks and good guns, the guerillas fought with any weapon they could find. One specialty was the burying of mines along all the roads.
After several years of this warfare, the Japanese spent their days hiding out in bases, constantly harassed by small arms fire and afraid to travel from town to town because of the permanent danger of mines and small bands of guerillas roaming the countryside.
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
The Iraq war is a lost war for the US, like the Japanese occupation of China was doomed from the moment that local guerillas figured out how to bring the war machinery to a grinding halt.
It’s a tragedy that so many young people have to die for the mistakes and willful shortsightedness of a few old men in Washington. Tens of thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have lost their health and their souls.
The troops have to come home, because right now they are wandering around the Iraqi desert without aim and without hope.
They are truly lost in the sand.
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05.15.05
Posted in Rants at 2:46 am by Thomas
As it turns out, while the White House and the Capitol were evacuated, President Bush was mountain biking… and nobody told him that there was a Red Alert over a potential terrorist attack in Washington DC.
Now my first thought was that somebody just screwed up and the Secret Service kinda forgot to tell him. But no, this was intentional!
In the White House press briefing linked above, Scott McClellan describes this as standard procedure in the event of a possible terrorist attack: If the President is out biking don’t tell him until we know for sure it’s bad.
Here’s the quote:
MR. McCLELLAN: John, the protocols that we put in place after September 11th were being followed. They did not require presidential authority for this situation. I think you have to look at each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation. And that’s what officials here at the White House were doing. That’s what officials were doing that were with the President at the off-site location, and this was a matter of minutes when all this was happening, when the alert level was going from yellow to orange to red, and then it went back down to yellow when the plane turned away.
So a plane is heading for the White House. The president’s wife is being evacuated. Senate employees forget everything they must have heard about evacuation procedures and run wild in the streets around the capitol. The terrorist alert level is elevated to red. And the protocols state that the President does not have to be notified immediately?
What the fuck???
Every primary school has better emergency plans than the US government. The Homeland Security budget for 2004 alone was 36.2 billion dollars, and we still do not even have procedures in place that inform the Commander in Chief of a Red Alert condition?
It explains a lot to me why President Bush always seems so carefree and happy. Has anybody told him that we are still fighting in Iraq?
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05.13.05
Posted in Rants at 9:50 pm by Thomas
The New York Times seems to have a major case of split personality lately… while the editorials by Krugman, Dowd and Herbert are full of accusations of how the Bush administration has mishandled the war, the economy and pretty much every other facet of statemanship, they also posted this “Op-Chart” today… an amazing peace of propaganda that could have sprung straight from the pages of the Soviet-era Pravda.
This chart lists “Good News You Missed” about the Iraq war. You are now probably wondering what good news could have possibly come out of this US-made hellhole… to save you the trouble of signing up with the NYT, here’s a few things they made up – I mean… got told by Karl Rove – no… “investigated”.
2 April
Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation announces it is now supervising 121 major reconstruction projects that will cost $1.8 billion.
Wow… now that’s good news. So the Planning Ministry is actually planning 121 projects a full two years after the war has ended. So how much will 15 million for the average project buy you if you have to buy services from US contractors?
To get some idea, here is a quote from US general Thomas Bostick:
In 2003, World Bank officials estimated it would take $60 billion to rehabilitate the Iraqi infrastructure to the point it was before 1990
So even if insurgents would not blow up a good chunk of these projects once they get started, we are only talking about 3% of the amount necessary to get Iraq back to a standard of living it had under Sadam Hussein fifteen years ago.
OK… let’s try another one…
24 April
Opening ceremony held at a primary school in Falluja, one of the five in the city renovated by the United States Army
In a city of once 300,000 people, now completely depopulated by US troops, where there is still fighting every day, the US Army is taking the time to open primary schools… apart from the fact that this sounds highly unlikely (Hello? New York Times? Where are the pictures of happy children having lessons in those schools?), here are a few facts about Falluja:
- About 65 primary and secondary schools were destroyed in the fighting
- US and Iraqi government forces are using some of the schools as bases
- more than 30,000 houses and 8500 businesses were destroyed
- The International Red Cross can not freely enter the city and expects outbreaks of disease this summer due to the lack of drinking water and destroyed drainage systems.
Opening primary schools? I don’t think so.
One more…
30 April
Nine residential neighborhoods in Diyala receive new electricity supply through an energy-cooperation project with Iran.
Uhm… so the only electricity getting to Iraqis in this area is coming from Iran? It is definitely good news for the residents of Diyala, but how is this good news for the US?
I could have done the same for any of the other good-news snippets the New York Times has been cooking up, but you get the idea… They should be ashamed of themselves.
Not only are they lying, they are not even able to make up believable stories anymore. That’s how bad the situation in Iraq has become.
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05.12.05
Posted in Rants at 12:05 am by Thomas
Have you seen the footage of all the politicians and their entourage running in panic through the streets of Washington, D.C.?
So let me get this straight… four years after the terror attacks of September 11 a small two-seat airplane approaches Washington at a speed of maybe 80 Mph, and the only reaction that the largest military power on earth is capable of is to have their leaders run wild in the streets in front of the capitol.
There were no fighter planes in the air, no anti-aircraft missiles were fired. We have pumped billions into anti-terror measures, but we can’t even protect the capital of the country from a measly Cessna (flown by a student pilot apparently being lost) trundling towards the center of power.
Is there anything that this government will not screw up beyond all measure?
Update: Ok, so they actually had two F-16s in the air and they successfully approached the plane and fired warning shots. Which for me still doesn’t explain the footage of the US Senate staff running in panic all over the place. Have they ever heard of evacuation plans?
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05.11.05
Posted in Rants at 11:51 pm by Thomas
It seems that my MT-Blacklist actually deleted all comments from the site… I noticed that I suddenly got ZERO comment spam – there was an entry in the blacklist that not only stopped all comments from being posted, but during a regular cleaning also threw out all old comments.
Well. That sucked.
Apologies to everybody whose comments were sent to the big bitblender in the sky.
Comments are now open again.
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