SOME BACKGROUND ON G-WOT AND G-SAVE

[Zlatko Waterman]

( some Tom Engelhart)




Chaos Under Heaven
The Bush Administration's Not-So-Silly Season

by Tom Engelhardt

"Asked about continued political challenges such as Iraq and Social Security, Bush said he doesn't care about the polls.

"Q But power is perception.

"THE PRESIDENT: Power is being the President."(George Bush in an interview with Texas reporters.)

G-SAVE Yourself!

Last week, the State Department issued an "updated worldwide caution" about "extremist violence" against U.S. citizens traveling abroad. According to Robin Wright of the Washington Post, the warning


"said attacks against private and official targets could come in the form of assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings or bombings. The targets could include places where Americans meet or visit, such as residential areas, hotels and restaurants, as well as places of worship, schools, clubs, business offices and public areas, the caution said…As causes of concern, the department cited spillover from the U.S. intervention in Iraq in and outside the Middle East…"
This was not long after other officials in the Bush administration, who had been arguing fiercely since September 11, 2001 for a series of deep links between terrorism and Iraq, strove hard to deny that the terrorist bombings in London's subways had anything to do with Iraq. So the message was clear: Don't leave home because… uh, they hate us (but Iraq has nothing to do with it). Somebody just hadn't bothered to inform the State Department.

In the meantime, the President and his people -- who have spent the last four years reaching for their dictionaries (the way gunfighters once reached for their six-guns) whenever they wanted to redefine our world to fit their needs -- suddenly, and quite atypically, broke ranks over a definition. A week ago, led by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the President's top men and women began using a new phrase. The Global War on Terror (fondly, if inelegantly, known as GWOT) was to be no more. It was now the "global struggle against violent extremism" (or G-SAVE) and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why. He told the National Press Club that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution."

Somehow, the new term, and acronym, hit the planet like one of those "tripods" from Mars after the germs got to it. The media ridiculed it, and George Bush, our "war president," agreed. He immediately broke ranks with his own spinmeisters. In a speech last week, he managed to use the phrase "war on terror" repeatedly and "global struggle against violent extremism" a total of zero times. According to former State Department counterterrorism official Larry Johnson, at a White House meeting a peeved "Bush reportedly said he was not in favor of the new term . . . In fact, he said, 'no one checked with me.' That comment brought an uncomfortable silence to the assembled group of pooh-bahs. The president insisted it was still a war as far as he is concerned."

But perhaps there's a compromise here. We wouldn't want to lose this administration's four-year late recognition that military power is not the be-all and end-all in the struggle against terrorism. So how about combining the two acronyms, saving the "struggle" against "violent extremism," while not losing the "war" element that so sets the President's blood a-boiling. What about G-SAVEGWOT?

An even surer sign that the Bush version of the summer not-so-silly season was upon us came when al-Qaeda's number-two man Ayman al-Zawahiri (whom the administration has been incapable of hunting down in the mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border) suddenly released a video filled with threats against the U.S. ("If you continue the same policy of aggression against Muslims, God willing, you will see horror that will make you forget what you saw in Vietnam.") The President promptly got up at a news conference at his Crawford, Texas "ranch" and responded in kind. It was a performance that recalled his infamous 2003 "bring ‘em on" comment in relation to Iraq's insurgents. Filled with his usual resolution, vowing to "stay the course" in Iraq, refusing to let al-Qaeda "drive us out of the broader Middle East," he managed to grant al-Zawahiri the kind of attention that might otherwise have gone to the head of state of a major enemy power; that is, he essentially acted as an unpaid publicist and recruitment officer for Zawahiri Operations. Thus, the path of madness.

The Sunny-side of the Well-Mined Highway

Meanwhile, any time the Iraqi insurgents change tactics or alter their behavior in any way, our publicly sunny-side up military high command immediately offers the rosiest of predictions. Take, for instance, Maj. Gen. William Webster, who heads Task Force Baghdad. In early July, at the end of a 7-week crackdown campaign against insurgents in the Iraqi capital, when attacks fell off significantly -- do I need to explain to anyone the essential principles of guerrilla war against a more powerful force? -- the general announced: "I do believe… that the ability of these insurgents to conduct sustained high-intensity operations, as they did last year -- we've mostly eliminated that." This was, of course, only moments before Baghdad was again drenched in blood and flooded with suicide bombings.

But give this much to our commanders, one upbeat prediction after another about "turned corners" and "tipping points," has proven wrong -- in fact, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that not a single positive Bush administration prediction about Iraq has proven accurate, and yet that stops no one. At the end of last week, there was Brig. Gen. C. Donald Alston, chief spokesman for the American command, right back up at that prediction podium:


"'When I look at the bar charts, the statistics are a clear indication that the tempo of suicide attacks has decreased,' General Alston said, noting that the percentage of car bombings involving suicide bombers was as high as 60 percent a few months ago. He expressed optimism that the flow of foreign fighters was ebbing. ‘This is not an expanding insurgency,' he said."
Calling General Alston, calling General Alston... Perhaps one of these days someone should G-SAVE one of our generals before another of these ridiculous statements pops out. These too have something of a "bring ‘em on" quality to them.

If this hadn't all been going on for so long, we could perhaps just write it off to some Bush administration version of the summer silly season -- to August when newspeople search for stories and dog-bites-shark, president-challenges-terrorist material has traditionally hit the front pages of papers across the country. If only...

Whether it's GWOT or G-SAVE or, for that matter, "World War IV," or the "Long War," or any of the other leaden phrases this administration and its neocon followers have specialized in, there is today a level of global chaos, a kind of political helter-skelter, that leaves us with regular headlines like "Two Explosions Hit Popular Turkish Resort." (Substitute almost any nationality other than American right now and the headline still seems to hold). Imagine that, more than two years after the fall of Baghdad, the deaths of three or four American soldiers (or scores of Iraqis) in a day are now so ho-hum as to be relegated to the deepest inside pages of our papers.

Today, you evidently need 14 Marines (and an Iraqi translator), all burned to death in a military vehicle in western Iraq -- if, that is, you want to hit the front pages of major papers across the country and make it to the top of the nightly TV news. The question is: Six months or a year from now, will 14 American deaths in a day have become commonplace enough to be relegated to the inside pages, while generals like Alston and Webster will still be claiming that the insurgency is not expanding, that attacks are on the wane?

Setting Records and Five-Star Sacrifices

After the London bombings and with the continuing chaos in Iraq -- no connections please ("Nonsense!" "Discredited!" insisted Don Rumsfeld) -- it's hard not to feel that the Bush administration is summoning grim reality from somewhere deep in its wildest nightmares. Others might imagine that, under the circumstances, real policy alterations, actual changes in course, might be in order. And evidently the President now feels the same way. While squabbling over the definition of his "war" and doing pro bono work to elevate the status of al-Zawahiri, he clearly sensed the need to take some meaningful action, to do something path-breaking, record setting -- and so he headed off on the most extended vacation of his two-term presidency, five weeks in Crawford, the longest presidential vacation in 36 years. It's the 49th trip he's made to his ranch and the 319th day that he's spent in Crawford, according to Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker of the Washington Post, "roughly 20 percent of his presidency to date." (And that's without even counting those weekends at Camp David or the summer visits with his folks in Kennebunkport, Maine.) This is a particularly record-setting moment because, by the time he returns, five years into his presidency, he will have bested his idol, Ronald Reagan, who in his 8 years as president spent 335 days on vacation.

While the President is at Crawford, perhaps he'll be thinking about the book he might sell in his post-presidential sunset for multi-millions; you know, the one he will "write," but not of course, in Newsweek's phrase, "physically write." Advisor Karen Hughes, Newsweek adds, "is expected to play a role in the president's new book, along with Mike Gerson, his former chief speechwriter, who crafted Bush's public voice in his first term." I wonder if that's his "physical voice"?

He may need that extra vacation time at the ranch because there's a knotty problem to be finessed, one typical of our tough, new G-SAVEGWOT world, one his predecessors didn't have to face. Exactly what "raw material" is "he" to base the book on? Unlike his father who kept a diary and wrote letters, or Bill Clinton who taped "conversations about his life with former speechwriter Ted Widmer," or Brother Jeb who, if Newsweek is to be believed, specializes in emails, the President can mainly fall back on a record of "thank-you notes and greeting cards" he scribbles "with a black Sharpie marker."

Okay, it's August. It's record-settingly hot across the country -- and even more so across Iraq where electricity is generally less available than it was under Saddam Hussein, and air conditioning undoubtedly the sort of thing you dream about in a fever haze of insomnia. Still, for the President in Crawford there's something in Iraq to feel positive about.

Without even a helping hand from Gen. Webster or Gen. Alston, it turns out that there is some good news when it comes to Iraq. Right-wingers always claim that the media and the war's critics never notice the "good news" in that benighted land; but, believe me, that's hardly the case, as I'm about to prove. Yes, Iraq may have devolved into a classically failed state and, at every turn, the Pentagon may have pioneered new paths, set future records, and won awards in the category of Lack of Foresight -- For $200, what Secretary of Defense shrugged off an initial wave of looting and burning in Baghdad by saying, "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things... Stuff happens"? For $300, what Coalition Provisional Authority head disbanded the Iraqi army? -- but on one specific issue, the Pentagon simply cannot be faulted when it comes to exercising foresight in Iraq:

At the end of June, Ashraf Khalil and Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times reported that, with just over 10,000 prisoners held in American-run jails across Iraq (only a few hundred of them foreigners) and another "1,630 detainees awaiting processing in different Army divisional and brigade headquarters," the Pentagon had spotted a growth industry and was acting accordingly. "Business is booming," commented Maj. Gen. William Brandenburg, who oversees U.S.-run prisons in that country. So the military began expanding the two Army-run prisons, Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib; as Army spokesman Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill put it, "pushing our surge capacity" -- and not to be caught short of facilities, they were actually adding a new prison, Fort Suse ("a former Russian-built barracks near Sulaymaniya.") "Part of it used to be a prison, so it should be easy to renovate," Brandenburg added. So convenient, just like that old Saddam Hussein war horse Abu Ghraib. Better yet, all of this was being done at a bargain basement cost of $50 million. A mere dribble in the Iraqi bucket and a sharp riposte to critics who claim that the Bush administration isn't engaged in serious reconstruction efforts in that country.

I think that we can all revel in the knowledge that this was money at least as well spent as the $150,000 our CIA agents plugged into 5-star hotels back in 2003 while engaged in a "rendition operation" in Italy; or the million bucks in taxpayer money that the Halliburton-owned KBR's Tiger Team of in-house auditors put into decent digs at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel while researching KBR overcharges to the military. (By comparison, according to Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books, American troops in the region were sleeping in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day, tents the KBR people refused to move into when asked by the Army.) Or what about those American dollars ploughed into a "Truth Tour" of Iraq for a group of conservative radio-talk show hosts aimed at finding the hidden "good news" in that country, an expenses-paid voyage that, columnist Bill Berkowitz tells us, was partially sponsored (for who knows how much) by the Office of Media Outreach, a taxpayer-funded publicity arm of the Department of Defense; or how about that nifty $100,000 the Air Force ploughed into an experimental program in Hollywood meant to turn scientists into screenwriters (including that national-security essential three-hour session on "agents and managers")?

Unfortunately, our enemies seem to have gotten word about the kind of life Americans engaged in G-SAVINGGWOT feel they have every right to live. According to the New York Times, the Jordanian government has just "arrested 17 men it said were linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq and were plotting to attack American military personnel who frequent Jordan's five-star hotels while on leave in Iraq."

Oh, sorry, I think I got distracted. It must be August. What was I talking about? Right... Pentagon long-range planning and foresight in Iraq. When the military put out its latest vacancy sign at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons there, they were aiming for cells (or at least space of some sort) for 16,000 prisoners. Unfortunately, Iraq's prisons under American control are evidently like LA's highways. If you build them, "they" will come. Just the other week, Donald Rumsfeld announced that we were now holding 15,000 assumedly enraged prisoners (more than enough to form an insurgency by themselves). Not quite the ceiling but...

Withdrawal Maneuvers and Other Half-Baked Schemes

As far as Tomdispatch informants can tell, the Pentagon's plan evidently is to get all Iraqi males of "military age" into some prison or another, or into some unit of the new Iraqi Army or police, and then safely "drawdown" our forces in that country. And speaking about withdrawals (in the context of the Bush not-so-silly season), as the President's poll figures continue to drop like Iraq's oil output and the thought of 2006 mid-term elections with a hopeless war raging on rises in the Republican political brain, and the military worries ever more about its vaunted forces going down the no-volunteer drain, our media have suddenly, even miraculously, filled with endless rumors about and curiously qualified official statements on "withdrawal" from Iraq.

All of this started with another of those leaked British documents claiming that U.S. officials favored "a relatively bold reduction in force numbers" in Iraq within the next year. Not so long after that, both Donald Rumsfeld and the top American military man in Iraq, General George W. Casey, suggested that significant withdrawals of American forces might be possible in the relatively near future. Casey's exact comment was: "If the political process continues to go positively, and if the development of the security forces continues to go as it is going, I do believe we'll still be able to take some fairly substantial reductions after these elections in the spring and summer." (Note that looming set of "ifs"). This, in turn, opened the media "withdrawal" floodgates.

In this, the Bush administration seems to be taking yet another leaf out of an ancient but tried-and-true Vietnam playbook. In those long-lost years, "withdrawal" plans never involved actual withdrawal, but all sorts of departure-like maneuvers including negotiation offers never meant to be taken up by the enemy and a "Vietnamization" plan rather like the present "Iraqification" one meant to "stand up" the Iraqi military in place of significant numbers of American troops. Each gesture of withdrawal, back then, only allowed the war planners to fight on a little longer. The same seems to hold true today.

Looked at baldly (and I say that as a bald guy), the Pentagon "withdrawal" plan (which may involve little more than withdrawing troops to Kuwait and bases outside of Iraq's cities), as Michael Hirsh and John Barry of Newsweek cannily point out, simply brings us back to the original Rumsfeld plan, which was to draw down our troops to the 30,000-40,000 level by the end of 2003 and have them well-situated in a small number of heavily fortified permanent bases (then charmingly referred to as "enduring camps"). Now, Rumsfeld more modestly hopes to halve the American forces in Iraq to 60,000 by the end of 2006 and assumedly housed them in those bases. His main commanders speak even more modestly of a drop of perhaps 20,000-30,000 troops from the present troop level of 138,000 by next spring, but only after a rise of 20,000 troops in time for Iraq's prospective elections in December. All of this, in turn, is couched in "ifs" of every sort. As Centcom Commander John Abizaid put it recently, we may "have to keep the current levels of about 138,000 American soldiers in Iraq throughout 2006 if security and political trends are unfavorable for a withdrawal."

One of the problems involved in all American "withdrawal" discussions, unfortunately, is that those long-planned "enduring camps" in Iraq seldom come up. They're just not on many minds (other than the Bush administration's collective one). For that, you have to look to coverage abroad. And yet there are now reputedly over 100 American bases of every size in that country (and a new one has only recently been established in Iraq's western desert). Some like Camp Victory at Baghdad Airport are massive beyond imagining, Vietnam-era-sized installations with the look of eternal permanency (and evidently with significant permanent housing for American troops being built into them as well).

Right now, the "withdrawal" trial balloons are, at best, in the lingo of the Pentagon, about reducing the American military "footprint" in Iraq. But like most of the half-baked schemes of Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the Bush administration's withdrawal strategy is likely to prove as much fantasy as the original Rumsfeld 2003 drawdown plans were. The "standing up" of an Iraqi military on which every administration plan is predicated already seems an exercise in futility, not to say predictable disaster. In the meantime, at home, calls for the setting of timetables for total withdrawal are beginning to mount and pressure is building, even without a significant antiwar movement -- enough so that the President now has to continually deny that he will ever set such a timetable. In the meantime, the "coalition of the ever less willing" is drawing down and at a pretty respectable pace. Even the Brits -- we swear, no connection to those bombings in London -- may really be mostly out of Iraq by the end of next year. And for good reason.

The truth is that Iraq, which was to be only the first stop on a Bush administration (and neocon) military tour of the Middle East, and then assumedly the world, has so far proven the last stop on the global domination line. It has revealed to a startled world the remarkable weakness of the Earth's last superpower, the land which was, Roman-style, supposed to imprint a Pax Americana on the planet. It has ripped up the all-volunteer military and confounded the dreams of the ever angrier neocons.

In the period before 9/11, neocon writers often focused on the spread of a failed-state world, a supposed jungle of unrulable instability out there on the peripheries, one on which only the sole global hyperpower would assumedly have the capability to impose some level of order. Some of those neocons, in their eagerness to whack various regimes in the Middle East -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon -- probably didn't care greatly if, as a result, they created failed states throughout the region. Chaos didn't perhaps seem the worst fate for many of those lands (as long as Ariel Sharon's Israel was strengthened in the process).

Little did they know. Now, they have indeed succeeded in creating a failed-state right in the oil-rich heart of the Middle East and the chaos of Iraq has proceeded to suck the American military as well as Bush administration policies and dreams of every sort down with it, creating maneuvering space for countries as disparate as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

In fact, it's unlikely that the Bush administration -- possibly any American government -- will be able to live comfortably with Iraq as a failed state, its ripples of chaos spreading regionally, even globally. And yet the administration has already demonstrated with definitive thoroughness that it is capable of doing little about the situation -- except continually making it worse.

Someday, withdrawal will come, "permanent" bases or no. Staying is not conceivable and the longer we remain, the worse the situation is likely to be when we depart. But on such subjects and on the matter of taking any responsibility for its actions, this administration is not only shameless, but quite hopeless. It can only create more chaos, foster yet more mad plans for future operations like -- if the latest rumors leaked to ex-CIA official Philip Giraldi of American Conservative magazine are to be believed -- taking out the Iranian nuclear program using... doh!... nuclear weapons. Even Homer Simpson, six beers to the wind, couldn't have come up with that one, but evidently our Vice President has.

If you really want to sample the madness of our times, consider Juan Cole's little history of how "the American Right, having created the [anti-Soviet] Mujahideen [in Afghanistan] and having mightily contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda, abruptly announced that there was something deeply wrong with Islam, that it kept producing terrorists," or just wrap your mind around the fate of the poor birdwatcher in George Bush's America. Cynthia H. Cho of the Los Angeles Times recently reported that, from Cape Charles, Virginia, to Sierra Vista, Arizona, your typical birder, walking quietly in nature with a pair of binoculars (and possibly a telescope and camera), the very picture of the harmless human being, is now feeling the pinch of the homeland security state. "At popular birding sites across the country, they are facing stricter regulations -- in some cases being required to hire a police escort -- as authorities beef up national security." Birds, it turns out, don't hesitate to congregate around key bridges, tunnels, roads, and military facilities like so many terrorist rock doves and who knows what stranger may be lurking in their vicinity cleverly dressed in the guise of a birder.

Take a Proud Step Forward… Mr. Anonymous!

So to sum up:

More prisons in Iraq = withdrawal from Iraq. So spend, spend, spend on constructing or reconstructing those jails.

More five-star hotels = an intensified war on terror. So fill those scenic rooms at taxpayer expense -- and don't forget to knock off the macadamia nuts in the mini-fridge! (On the other hand, America's Spartan warriors --and Spartan auditors -- might consider crossing up the terrorists by varying their lodgings in order to G-SAVE themselves; they might, that is, make the ultimate sacrifice and, from time to time, stay in 4 or even... gasp!... 3-star hotels.)

Travel = Death. So if you're a U.S. citizen, thinking about those late summer days abroad, you should probably cancel those plans and catch another showing of War of the Worlds instead.

Birdwatching = security risk. So if you're heading out for a quiet, woodsy morning with that nesting pair of Blackburnian warblers near the local nuclear plant, bring your own guards and the necessary papers.

Oh, and to catch the full spirit of our Bushificated summer of fun, just consider the State Department's recently announced winner of its annual Foreign Service National Employee of the Year award. According to the eagle-eyed Al Kamen in his Washington Post on-line column, "In the Loop," the winner gets "a certificate signed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and $10,000." And, as it happens, that man, an official in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, has a remarkable tale to tell. As Kamen relates it, his "life was at risk night and day" and he had "many close calls personally and several friends were slain."


"If that's not enough, ‘after a suicide bomber detonated [a] device within five yards of the dining table,' the announcement says, [he] ‘limped in to the embassy and continued working despite suffering from shock and severe hearing loss. When a colleague was assassinated' and his U.S. supervisor sent home the following day, [he] ‘vowed to work "even if no one was left."'
"And when the delegates to the Iraqi National Assembly met at a Baghdad hotel, he was ‘trapped in the elevator when a rocket slammed into the hotel,' we're told. ‘Later that day, a Gurkha security guard standing a few feet away was struck in the head by shrapnel from an exploding mortar round,' and [he] provided first aid."

So, to honor this American hero, we give you our proud winner... step forward, Mr. Anonymous! (His name was omitted from the State Department announcement "for security reasons.")

And if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the state of our American world today, then, boy do I have a five-star hotel in sunny Baghdad to sell you!

Note of thanks: I use many wonderful article-collection websites to research my pieces, most of which I try to thank in some fashion from time to time. For this particular dispatch, I found Paul Woodward's The War in Context website particularly useful in reviewing key developments of the last few weeks. Woodward has a sharp eye for provocative pieces published wherever and a well-sharpened tongue when, on rare occasions, he offers up one of his pungent, koan-like comments. I recommend his website to all of you. And, as ever, I thank Nick Turse for his invaluable efforts on behalf of Tomdispatch.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

© 2005 TomDispatch.com

[stilltrucking]

Hip shot
Pollsters Wizard Of ID Sunday 080705
“Fire the smart ones”
The Peter Principle in the military brass.
Kill the messenger
Promote the incompetent
In the CIA, purge the disloyal
I could go on but
This follow my bliss scribbling is going to kill me if I don’t stop. Night and day it seems seeking the beat feeling of the long haul. . Some courage to shut up here.

Thanks this is the post I was waiting for.
Much gratitude. I think I took your name, hell I know I took it vain. Doreen explained it to me. Hope you can shine it on.

finish it later.

[stilltrucking]

Ok but this is jumbled spontaneous gibberish not finished reading yet, slow reader me.

reaching for their dictionaries

Code: Select all

GWOT) was to be no more. It was now the "global struggle against violent extremism" (or G-SAVE)

Can’t tell you how many times I have snorted so far.

"war president,"

Yeah about time for him to land on a carrier again, maybe off the island of Taiwan this time

acted as an unpaid publicist and recruitment officer for Zawahiri Operations. Thus, the path of madness.

It is a kind of symbiotic parasitic relationship between Bush and his enemy. .

"I do believe… that the ability of these insurgents to conduct sustained high-intensity operations, as they did last year -- we've mostly eliminated that." This was, of course, only moments before Baghdad was again drenched in blood and flooded with suicide bombings.

Hey as long he believes it, that is proof enough for me.

Fascinating reading
More more to follow cause it is a long road to scroll, and I just can’t do it at one sitting. Barely a third threw it. I will keep editing this post until I get to the end.

thanks
Ok
I opened this one in word because I am trying to have some consideration of those weary eyes of yours. Thirty years of reading sophomoric papers must have taken its toll.


thanks

[jimboloco]

Cindy Sheehan is at Crawford waiting for the prez, a Gold Star mom and associate member of Vets for Peace, her son died in Iraq last year.

We had a call-in taped yesterday on wmnf Radioactivity, a young woman recently back fro Iraq via the military. She was screaming and cursing, stating that the military is over there to defend our freedumb.

G-DAMMIT!
Global disinformation array made manifest in Texass.

[stilltrucking]

She was screaming and cursing, stating that the military is over there to defend our freedumb.

Still reading this one Z

Jimbo this ain't a trick question by no means just curious.
What do you think Claude would have said?

[stilltrucking]

War president

Yeah they suckered Kerry's people on that, he played right into it.
PT109 everything happens twice...

[stilltrucking]

"bring ‘em on" quality to them.

Independence Day, ok I know it was just a fun movie, but when he strutted across the deck of that carrier I almost fell out of my chair. Did I mention this. I bet he never does that again, our fighter pilot war hero president. Snort Snort.

Whether it's GWOT or G-SAVE or, for that matter, "World War IV," or the "Long War," or

Vietnam our longest war. Unbelievable, Hanoi September 1945 Parade ground, american and vietmin flag flying, fighter plans flying salute. Uncle Ho and cia and american generals standing side by side in friendship. Uncle Ho saying how old Tom Jefferson was his hero Well then it seems they were having a problem with France, it would cooperate in Nato unless they would get their colony in Indo China back. So naturally we sold them out. They even armed the Jap pow’s to fight against ho

Did I mention I was going to cut and paste this into one post.

[jimboloco]

Recently the administration has been lying about how the insurgency is getting weaker, and responded to Al-Kayduh #2 speech very directly, referring to it specifically, thereby making it more ominous than it would have been, so there it goes, a deeper imbroilment than ever.

When will the American people wake up?

Maybe never.

[stilltrucking]

Imagine that, more than two years after the fall of Baghdad, the deaths of three or four American soldiers (or scores of Iraqis) in a day are now so ho-hum as to be relegated to the deepest inside pages of our papers.

The question is: Six months or a year from now, will 14 American deaths in a day have become commonplace enough to be relegated to the inside pages, while generals like Alston and Webster will still be claiming that the insurgency is not expanding, that attacks are on the wane?

Thirty years ago news was the news, now it is entertainment.
Vietnam was on the evening TV New every night and in news papers every day. That is how I rember it anyway.




Jimbo I am racking my brain thinking how I can get to wacko or crawford, to answer your question 183 miles sanato to wacko one way.

Prof Z no idea when this term paper is due, I hope I will finish tonite.

Will cut and paste bits and pieces.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Still:

Here's a nice piece by Ira Chernus on body count, Vietnam and Iraq:

(paste)

Bring Back the Body Count

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted April 3, 2003.

"We don't do body counts," says America's soldier-in-chief, Tommy Franks. That's a damn shame.

During the Vietnam war, the body count was served up every day on the evening news. While Americans ate dinner, they watched a graphic visual scorecard: how many Americans had died that day, how many South Vietnamese and how many Communists. At the time, it seemed the height of dehumanized violence. Compared to Tommy Franks' new way of war, though, the old way looks very humane indeed.

True, the body count turned human beings into abstract numbers. But it required soldiers to say to the world, "I killed human beings today. This is exactly how many I killed. I am obliged to count each and every one." It demanded that the killers look at what they had done, think about it (however briefly), and acknowledge their deed. It was a way of taking responsibility.

Today's killers avoid that responsibility. They perpetuate the fiction so many Americans want to believe -- that no real people die in war, that it's just an exciting video game. It's not merely the dead who disappear; it's the act of killing itself. When the victim's family holds up a picture, U.S. soldiers or journalists can simply reply "Who's that? We have no record of such a person. In fact, we have no records at all."

This is not just a matter of new technology. There was plenty of long-distance impersonal killing in Vietnam too. But back then, the U.S. military at least went through the motions of going in to see what they had done. True, the investigations were often cursory and the numbers often fictional. No matter how inaccurate the numbers were, though, the message to the public every day was that each body should be counted. At some level, at least, each individual life seemed to matter.

The difference between Vietnam and Iraq lies partly in overall strategy. In Vietnam, there was no territory to be conquered and occupied. If U.S. forces seized an area, they knew that sooner or later the Viet Cong would take it back. The only way to measure "victory" was by killing more of them than they killed of us. In Iraq, the goal is control of place. U.S. forces can "take" Basra or Nassiriya and call it a victory, without ever thinking about how many Iraqis had to be killed in the process. So the body count matters less.

However, the end of body counts can not be explained simply by the difference in strategy. The old-fashioned body counts disappeared during the first war against Iraq, when the goal was still defined by territory: pushing Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

It's much more likely that "we don't do body counts" because Vietnam proved how embarrassing they could be. As the U.S. public turned against that war, the body count became a symbol of everything that was inhumane and irrational about that war. The Pentagon fears that the same might happen if the Iraq war bogs down. How much simpler to deny the inhumanity and irrationality of war by denying the obvious fact of slaughter.

What I fear is a world where thousands can be killed and no one is responsible, where deaths are erased from history as soon as they happen. The body count was more than an act of responsibility. It was a permanent record. It made each death a historical fact. You can go back and graph those Vietnam deaths from day to day, month to month, year to year. That turns the victims into nameless, faceless abstractions. But it least it confirms for ever and ever that they lived and died, because someone took the time to kill and count them.

In Iraq, it is as if the killing never happened. When a human being's death is erased from history, so is their life. Life and death together vanish without a trace.

The body count has one other virtue. It is enemy soldiers, not civilians, who are officially counted. Antiwar activists rightly warn about civilian slaughter and watch the toll rise at IraqBodyCount.org. It is easy to forget that the vast majority of Iraqi dead and wounded will be soldiers. Most of them were pressed into service, either by brute force or economic necessity. As the whole world has been telling us for months, there is no good reason for this war, no good reason for those hapless Iraqi foot-soldiers to die. They are victims of brutality -- inflicted by their own government and by ours -- just as much as the civilians. They deserve just as much to be counted.

So let us bring back the body count. If we must kill, let us kill as one human being to another, recognizing the full humanity of our victims. Without a body count, our nation becomes more of a robotic killing machine. As we dehumanize Iraqis, we slip even further into our own dehumanization. Let us bring back the body count, if only to recover our own sense of responsibility to the world's people, to history, to our own humanity.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Email him at chernus@colorado.edu.

[stilltrucking]

Thank you Herr Professor you make me feel like I am in the honors program

[Zlatko Waterman]

More still, Still ( and Jim):


Here's a fine "open letter" by Ralph Nader, one of my old-time heroes, and back to his real profession of gadfly after his ill-considered run for President, which I forgive him.

This letter to the courageous gold star mother ( Cindy Sheehan) who has chosen to make a clear statement for all Americans opposed to this criminal war and criminal White House gang, expresses my own views of BushCo rather directly.

No doubt you have noticed that I do not reply directly to the "counter-posts" on this board which support, condone, or even " reason constructively" about the Iraq War.

For thinking Americans, this war and this administration are a disgrace. I have many friends in foreign countries, all of whom are appalled by the quiescence of the American people and their silent partnership in the trouncing of the Constitution and the former moral self-respect of the US electorate and populace.

We have seen the absolute merger of Huxley's and Orwell's prophetic visions: a drugging on pleasure combined with the iron hand of autocracy. Further, we witness daily the Orwellian mixing of facts and lies to a homogeneity that is utterly useless in fighting for the truth in a supine mass media. Perpetual war and a declared unceasing "state of terror" justify the most egregious violation of the 800-year history of Western self-governance fostered by our idealistic, enlightened and scientifically-minded ancestors.

For a nation of mesmerized tv watchers, the war appears to cost nothing ( it cost Cindy Sheehan a precious life ), and "our president" seems to be "keeping us safe", despite the deaths of 44 American soldiers just like Ms. Sheehan's son in 10 days:


http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2277


Joseph Goebbels would be proud:

http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed061402.shtml


Where are the Oppenheimers:


http://www.economist.com/printedition/d ... tranMode=E

and Ellsbergs:

http://www.omnicenter.org/warpeacecolle ... ialism.htm

( this is a general link from the OMNICENTER, with a link on Ellsberg's ideological reversal as a RAND employee and cold-warrior, as well as many other fine topics)

those two thinkers who were able to reverse or reconsider ( Oppie DID sponsor the development of "battlefield nukes", but also suffered numerous "Hamlet-like" episodes of conscience about his work on The Bomb) their positions?

We DO have relentless truth-tellers like the ones whose essays I post regularly here in "Culture", including Nader and this fine woman, now squatting in Texas, waiting for the chance to tell the Emperor he has no clothes.

I am seized with loathing over the blurmeisters and self-serving corporate goons who control my country and hold it hostile to the world, to peaceful aims and means, to reason and to truth.

Here is Ralph Nader's Letter:


( paste)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AUGUST 10, 2005
3:33 PM
CONTACT: Ralph Nader
202-387-8034


An Open Letter from Ralph Nader to Cindy Sheehan

WASHINGTON - August 10 -

Dear Ms. Sheehan,

From your grief over the loss of your son, Casey, in Iraq has come the courage to spotlight nationally the cowardly character trait of a President who refuses to meet with anyone or any group critical of his illegal, fabricated, deceptive war and occupation of that ravaged country. As a messianic militarist, Mr. Bush turned aside his own father's major advisers who warned him of the terroristic, political, and diplomatic perils to the United States from an invasion of Iraq. He refused to listen.

Thirteen organizations in early 2003 separately wrote their President requesting a meeting to have him hear them out as to why they opposed his drumbeating, on-the-road-to war policies. These groups represented millions of Americans. They included church leaders, veterans, business, labor, retired intelligence officials, students, women and others. They are among those Americans who are not allowed through the carefully screened public audiences that are bused to arenas around the country to hear his repetitive slogans for carrying on this draining, boomeranging war. They each wrote President Bush but he never bothered even to acknowledge their letters simply to say no to the requested meetings. Not even the courtesy of a reply came from their White House. Ever since then it has been the same-exclusion, denial, contempt and arrogance for views counter to that of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and the tight circle around them that composes the inner tin ear of this Administration. Why, they even refuse to listen to objections by their own government's military lawyers (JAG) over repeated violations of due process of law. When will he realize that he is supposed to be the President of all the people, not just those misled into supporting his Iraq maneuvers?

Perhaps the breakthrough will begin this hot August in Crawford, Texas, with the devastating loss of a beloved child transformed into a mission for the soul of our country. This rogue regime, led by two draft-dodgers and officially counseled by similar pro-war evaders during the Vietnam War, is not "our country." Millions of Americans, including military and public servants in his Administration, and many in the retired military, diplomatic and intelligence services, opposed this war, still oppose it and do not equate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney with the United States of America.

Our flag stands for "liberty and justice for all." Our flag must never be misused or defiled as a bandana for war crimes, as a gag against the people's freedom of speech and conscience or as a fig leaf to hide the shame of charlatans in high public office, who violate our Constitution, our laws and our founding fathers' framework for accountable, responsive government.

You will be goaded to cross the semantic line against a President who himself has crossed the much graver constitutional line that has cost so many lives on both sides and continues to cost and cost our country in so many ways domestically and before the world. Neglecting America for the Iraq war has become the widening downward path trod by the Bush government.

Authenticity, bereft of contrivances, is what must confront this White House Misleader. And authenticity is what you are and what drives you as you demand to see this resistant President. He is on an intermittent month long vacation, with spells for fundraisers and other insulated events. His schedule provides ample time for such a meeting. You reflect the hopes and prayers of millions of like-minded Americans. Should he relent and opens his doors, be sure to ask why he lowballs U.S. casualties in Iraq, deleting and disrespecting soldiers seriously hurt or sickened in the Iraq war theatre, but not in direct combat. Remind him of those soldiers back in military hospitals who, with their families, wonder why they are not being counted as they cope with their serious and permanent disabilities. (60 Minutes, CBS program). Ask him why, despite Pentagon audits and GAO investigations about corruption, waste and non-delivery of services in Iraq by profiteering large corporations totaling billions of dollars, this Commander of Chief accepted campaign contributions from their executives and proceeds to let this giant corporate robbery continue without the requisite law and order?

Consider bringing to him a copy of President Dwight Eisenhower's famous "Cross of Iron" speech, delivered in April 1953 before the nation's newspaper editors in Washington, D.C. And add statements by Marine General Anthony Zinni (ret.), a Middle East specialist who strongly criticized the Bush-Cheney war policy before and after March 2003. May you and your associates succeed in galvanizing the public debate in this country over why a growing majority of Americans now think it was a costly mistake to invade Iraq and want our soldiers back, with the U.S. out of that country. He knows that his support for how he is handling this war-occupation is falling close to one third of respondents in recent polls-the lowest yet. Even with the mass-media at his disposal everyday, he now represents a minority of public opinion, which should give him pause before closing his oil marinated doors on majority views in this nation.

May you prevail where others have failed to secure an audience with Mr. Bush.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

(my note: President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Cross of Iron" (1953) speech):

https://ideotrope.org/index.pl?node_id=23495