These things and more!

Chaos In Iraq


President Bush: Show some humility! If you truly love our troops, go to the U.N. now. If you can't do it, then bring our troops home!

*please note, in this article, that it is the Republican senators making public political mud for the U.N. at a time when our troops need the good-faith support of the world. This partisan mudslinging for the cult of the Bush foreign policy is not American, not patriotic, and not in good faith for our most precious commodity...our troops. Wake the hell up, Senator Lugar!*

Fierce street battles are raging in Falluja between resistance fighters defending the town and US occupation forces.
It's not for the faint of heart, but look at the photo feature on the right when you go to this article.

Please read Juan Cole's summary. I promise you'll learn a lot.

Some of our soldiers may be captured per this report. We don't know nowadays..it may be private security personnel, too. There's no way for us to know unless we're told directly by our government. (Fat chance).

The title of this article is: 'US may need to delay Iraqi power transfer'. Considering we don't have a friggen clue as to WHO the "power" will be turned over to, I guess that's a good idea.

When 40 people are killed inside a mosque by our forces, we've lost the hearts and the minds. You know we have. Stop fooling yourselves! This report states that "in the third day of a battle to pacify (that's an all-too-familiar Viet Nam-era code word) this Sunni Muslim city fired rockets that hit a mosque compound Wednesday, and witnesses said as many as 40 people were killed.... The strike came as worshippers had gathered for afternoon prayers...."

Al Jazeera has a video of the situation.

Paul Findley, WWII vet and former Republican Congressman from Illinois, says he believes President Bush’s decision to initiate war on Iraq will be the greatest and most costly blunder in American history.

Is Iraq like Viet Nam? Many people are comparing/contrasting.

Australians are losing their taste for this war. Australia's opposition leader Mark Latham's recent statements show there's a bruising debate over when to bring Australian troops home from Iraq.

Here's an article worth reading. From the Asia Times, it discusses the unreality of the June 30th handover date.

Bush is hoping to stem the tide of deleterious spillover effects from his decision to invade Iraq for his prospects of reelection. But the Middle East has proven through centuries that it operates purely on the basis of its own logic, or, as some say, the lack thereof.

The Pentagon said today that there will soon be a big increase in the number of American troops in Iraq to quell the violence there. McCain and Biden are hawking for it. I remember McCain hawking for ground troops in Kosovo in 1999, which would have been disastrous. God, what are they getting our troops into? Senator Robert Byrd seems to be one of the few with conscience, memory, and true wisdom:

"Surely I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam in this development. Surely, the administration recognizes that increasing the U.S. troop presence in Iraq will only suck us deeper into the maelstrom of violence that has become the hallmark of that unfortunate country. Starkly put, at this juncture, more U.S. forces in Iraq equates more U.S. targets in Iraq."
--Sen. Robert Byrd

The Reverend Jesse Jackson says: We all pay for Bush's mistakes.

Jonathan Schell speaks to Syracuse audience

Jonathan Schell spoke to a welcoming crowd at May Memorial church in Syracuse last night. He blasted away the flimsy facade of semantics used by the Bush administration to make this war in Iraq patriotically palatable.
He used some of senior civilian administrator Paul Bremer's own words [this is not exact]-"Today, in the new Iraq, the power should not be with the guy who's got the guns." This sounded rather silly when you really thought about it. I mean, who's got the biggest guns, really?

As in his new book The Unconquerable World, Mr. Schell made the point that the lesson of the last two centuries is that all people of the globe refuse to be ruled from afar-imperially. People do not like to be taken over by other countries and ruled. It's mere folly to believe people want to be occupied or will long stand for occupation. He gave an example. You knock at someone's door and tell them you have a gift for them. They say they don't want it and slam the door. You try again. They slam the door harder. Do you bomb them to get them to accept your gift? (Think of the basics..all you learned in Kindergarten, my friends).

Mr. Schell spoke of how Bush's foreign policy move toward imperialism is bound to fail for historical reasons and pointed out the terrible cost both in the U.S. and around the world. Empire is the embodiment of force. It's bound to backfire. No supporter of freedom can support it. Mr. Schell pointed out that imperialism is especially contrary to the founding principles of our nation. Making force the mainstay of our foreign policy is our biggest mistake. Coercion over cooperation/force over peace...these policies have never shown success over time. Empires have gone under the way throughout history. He used James Madison's words:

The veteran legions of Rome were an overmatch for the undisciplined valour of all other nations, and rendered her mistress of the world.

He noted that the Bush administration and their chosen group of thinkers (ie: the Project for a New American Century) are extremely radical and revolutionary in their desire to see regime-change (an anodyne...a numbing word for violence brought upon a people) with absolute miltary dominance. He invoked the words of John Hobson:

It is partly the dupery of imperfectly realised ideas, partly a case of psychical departmentalism. Imperialism has been floated on a sea of vague, shifty, well-sounding phrases which are seldom tested by close contact with fact.

As in his Tikkun article titled Power and Cooperation, Mr. Schell stated that the United States has greatly overestimated the usefulness of force and hugely underestimated the usefulness of forms of action that do not employ violence. He spoke of Ghandi's success in non-violence-based activism. He raised the belief that al-Sistani's collecting of 10,000 Iraqi signatures of protest by petition is far more democratically and politically productive in its effects than the violent anarchy we're seeing.

He intimated that Iraq is a mistake that will be hard to morally correct. As he said in his article titled "The Importance of Losing the War":

The United States must learn to lose this war-- a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time..

When Bloggers Attack

At Reason, Julian Sanchez writes an article about the Daily Kos situation. He asks:

Now that it's possible for bloggers to make it big, will the most ambitious of them rein in the very un-journalistic recklessness that made the form so much fun to begin with? More importantly, will the potential political leverage provided by the link between politicians and bloggers give partisans even more reason to ensure that every molehill grows to Everest-like proportions?

It reminded me of my own statement on Monday: "If politicians wish to distance themselves from the bloggers, then let them do so. The same goes for advertisers. My hope is that Kos would not let the loss of a few bucks break his honesty. I think the most important thing is being unencumbered to freely speak."

Blogging has been fun...but it's also been important in keeping our leaders honest by displaying thoughts of the people where they could not before be heard...or hidden. Turning up the volume of democracy has been blogging's greatest gift to America. I don't think we've yet seen the true and full effect of people like Kos and Atrios and Instapundit. They've been a wonderful inspiration to others out here. They've made headway by popping a pin-hole in the mainstream.

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I don't usually speak this way, so let my "outrage" be known. I firmly believe the person who came up with the following headline is an ignorant a*shole.

From FrontPageMag.com: "Democrats Cheer Falluja Outrage"

I swear these days (no pun intended), there is a cult of Bushism and all the foreign policy trimmings that come with Bushism. These are not patriotic Americans, my friends. They wish to put a trap on your yap. We citizens have a right to question the use of privately paid warriors in any way we choose without fear of censorship or the intimidation of self-censorship. Freedom is far more precious and meaningful than a nagging worry about being politically appropriate. F*ck the advertising money. Everything in America doesn't have to be about "what's in it for me".

Some people simply have a burning lust for truth and American patriotism that demands such truth.

The world is changing on these cultists and the harsh language and frustrated sarcasm of their ideological enemy is all they have to fight against. It's decidedly pitiful and nearly hilarious. I'd laugh if my heart wasn't broken over the lies, violence, death, destruction, chaos, anarchy in Iraq. The truth is going to betray their every move from here on in. One thing about the technology of blogging...you can read and decide for yourself. The cultists hate that. They are pushing for censorship. Screw themTo heck with them.