con·fla·tion

Patriotism does not equal militarism .

Besides, loyalty oaths are dumb. I had to sign one years ago when I was a grad student in Florida. And look at all the good it did me: I grew up to be a freedom-hating crypto-commie homo-symp objective terrorist premature anti-fascist. Well, at least I can look back on it and thank the Florida state legislature for their financial aid which helped me to become everything I am today.

McCain and the Legion of Clueless Jingoes

McCain, revving up the Zombie Patriots by re-linking the Iraq war and al-Qaeda:

“[M]y friends, if we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said Wednesday. “They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”

The idea that Al-Qaeda is in a position to take over Iraq, or would be if Uncle Sam ended the occupation, is not remotely credible.

Juan Cole:

the allegation that he makes about there being 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' that could well take over the country is part lie and part insanity. The Sunni Arabs are no more than 20% of the Iraqi population. How could a tiny minority from within them take over the whole?

The technical definition of al-Qaeda is operatives who have sworn fealty to Usama bin Laden. There were only a few hundred of them. I doubt whether more than a handful of such individuals are in Iraq.

So there isn't any "al-Qaeda" in Iraq in the technical sense. There are "Excommunicating Holy Warriors" (Takfiri Jihadis), i.e. devotees of political Islam who are violent and willing to deploy terror for political purposes. They declare other Muslims who disagree with them "not Muslims,"-- thus the "excommunicating" bit. But there are only a few hundred foreign fighters. A small minority of Iraqis has associated with them. They don't call themselves 'al-Qaeda in Iraq.' The major such group is "The Islamic State of Iraq." And to say that they have "bases" in Iraq is pretty grandiose. They have some safe houses and try to take and hold neighborhoods, so far with indifferent success.

The idea that this small minority of violent Muslim fundamentalists could take over Iraq is completely crazy. They haven't even been able to keep their toehold in Baghdad-- the Sunnis have been largely ethnically cleansed from the capital by Shiite militias.

So the Shiites would not allow an "al-Qaeda" takeover of Iraq. Neither would the Kurds. Nor would most Sunni Arabs (as in al-Anbar Province, where the Dulaim tribe is at daggers drawn with the Excommunicating Holy Warriors).

Moreover, the neighbors would not allow the radical Sunnis to take over. Iran would sit on its hands while Shiites were massacred in Baghdad? Secular Turkey would allow this development? Baathist Syria? Hashemite Jordan (which played a major role in tracking down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi)?

McCain's assertions that "al-Qaeda" has a strong position in Iraq or has any chance of taking over the country if the US leaves are both inaccurate. One is an error, the other is a dark but insubstantial fantasy.

So, as Crooks and Liars points out, this raises a serious question: Is McCain abjectly pandering to the militaristic yahoos and knee-jerk jingoes who he hopes will constitute his base, or is is he genuinely, frighteningly clueless about the actual politics we have gotten ourselves mixed up with in Iraq?

McCain is going out of his way to act like an uniformed hack — on purpose — because the Republican Party’s far-right base is just confused enough to think AQI really could somehow take over Iraq. McCain doesn’t want to educate them; he wants to exploit their confusion and ignorance for electoral gain. It’s easier, in McCain’s case, for voters to be wrong — an informed voter is less likely to support him.

But I’m not at all sure why we should assume that McCain really does know what he’s talking about. He’s offered precious little evidence of it. McCain was wrong before the invasion (he said the conflict would be short and easy); he was wrong at the start of the occupation (he supported the Rumsfeld strategy and said we simply needed to “stay the course”); and he’s been wrong about the surge (he predicted widespread political reconciliation, none of which has happened).

As recently as November 2006, McCain couldn’t even talk about his own opinions on the war without reading prepared notes on the subject. As recently as March 2007, McCain was embarrassing himself by insisting that Gen. Petraeus travels around Baghdad “in a non-armed Humvee” (a comment that military leaders literally laughed at, and which CNN’s Michael Ware responded to by saying McCain’s credibility “has now been left out hanging to dry.”)

So, how do we know McCain really “knows better”? Is it unreasonable to at least entertain the possibility that the senator simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and that his reputation for expertise is a media-hyped mirage? At this point, the difference between a politician who gets Iraq wrong on purpose to make right-wing activists happy, and a politician who gets Iraq wrong accidentally is fairly small.

PAF: Either way, if McCain wins, we all lose.

These are not the droids we've been looking for

Automated Killer Robots ‘Threat to Humanity’

My profs are all agents of the International Communist Conspiracy

Why are there relatively few conservative college professors? It's because universities are dominated by tenured radicals, sixties holdovers who are intolerant of other viewpoints, who indoctrinate students into rigid PC orthodoxy, and who actively discriminate against conservative scholars in order to maintain their left-wing stranglehold on academia. Right?

Right???

Um, not so much. As the Chronicle of Higher Education puts it, new research shows that "conservatives just aren't into academe":

...liberal students reported valuing intellectual freedom, creativity, and the chance to write original work and make a theoretical contribution to science. They outnumbered conservative students two to one in the humanities and social sciences — which are among the fields most likely to produce interest in doctoral study. Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money.

Self-selection. You know, choice. What could be more totalitarian than that?


Thanks to the Agonist for posting this.

Forgotten history

Uncle Sam and water torture go way back. Funny how the turn-of-the-century jingoes justified brutality and torture with racism and sanctimonious bullshit about bringing freedom to the natives while accusing domestic war critics of treason.

Deja fucking vu.

On the Sadrist cease-fire

This is another crucial political element in Iraq which is often glossed over in all the "surge-to-victory" bullshit. The Sadrist militias have been observing a unilateral cease-fire for the last six months, for their own political reasons largely independent of the US surge (having more to do with intra-Shiite rivalry). They have purged their ranks of elements which defied their control, and whose indiscriminate uses of force were hurting the Sadr movement politically. But they haven't gone away, and they haven't laid down their arms, and they are ready to fight again.

Real reasons why violence has slowed in Iraq are political, and hardly permanent

Patrick Cockburn in the Independent (UK):

From the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the summer of 2006, the five million-strong Sunni community had battled the US and the Shia-Kurdish Iraqi government. Then, quite suddenly, last year many of the Sunni rebel groups switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans, formed the "al-Sahwa" or "Awakening" movement and declared war on al-Qa'ida.

...The dramatic change of sides of Sunni guerrilla organisations such as the "1920 Revolution Brigades" and the "Islamic Army" came about for many reasons. In Anbar province west of Baghdad (perhaps one-third of Iraq by area), the Sunni tribes had become enraged by al-Qa'ida's attempt to establish total dominance, and to replace or murder traditional leaders and set up a Taliban-type state. But the Sunni community could also see that, although its guerrilla war was effective against the US, it was being defeated by the Shia who controlled the Iraqi government and armed forces after the elections of 2005.

The only source of money in Iraq is oil revenues, and the only jobs – four million, if those on a pension are included – are with the government. The Shia, in alliance with the Kurds, controlled both. "The Sunni people found that the only way to be protected from the Shia was to be allied to the Americans," said Kassim Ahmed Salman, a well-educated Sunni from west Baghdad. "Otherwise we were in a hopeless situation. For the last two years it has been possible for Sunni to be killed legally [by death squads covertly supported by the government] in Baghdad."

The "surge" – the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad – has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.

...The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government.

...The present state of Iraq is highly unstable, but nobody quite wants to go to war again. It reminds me of lulls in the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s, when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for some time.

All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they are supported by American military power. Al-Qa'ida is wounded but by no means out of business.

As the rest of Cockburn's article vividly illustrates, conditions of life for average Iraqis still suck, and the deepest political divisions remain, even as the US has bought itself a little respite by arming all the parties to the coming struggle. Some victory. But it has served a public relations purpose for the administration and the GOP.

Tom Englehardt summarizes the situation like this:

Their latest "abracadabra," the President's "surge strategy" of 2007, has still worked like a charm. They waved their magic wands, paid off and armed a bunch of former Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists (about 80,000 "concerned citizens," as the President likes to call them), and magically lowered "violence" in Iraq. Even more miraculously, they made a country that they had already turned into a cesspool and a slagheap -- its capital now has a "lake" of sewage so large that it can be viewed "as a big black spot on Google Earth" -- almost entirely disappear from view in the U.S.

Meanwhile the forcible US occupation of Iraq grinds on, people continue to die, and a US-armed civil war looms on the horizon.

Ultimately, the future of Iraq will be determined by Iraqis. The longer Uncle Sam seeks to postpone that day by military force, and arming or bribing the various political factions, the uglier that necessary reckoning will be when it comes.

Again, Englehardt:

It is a delusion to believe that the U.S. military is a force that stands between Iraqis and catastrophe. It is a significant part of the catastrophe and, as long as Washington is committed to any form of permanency (however euphemistically described), it cannot help but remain so.

History Lessons for McCain

from Juan Cole, who reminds McCain of what he already knows (or ought to know) about the history of Pakistan, because of McCain 's own inviolvement in that history.

And, based on this reminder, Professor Cole has some questions for our Republican frontrunner":

So lest we take any holidays from history, I have some questions for John McCain. Did you or did you not know about Gen. Zia's nuclear weapons program? Did you wink at it? If so doesn't that make you a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction to a radical Muslim extremist regime? ...how much support did John McCain give to the precursors of the Taliban in Afghanistan? To the budding al-Qaeda?

...Far from "bringing stability" as McCain suggested, Musharraf has destabilized Pakistan in the past year, arbitrarily sacking the chief justice of the supreme court, provoking massive demonstrations, brutally invading the Red Mosque, and provoking a violent backlash in the northwest. This is stability?

And is this really the kind of government McCain supports? Are these judgments the fruit of his experience? Is this the kind of holiday from history he is going to take? Having backed the radical Muslim extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s, having winked at Zia's dictatorship and nuclear program, having coddled Musharraf's authoritarianism, is McCain going to bring us more disasters like September 11, done by his good friends, Reagan's Freedom Fighters?

How about it, Senator? Any way to answer these questions with straight talk?

Surge buys time for Iraqi groups to prepare for civil war?

Joost Hiltermann, of the International Crisis Group, interviewed at Real News:

BASILONE: These Sunni groups—vigilante groups or whatever they may be—are they becoming legitimized? Will they be wearing uniforms? Are they wearing uniforms? Will they be part of the Iraqi police and army?

HILTERMANN: Well, this is the $5 million question, because if they don't, then all we have done in the past year, or all the United States has done, is to train, equip, fund one side in a civil war, the sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites, while of course they continue to build the Iraqi security forces, which is the other side in the civil war, 'cause they're dominated by the Shiite militias. What ought to happen is the gradual incorporation of these Sunni militias into the security apparatus of the Iraqi state. But that is a very difficult process. It's being resisted by the Iraqi government because it's controlled by Shiite militias. And so this is going to be extremely difficult. And if it fails, then we may be back to square one, but, as I said, with actors that are better armed and equipped than before.

BASILONE: And so the chances of a civil war then aren't gone.

HILTERMAN: The chances of a re-escalation of the civil war are quite significant, but it's mostly because I don't see any real energy being exerted by the Bush administration to bring about these political deals. I think the Bush administration is quite content if the situation remains relatively stable through the surge until the November elections, and then it's, you know, après moi le deluge. And so whoever comes to the White House, Democrat or Republican, will inherit the mess that will be unleashed once American forces start to draw down, as eventually they must. The key is to bring some kind of political accommodation at the top, and this is where we just have seen no real progress.

Hiltermann is the author of A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge University Press,2007).

Bush Administration seeks latitude to use torture at will

Washington Post:

The government's defense of the waterboarding episodes, laid out in congressional testimony and administration statements over the past two weeks, relies on a complex legal argument that many scholars and human rights advocates say is at odds with settled law barring conduct that amounts to torture, at any time or for any reason. It also leaves open the possibility that, under the right conditions, the CIA could decide to use the tactic again.

...Controversy quickly followed CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's confirmation last week that three al-Qaeda prisoners were subjected to waterboarding in 2002 and 2003. Hayden, Fratto and other Bush administration officials left open the possibility that President Bush could authorize the use of simulated drowning again, but conceded that recent court rulings and legislation might not allow it.

The flurry of statements prompted fierce criticism from Democrats as well as strong condemnations from abroad. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, said last week that the administration's use of waterboarding is "unjustifiable" and "absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law."

Waterboarding usually involves pouring water over a captive's mouth and nose while he is strapped to an inclined board, with his head lower than his feet and a piece of cloth or cellophane placed over his face. Use of the tactic and its variations has long been condemned by the State Department, and it is explicitly barred by the U.S. Army Field Manual for the handling of military prisoners.

But White House and Justice Department officials have said that the CIA was acting lawfully when it used the tactic. At the time, they noted, administration lawyers, led by then-White House counsel and future attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, had concluded that al-Qaeda prisoners were not covered by protections of the Geneva Conventions.

...Most human rights groups and many lawyers who specialize in interrogation and detention laws maintain that waterboarding is torture, regardless of how carefully it is done -- because some pain is inflicted and victims are essentially coercively threatened with imminent death. "Virtually the entire rest of the world, including . . . every legislator who has spoken to the question, has concluded that waterboarding is categorically unlawful," former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer Martin S. Lederman said in a blog posting Friday.

No closer to "victory" in Iraq

Political analyst Ghassan Attiyah, quoted in the Monitor :

All the Americans did was buy the Iraqi government some time. The fact that fewer people are dying now does not change the reality that this is a dysfunctional state that can easily slip back into civil war.

See the article for more on political instability among the Anbar Sunni tribes on whom the alleged successes of the surge actually depends.

DoD official's epiphany

from the Washington Post, the story of Marc Garlasco who went from being a Pentagon bombing expert to a human rights advocate:

"I found myself standing at that crater, talking to a man about how his family was destroyed, how children were killed, and there was this bunny-rabbit toy covered in dust nearby, and it tore me in two," Garlasco said. "I had been a part of it, so it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It really dawned on me that these aren't just nameless, faceless targets. This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time."

...As the U.S. military has significantly stepped up its use of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Garlasco has tracked every bomb, noting their effectiveness and their potential for killing the innocent. The United States increased its use of aerial bombs in Iraq by more than 500 percent from 2006 to 2007 and dropped more than 20 times as many bombs on Afghanistan last year as it did just a few years ago.

That increase, part of a strategy by U.S. commanders who want to attack enemies in areas they have controlled for years, has made Garlasco's work all the more relevant.

a little context: Uncle Sam and Iran

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting this new video from justforeignpolicy.

McCain's Big Stick

Warren Strobel at McClatchy News:

One thing is clear about John McCain's foreign policy views: Much like his political heroes Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt, he believes that America's power is a force to make the world better.

... Less well known are McCain's promises, if elected, to expand the Army and the Marine Corps to 900,000 soldiers and Marines from a planned strength of about 750,000; to form a U.S.-led League of Democracies to act when the United Nations can't or won't; and to form a new government unit, patterned after the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services, "to fight terrorist subversion" and "take risks that our bureaucracies today rarely consider taking."

...McCain already has indicated that he plans to use national security as a cudgel against the eventual Democratic nominee in the general election campaign.

In Norfolk, Va., on Friday, he talked tough on Iran and said he's best prepared to deal with security threats on his first day in office.

Democratic candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama "want to set a date for withdrawal in Iraq. I believe that would have catastrophic consequences. They (terrorists) would try to follow us home," McCain said.

But McCain hasn't spelled out in detail yet how he'd deal with threats to America's security.

...McCain's foreign-policy team is sprinkled with people, including Scheunemann, who were ardent backers of the 2003 Iraq invasion and who dismissed critics who warned of unintended consequences. They include former CIA Director James Woolsey, an adviser mostly on energy security, and William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard.

McCain himself was an early booster of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress provided bogus prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism.

At a January town hall in New Hampshire, McCain told a questioner that it "would be fine with me" if the United States had a military presence in Iraq for 100 years. He stressed that he meant a peacetime presence like that of U.S. troops in Germany and Japan.

So President McCain is going to rehabilitate the neocons, occupy Iraq forever, and militarily intimidate anybody who doesn't lick Uncle Sam's boots.

Are we scared yet?

AQI admits mistaken political strategy in Anbar

Washington Post interviews AQI leader:

"We do not deny the difficulties we are facing right now," said Riyadh al-Ogaidi, a senior leader, or emir, of al-Qaeda in Iraq in the Garma region of eastern Anbar province. "The Americans have not defeated us, but the turnaround of the Sunnis against us had made us lose a lot and suffer very painfully." Resting on a blanket in the garden of a squat concrete house in Garma, Ogaidi lamented al-Qaeda in Iraq's reversal of fortunes over the past year.

Ogaidi, 39, once traveled with 20 bodyguards in a four-vehicle convoy. But during the recent interview, he was nearly alone, wearing a white cap on his bald head and a gray dishdasha, or floor-length tunic, to disguise himself as a poor villager.

"We made many mistakes over the past year," including the imposition of a strict interpretation of Islamic law, he told a Washington Post special correspondent. Al-Qaeda in Iraq followers broke the fingers of men who smoked, whipped those who imbibed alcohol and banned shops from selling shampoo bottles that displayed images of women -- actions that turned Sunnis against the group.

Neither AQI, nor Uncle Sam, have won the hearts and minds of Iraqis by treating them as fodder for "collateral damage." AQI, however, seems now to have figured that out.

GOP vs. "Party of Surrender"

CNN on Romney's announcement suspending his campaign:

Mitt Romney suspended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination Thursday, saying if he continued it would "forestall the launch of a national campaign and be making it easier for Sen. Clinton or Obama to win. In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror." [PAF's emphasis]

Get ready for the GOP campaign theme of 2008: "Democrats: the Party of Surrender to Terror".

One "stab-in-the-back" coming up! And that proto-fascist bullshit will be all the more virulent if the real Al Qaeda (you remember them -- the guys BushCo allowed to escape from Afghanistan into Pakistan because Iraq was more important and besides Bush was not really that concerned about Osama) succeeds in organizing another attack on US soil.

Jon Stewart responds more directly.

Land of the Brave and Free

Reuters:

The CIA on three occasions shortly after the Sept 11 attacks used a widely condemned interrogation technique known as waterboarding, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress on Tuesday.“Waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,” Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly specifying the number of subjects and naming them for the first time, as Congress considers banning the technique.

Washington Post:

The White House yesterday directly joined a debate over the use of simulated drownings to force disclosures by CIA detainees, saying the interrogation technique known as waterboarding was legal and that President Bush could authorize the tactic in the future.

Losing the GWOT

Seamus Milne writing in The Guardian (UK):

Nato forces’ own figures show that attacks on western and Afghan troops were up by almost a third last year, to more than 9,000 “significant actions”. And while Nato claims that 70% of incidents took place in the southern Taliban heartlands, the independent Senlis Council thinktank recently estimated that the Taliban now has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan, arguing that “the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when”. Meanwhile, US-led coalition air attacks reached 3,572 last year, 20 times the level two years earlier, as more civilians are killed by Nato forces than by the Taliban and suicide bombings climbed to a record 140. The Kabul press last week predicted a major Taliban offensive in the spring.

The intensity of this armed campaign reflects a significant broadening of the Taliban’s base, as it has increasingly become the umbrella for a revived Pashtun nationalism on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, as well as for jihadists and others committed to fighting foreign occupation. The original aims of the US-led invasion were of course the capture of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden, along with the destruction of al-Qaida.

None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the two leaders remain free, while al Qaida has spread from its Afghan base into Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and Afghanistan has become the heroin capital of the world. For the majority of Afghans, occupation has meant the exchange of obscurantist theocrats for brutal and corrupt warlordism, along with rampant torture and insecurity; while even the early limited gains for women and girls in some urban areas, offset by an explosion of rape and other violence against women, are now being reversed. The meaning of “liberation” under foreign occupation can be measured by the death sentence passed last month on a 23-year-old student for blasphemy after he downloaded a report on women’s rights from the internet.

The war in Afghanistan, which claimed more than 6,500 lives last year, cannot be won. It has brought neither peace, development nor freedom, and has no prospect of doing so. Instead of eradicating terror networks, it has spread and multiplied them. The US plans to send 3,000 more troops in April to reinforce its existing 25,000-strong contingent, and influential thinktanks in Washington are pressing for an Iraqi-style surge. But only a vastly greater deployment could even temporarily subdue the country, and that is not remotely in prospect. The only real chance for peace in Afghanistan is the withdrawal of foreign forces as part of a wider political settlement, including the Taliban and neighbouring countries like Iran and Pakistan. But having put their credibility on the line, it seems the western powers are going to have to learn the lessons of the colonial era again and again.

McCain's militarism

Amy Goodman interviews Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick:

MATT WELCH: Not only were his parents—father and grandfather in the military, but his father used to go around giving these lectures about how, you know, the naval gap between the US and the Soviet Union was threatening democracy, how we—his nickname was Mr. Sea Power. You know, he would recite British colonialist poetry around the dinner table. They were constantly talking about the necessity for just a huge US navy to guarantee the world’s security. That is the background that John McCain was just marinating in from the time he was a child. And for much of that period, whenever his father or grandfather was not out at sea, they were living on Capitol Hill, usually in some Washington, D.C. capacity. So he was sitting around the breakfast table with senators and congressmen from the time he was a kid. There’s this big notion that he’s a man of the people, which is actually the name of a biography of him, when in fact, down the line, he’s been very much an elitist his entire life, for both good and for ill. He has just been surrounded by, you know, top historians, top senators and congressmen and top military brass.


But this tradition that he comes from is incredibly interventionist and expansionist. It’s really interesting that in the primaries so far, if you look at the exit polls, among people who voted in the GOP primaries who consider themselves antiwar, anti-the-Iraq-war, and among voters who consider themselves angry at George Bush—and that’s a quote—and among independents, McCain is beating his opponents by two-to-one. If you actually look at people who describe themselves as just Republicans, McCain has not yet won a single primary. So he is basically winning the GOP primaries on the back of the antiwar vote, when in fact he would be the most explicitly interventionist president since Teddy Roosevelt, and he certainly makes George Bush look gun-shy by comparison.


AMY GOODMAN: And when it comes to the future in Iraq, talk about his comments about being there for a hundred years.


MATT WELCH: Well, this is what’s interesting about it—well, first of all, he was asked—he has been asked several times, you know, how long are we going to be there, how long do you foresee troops. And he just says, “Hey, look, how long have we been in Korea? No one complains about that, so we can be there for fifty, a hundred years. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there’s no casualties. But, you know, if there’s no casualties, then the US people will support it.” He doesn’t understand the question of why is it that it might be bad that the US troops would be on foreign soil in a semi-hostile area for a hundred years. He just doesn’t understand the question, which I think is even more revealing than the answer itself. There is no downside, from his point of view, of the US basically being the world’s policeman.

Tomorrow

PAF will vote for Obama in the NY primary, not because he's a saint or the second coming of JFK (been there, done that), but because Barak was right about the war and said so, while Hillary was genuflecting to executive power and handing Chimpy the ammunition he needed to attack a country that posed no threat to us. All her bullshit about "experience" notwithstanding, Barak has already passed a crucial test of leadership, and Hillary has already failed that same test.

Hillary and Wal-Mart

From ABC News:

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

That would be this Wal-Mart;

And this one.

Another case where Hillary had the chance to do the right thing for the American people and did not.

Waiting for Tet

Thomas Bass and Marice Isserman offer a cogent statement of the reasons why the worst is yet to come in Iraq:

Claims that victory is at hand in the Iraq war are as fatuous and unsubstantiated as Westmoreland’s belief in 1968 that he was seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.” In spite of the optimistic talk coming from Baghdad that “civilian deaths have decreased by 62 percent,” the metrics measuring progress in Iraq are no more believable than they were 40 years ago in Vietnam. In fact, America’s military adventure in Iraq is even less sustainable than it was in Vietnam.

In 1968, the United States had a military draft and a surplus of 18-year-olds, and it had yet to commit any of its Reserve or National Guard units to the war. Today, the United States has 160,000 troops in Iraq, many of them reservist and national guard forces (not counting Blackwater and other hired guns). Regardless of the situation on the ground, these troops will soon be coming to the end of their 15-month tours of duty. There is no draft and no possibility of instituting one, and there are not enough fresh units to replace those in the field. The military is finding it hard to keep up enlistments, even with lowered standards, and junior officers are refusing to re-up.

U.S. military commanders are aware that maintaining, never mind increasing, U.S. forces in Iraq is a logistical impossibility. And so are the Iraqis. Iraqi forces opposed to the U.S. occupation have not been eliminated, but are merely lying low. The media focus on al-Qaida is misleading, since it is a minor component in this war compared to the various Sunni and Shiite militias, who for their own reasons have temporarily suspended attacks on U.S. forces and each other’s civilians.

Borrowing a page from the playbook of Lawrence of Arabia, the United States has put the Shiite militias and Sunni tribes on the U.S. payroll. Infusions of cold cash, in a conflict already costing more than $2 billion a week, have created a welfare warfare state, with many of Iraq’s insurgent forces being fed, trained and equipped by the United States. But incorporating one-time insurgents into U.S.-backed paramilitary groups guarantees neither their future loyalty nor the future stability of Iraq. Leaders of the Shiite and Sunni militias know full well that the number of U.S. boots on the ground will be going down later this year, which is when the real battle for control of neighborhoods, cities, regions, and oil will begin in earnest.

Smells like... Victory?