I hold no brief for State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, who spends most of her time shilling for her bosses’ catastrophic policies in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond. But it bodes ill for our prospects of peace that the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard her say is the one thing that has put her in possibly career-ending hot water.
On MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, she had the following exchange with the host:
MARIE HARF, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT: I think there are a few stages here, right now we are trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq & Syria, that is where they really flourish.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: Are we killing enough of them?
MARIE HARF: We’re killing a lot of them. And we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians and Jordanians, they’re in this fight with us. We can not win this war by killing them. We can not kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs—
First of all, here is what is problematic about her statement. For one thing, she ignores the deepest of the “root causes,” which is US intervention itself: especially, George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, which fertilized the east of the Fertile Crescent with blood and chaos, yielding a blooming Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as its harvest. Continue reading “Laugh All You Want, but Marie Harf is Basically Right About Jobs and Jihadis”
If you wrongly guessed Charles Manson, you could hardly be blamed, especially since he’s been in the news again recently. As you can see from the picture of the real Manson below, this skinny young long-hair could have played the infamous mass murderer in a biopic with nary a trip to hair-and-makeup.
Yet the man in the black and white photo is also a serial killer and mass murderer, even though hardly anybody even knows his name. He openly confessed to his murders on film, and yet has not been charged for a single one. He would never have borne any punishment at all, had he not had, to his credit, imposed on himself a career of activism-as-penance.
The mass murderer is Sergeant Scott Camile, and he was an American soldier in the Vietnam War. Like Chris Kyle, Camile participated in an immoral, imperial invasion of a poor country, driving townspeople and villagers from their homes, and massacring them in their homeland.
In 1971, Camile voluntarily testified in the non-governmental, antiwar Winter Soldier Investigation. These were among his confessions:
The most harrowing scene in American Sniper involves an Iraqi character nicknamed “The Butcher” torturing and executing an Iraqi child by taking a power drill to his skull. The scene lends credibility to the narrative of Chris Kyle as basically a hero facing villains. In the film, “The Butcher” is a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni insurgent, terrorist, and founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later became ISIS.
However, in the Iraq of the real world, power drilling human heads is more of a predilection, not of Sunni insurgents, but of their enemies in the Shiite militias.
Abu Deraa
For one, there is the warlord Abu Deraa, nicknamed “the Shiite Zarqawi,” who according to the UK’sSunday Times (emphasis added):
“…is thought to be responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunnis, and is said to take personal delight in killing — sometimes with a bullet to the head, sometimes by driving a drill into the skulls of his victims. On other occasions, Iraqis say, he gives them a choice of being shot or battered to death with concrete building blocks.”
AQI/ISIS falsely claimed to have killed him in 2006, but after years of hiding in Iran, he recently reemerged in Baghdad once again leading a militia.
Hadi al-Amiri
Then there is Hadi al-Amiri, head of the Iran-backed Badr Brigade. According to The Washington Post, “A leaked 2009 State Department cable said sources had indicated that Amiri may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis.” The Post continues (emphasis added):
“…in 2005 and 2006, sectarian killings in Iraq surged as Badr death squads worked under the cloak of the police force.
The 2009 State Department cable, referring to that era, said that ‘one of [Amiri’s] preferred methods of killing allegedly involved using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries.‘”
Electric Drill Amiri is now, according to the Post, effectively the head of security in Iraq:
“Iraq’s parliament voted Saturday to put an affiliate of an Iranian-backed paramilitary group in charge of a key security ministry, a move that could strike a serious blow to efforts to unite Sunnis and Shiites to wrest back their country from Islamist extremists.
The new interior minister is Mohammed Ghabban, a little-known Shiite politician with the Badr Organization. But there is little doubt that Hadi al-Amiri, head of the party and its military wing, will wield the real power in the ministry.”
Both of these Iran-sponsored real-life head-drilling “butchers” of Iraq rose to power thanks to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and are now commanding forces either in the US-backed Iraqi government, or under its protection, fighting alongside the US military against the now ISIS-led Sunni insurgency. At the end of the day, the American Sniper was not the enemy of the Iraqi Butchers, but their benefactor.
As radio host Scott Horton never tires reminding his listeners, the chief role of the American troops in Iraq was to fight a bloody civil war on behalf of the Shiite side and to install Iran-backed Shiite militias in power. These militias used death squads to ethnically cleanse Baghdad and other cities of Sunnis, and, as Will Grigg never tires reminding his readers, imposed a Sharia-compliant constitution over a once-secular country. This Shiite jihad was, in effect, Chris Kyle’s true mission, for which millions of American Christians now lionize him.
“There are four types of people who join the military. For some, it’s a family trade. Others are patriots, eager to serve. Next you have those who just need a job. Then there’s the kind who want a legal means of killing other people.”
– The title character of the 2012 movie Jack Reacher, played by Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, listing the “four types” to Rosamund Pike’s Helen Rodin.
As for the fourth type, Reacher was referring to another character in the film, an American sniper prosecuted for murders both in Iraq and the US.
Jack Reacher’s “American Sniper”: James Barr, played by Joseph Sikora.
Judging from Kyle’s own words, this character is a much more accurate portrayal of Chris Kyle’s psyche than the one created by Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper.
“But after you kill your enemy, you see it’s okay. You say, Great. You do it again. And again. (…) I loved what I did. I still do. If circumstances were different–if my family didn’t need me–I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun.”
One of the Paris terror suspects was radicalized by outrage over American torture and the invasion of Iraq. The Huffington Postreports:
“The Associated Press said that Cherif Kouachi was tried in 2008 for helping funnel fighters to Iraq and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Kouachi told the court at the time that he was outraged by images that revealed the torture of Iraqi inmates by U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, according to the AP.”
“Chérif’s interest in radical Islam, it was said at the 2008 trial, was rooted in his fury over the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, particularly the mistreatment of Muslims held at Abu Ghraib prison.”
Last October, The New York Times ran a story about the effects of abandoned chemical weapons in Iraq from a program that was abandoned in the early 90s, and so had nothing to do with Bush Administration WMD accusations that were used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, the “Paper of Record” (which played such a large role deceiving the public in the run-up to the Iraq War) gave the article a headline that read, “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons,” and that did not give any indication when the weapons were abandoned. This deceptiveness was compounded when the massively popular conservative news aggregation web site The Drudge Report linked to the story with a huge, top-level, even more deceptive headline that read, “NYT: PENTAGON HUSHED IRAQ’S USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS.”
That was all it took for confirmation bias to take over, as conservatives all across the country leapt on the deceptive headlines (of course, not bothering to read the actual article) as a permanent talking point for claiming that it was right to invade Iraq all along, since Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction after all.
And now, three months later, we see the fruits of that deception. RT today reported on a new survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind that found that, “4 in 10 Americans erroneously believe US found active WMDs in Iraq.”
“PublicMind noted that the discovery of degraded chemical weapons in Iraq – likely leftover materials from a program that ended in the early 1990s – might explain some confusion. The presence of these weapons was first reported in October 2014.”
Of course, it wasn’t the “discovery” itself that caused the confusion, but, once again, shoddy, unprofessional, and irresponsible (if not downright mendacious) journalism.
