…allegedly "hacked" software, in the case of the CIA, is now being used to guide killer drones to their targets, according to IISI’s legal pleadings, despite the fact that the modified software doesn’t function properly… –CIA Drone-Code Scandal Now Has A Big Blue Hue
Category: Iraq
“The American Combat Mission in Iraq Has Ended …”
And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in buying. It connects my oceanfront properties in Kansas (also for sale) to the magical island where I keep my leprechaun-sourced gold hoard.
From the Washington Post‘s account of an attack on an Iraqi army base today:
The Americans provided covering fire while Iraqi soldiers pursued the attackers who had entered the compound, said Lt. Col Eric Bloom, a U.S. military spokesman. The U.S. intervention also included helicopters and drones, he said.
50,000 US troops remain in Iraq. Re-labeling them (“advisers”) doesn’t take them out of harm’s way. No magic, bulletproof “we’re not combat troops any more” force field pops into existence around them just because POTUS made a speech. They’re still there, and the fighting continues.
The American combat mission in Iraq has ended? I need not deplete my own meager rhetorical arsenal for a pithy response — Confederate cavalry warlord (and, to his eternal discredit, Ku Klux Klan founder) Nathan Bedford Forrest provided that response 140-odd years ago:
Damn such nonsense. War means fightin’ and fightin’ means killin’. Turn the grindstone.
Why Are People Grudgeful?
Timothy P. Carney weighs in on the “Cato purge”:
[Brink] Lindsey will be portrayed as a martyr, excommunicated for his heresies from the Right’s dogma. In this role, he joins neoconservative writer David Frum, who was driven from the American Enterprise Institute after praising Obamacare.
Lindsey and Frum followed parallel paths. In 2002 and 2003, Lindsey – contra most libertarians – prominently beat the drums for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, Frum played the conservatives’ Robespierre, trying to purge from the Right those who opposed the invasion, whom he slurred as “unpatriotic conservatives.”
Lindsey, when he admitted in 2006 that invading Iraq was a mistake, still billed himself as “extremely controversial” and open-minded in the face of dogma. Frum, today, basks in the Left’s praise as an independent thinker. But Lindsey and Frum, in backing Bush’s invasion then and supporting Obama now, were the opposite of dissidents: They consistently supported those in power who were fighting for more power.
This pattern doesn’t make Lindsey or Frum sycophants, but it undermines their claim to be dissidents.
Amen.
The reason I keep banging on about Iraq War supporters – including the “born-again doves” – is simple: The road out of militarism and empire runs through the ruins of the Washington establishment that got us here.
First, there must be some penalty for supporting wars of aggression, even in a non-governmental role. I don’t mean a legal penalty, obviously, but shaming, shunning, boycotting, and the like. But everywhere you look, the very people who sold the Iraq War have not only not paid for their bloodthirsty idiocy, they’ve often been promoted. Second, as long as even “reformed” warmongers hold positions of influence, there’s always the danger of relapse. Clearly, the personality defects that contribute to the endorsement of monstrosities don’t go away quickly, if ever. For example, here’s one ex-Bushbot-turned-Obamaton sticking it to the White House’s critics:
Personally, I’m not satisfied with the job they [Obama & co.] are doing (unemployment is horrible, they’ve spent too much time negotiating with Republicans, the drone wars, the civil liberties issues, Lloyd Blankfein is still a free man, etc.), and think there have been some real failings and some real let-downs. But I will belly crawl over broken glass while someone pours lemon juice and rubbing alcohol on me to vote for the Democrats in November.
Note how drone wars and civil liberties fall behind “negotiating with Republicans” on this list of sins. To paraphrase Mick Jagger, could you use a lemon-squeezer, dude? I volunteer.
I could go on – there are so many targets – but instead, I’ll leave you with a thought experiment. Imagine that the invasion of Iraq had succeeded on the war supporters’ own terms, and the U.S. had crushed all armed resistance within a few months and set up some plausibly “pro-American” Potemkin democracy that didn’t need a foreign army to defend it from the citizenry (this requires a lot of imagination, I know). Let’s assume that the U.S. military had accomplished this by really taking the gloves off, as many war supporters urged in the days when the occupation began to implode. Thus, in our counterfactual, the Iraqi civilian casualty count is roughly the same as the actual count today, anti-American sentiment is inflamed throughout the Muslim world, and Iran is the unquestioned dominant regional power, all for a preventive war against a fabricated threat. Do you think that our born-again doves – much less the dead-enders who still think the war was a good idea – would have had any moral or even practical second thoughts? Or do you think they’d be doing a sack dance in the peaceniks’ faces and demanding the destruction of the next country on their list?
UPDATE: I think this sort of amends-making is a wonderful idea, but I suggest it for people who have abetted acts of mass destruction. How many prosthetic limbs could the Brinkster buy with his disposable income? Shoot, Andrew Sullivan could probably fund half a dozen orphanages across Iraq if he cut his personal expenditures back to bare subsistence levels. Let’s make this happen!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpCghKWnzC0[/youtube]
Now Comes the Deadly ‘Peace’ for Iraq
One soldier, the first since the symbolic withdrawal, lost his or her life during a rocket attack today in Basra.
For many Americans the withdrawal of the last “combat troops” from Iraq three days ago marked a psychological end to the war. Lost in the self-congratulatory reportage, however, were the approximately 52,000 servicemembers who remain behind in various functions, some of them as dangerous as traditional “combat.” One soldier, the first since the symbolic withdrawal, lost his or her life during a presumed “hostile” rocket attack today in Basra. More deaths will follow until the last servicemember is gone…if that ever actually occurs.
I would not count on it happening anytime soon though. On the heels of this tragic news, Gen. Ray Odierno, who is the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, admitted that “combat troops” could return if the Iraqi security forces completely fail at their job. Part of that success unfortunately rests on a government that has been unable to seat a new premier thanks to political chicanery from the sitting prime minister. It has been five months and hundreds of civilian deaths since Iraqis tried to elect a new leader and little has changed. Much like little has changed for the American troops who are still stationed in Iraq and still hoping they make it home alive.
YouTube of Iran Debate
Below is the 2 1/2 hour entirety of that Iran debate at UCR on April 1, 2010. Featured speaker was Reese Erlich. Panelists were Erlich, Larry Greenfield, Christopher Records and myself. The host was Louis Vandenberg. Thanks to Joe Briggs for putting this on his YouTube account.
One correction: After this conference, I learned from Syed Saleem Shahzad that the Jundallah that the CIA and JSOC use against Iran is different from the Jundallah that KSM used to be the leader of. However, they are both radical Salafi civilian-bombing terrorists, so same difference.
Weigel vs. WikiLeaks
On his Twitter feed Monday, Dave Weigel, journalist, posted the following (emphasis mine):
The WikiLeaks Afghan dump is depressing. Very tired of our effort there being subjected to this kind of crap.
When Glenn Greenwald pressed Weigel to clarify what “kind of crap” he meant, Weigel answered:
I mean the disclosing in a way that hurts us. It’s not like we’ve been prevented from knowing things are going poorly.
This caused a minor stir among Weigel’s Twitter followers, with one responding:
You prefer being lied to? You really *have* crossed over to the dark side…
To which Weigel replied:
I support the war and agree to disagree with a lot of people on this.
Greenwald continued to prod Weigel for clarification, but Weigel ignored the questions, huffing, “I don’t ‘debate’ on Twitter. If it’s important I take it to email. This is a wretched medium for debate.” Meanwhile, some members of #teamweigel began tweeting their disapproval, distaste, and even shock.
I can’t imagine why.
Dave Weigel supported the invasion of Iraq, and he continued to ridicule and slander war opponents until the precise moment that it was no longer professionally advantageous for him to do so. He is a shape-shifting seeker of the Inner Ring who has already been called a liar twice by his former bosses. Here’s Matt Welch of Reason on Weigel’s suggestion that he was let go from that magazine for being too mavericky (a recurrent form of self-gratification for Weigel):
To the extent that this gives the impression that Dave’s job was in any way tied to him voting for Obama, I need to shout from the rooftops that this is emphatically not the case. If it were, Ronald Bailey would no longer be our Science Correspondent and Tim Cavanaugh would not be our back-of-the-book columnist. …
There were multiple factors at play in the Weigel/Reason separation, none of them having to do with voting records, and many (though not all) pointing to what Dave alludes to in his post: What he wanted to write about, and what we needed him to write about, were two different things. …
Another clarification, especially for people unfamiliar with Reason: There is, to put it mildly, zero professional sanction at this magazine for being “a little less favorable to Republicans,” or being “pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders.”
And here’s Nick Gillespie:
In his public mea culpa (which like all examples of the genre is long on mea and short on culpa), former Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel suggested his long journey upwards began with his being fired from Reason magazine.
Full disclosure: I was editor in chief of Reason from 2000 to 2008 and hired Dave, who was eventually let go by my successor, Matt Welch. Dave suggests that the separation came about because he had strayed too far off what we sometime call the “libtard†reservation. …
As Matt Welch has written, Dave certainly didn’t earn any supervisory ire by voting for Obama-Biden or even for being from Delaware (though this latter condition has never been a clear plus for anyone except maybe George Thorogood and Cesar Romney). Similarly, the implication that Reason would be bothered by a staffer’s attacks on Republicans or support for gay marriage and open borders makes about as much sense and holds as much value as fiat currency.
Actually, while Maverick Dave was with Reason, he made some pathetically strenuous efforts to ingratiate himself with the herd (another recurrent theme in Weigel’s career). In Reason‘s 2008 presidential election survey, Weigel gave the following answer to the final question:
5. Leaving George W. Bush out of consideration, what former U.S. president would you most like to have waterboarded? Lyndon Baines Johnson. While his children watch.
Leaving aside the warped question and the demented reply – Weigel and his pal Spencer Ackerman seem to have studied rhetoric at the Mel Gibson Finishing School – do you think for a minute that Weigel would say such a thing (or anything negative at all) about the father of Medicare and Medicaid in his new gig as an MSNBC commentator? More recently, in an odd act of self-defense, Weigel actually admitted that he wrote things he didn’t believe on Journolist in order to “suck up to the liberals.” And that was for a tiny, exclusive audience that was supposedly organized to allow “extremely smart people” to say what they really thought! What ulterior considerations inform Weigel’s reporting and analysis for us dumb yokels drooling over our Hungry-Man dinners in front of the tube?
Anyway, now Weigel’s “supporting” “our” war in Afghanistan, the It War of the militant center that employs him, and people are surprised? Please.
P.S. I’ll go ahead and write the rebuttal for Dave and his clique. Yes, I’m a loser nobody who blogs for the objectively pro-fascist Antiwar.com. I only wrote this because I envy Dave’s sweet job at the Washington Post (oops!), his large circle of friends, and the cool, emotionally mature professionalism he demonstrated in Boogiegate. Did I leave out anything? Oh, right. Yada yada yada anti-Semite. (Hey, you said it, Adolf!) When you get through with me, maybe you can respond to Welch and Gillespie.
P.P.S. For more on the Weigel-Journolist fiasco, if you’re not sick to death of it already, I strongly recommend two posts by Arthur Silber: 1, 2.