Antiwar.com Blog

As Veterans Day approaches, a gift of some good news. Thanks to a lot of lobbying by members of congress and vet organizations, and backed up by great reporting by the Army Times and by hundreds of personal testimonies and affidavits by individual soldiers and veterans, Congress has passed some tough new guidelines regarding the frighteningly toxic burn pits on our military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I wrote about for TAC this month, individuals are returning from war with horrific, unexplained symptoms ranging from chronic breathing problems like sleep apnea to skin rashes, nerve damage, cancer and pulmonary distress. The Pentagon — so far — denies that these symptoms can be traced back to the burn pits, which have been burning in the middle of military installations like Camp Taji and Balad Air Force Base for as long as troops have been overseas and in some cases burn some 150 tons of mixed trash (including medical waste, hardware, chemicals, food, etc) a day.

Thanks in part to reporting by TAC and Antiwar.com, Reps. Ron Paul, R-TX, and Walter Jones, R-N.C, joined Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Fla., as the only Republicans to co-sponsor the Democratic House bill, sponsored by Rep. Tim Bishop, D-N.Y, which made it through the conference committee and is headed to the President’s desk this week as part of the FY 2010 National Defense Authorization Act.

It includes provisions that will:

• Prohibit the use of burn pits for hazardous and medical waste except if the Secretary of Defense sees no alternative;
• Require the Department of Defense (DOD) to report to the congressional oversight committees whenever burn pits are used and justify their use, and every six months to report on their status;
• Require DOD to develop a plan for alternatives, in order to eliminate the use of burn pits; further, DOD must report to Congress how and why they use burn pits and what they burn in them;
• Require DOD to assess existing medical surveillance programs of burn pits exposure and make recommendations to improve them;
• Require DOD to do a study of the effects of burning plastics in open pits and evaluate the feasibility of prohibiting the burning of plastics.

This is definitely a first step – the Bishop bill would create a registry that would track all of the exposed troops, and that measure did not make it into the final legislation. Meanwhile, there is a massive class action lawsuit against KBR, for which soldiers are blaming for their illnesses, and other pending legislation, like the one proposed by Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., most recently. He wants automatic priority health care and benefits for veterans suffering from toxic exposures on the battlefield. We’ll see how that goes over at the DoD.

(cross posted @TAC)

October 18th’s suicide bombing in Iran near the Pakistan border was the subject of the top three articles in October 20th’s Asia Times.
 
“Conventional wisdom suggests that the terrorist strike by Jundallah in southeastern Iran on Sunday might have had the backing of the United States or Britain,” M K Bhadrakumar opens the first.  Yet “clearly,” he concludes, Obama would have to be “out of his mind to have his intelligence agencies mount a terrorist attack on Iran which would torpedo his own gameplan to address the Iran nuclear file at the present sensitive juncture” (Saudi-Iranian hostility hits boiling point). 
 
In the second, Pepe Escobar cautions “but one thing is the Obama administration’s priorities; another is the agenda of ‘full spectrum dominance’ types at the Pentagon and the CIA…Chaos in Iranian Balochistan derails the [Iran-Pakistan] pipeline – something that is an absolute priority for full spectrum dominance: Washington wants its horse, the Trans-Afghan (TAP) pipeline, to win at all costs. A ‘victory’ of the IP pipeline means Gwadar port in [Pakistani] Balochistan falling into China’s orbit, not the US’s”  (Jundallah versus the mullahtariat). 
 
In the third, Kaveh L Afrasiabi quotes a Tehran professor, “‘There is now a serious crisis of Iranian confidence in Mr Obama and many people are asking: is he really in charge and who calls the shots on US policy in the region? Did Mossad pull this off without notifying the White House, or in cahoots with them [the US]?'” (Iran’s nuclear talks also hit)
 
Here at Antiwar, in Our Two-Faced Iran Policy, Justin Raimondo raises the possibility that the U.S.’s “terrorism” complements its “talk,” the idea being “to keep the Iranian regime off-balance, and make them more amenable to compromise…In any case, we are walking a tightrope” and the presence of “the very powerful Israel lobby” is a major reason why “military conflict with Iran may be unavoidable.”         
 
With the suicide bombing in Iran occurring as the Pakistan situation degenerates (and now, Baghdad blasts echo far and wide), Reuters blogger Myra MacDonald is almost reduced to prayer:  “In my 25 years of journalism, I’ve rarely seen a situation move so quickly.  I’d like to think there is someone in power who is not only keeping pace, but keeping ahead”  (Afganistan, Pakistan … and all the other countries involved).
 
“Someone?”  I don’t think she has in mind Osama bin Laden, so, if it’s not the Obama administration and/or a CIA-Pentagon cabal and/or the Mossad, that leaves—The Duchy of Grand Fenwick!
 
Leaving aside the question of who, if anyone, is driving, to where is the train hurtling? What humongous wreck awaits?
 
The U.S. falling off the “tightrope” into an Iranian “quagmire” is one possibility, but even as I write, the words “unprecedented” and “spin out of control” appear in a Reuters article, the subject of which is “India-China tensions” (Afghanistan in focus at trilateral meet in India).  For a bigger dip into an “electrified” atmosphere, with a similar warning that “an accidental slip or go-off at the border would erode into war,” see M K Bhadrakumar’s The dragon spews fire at the elephant.  For a treatise on how “the wider struggle between the powers of Eurasia and the nations of the Periphery, led by the United States,” could manifest itself in a nuclear war, there’s Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya’s Geo-Strategic Chessboard: War Between India and China?

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan gave an interview to the Guardian today, and the throw-away final sentence is causing a small stir. Quote:

He insisted that the Turkey-Israel strategic alliance – which some AKP insiders have said privately is over – remains alive but chided the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who he said had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza.

Which has led the Israeli press to fly into speculation about how it would impact Israeli-Turkish relations, and led Lieberman’s office to mock it as “nonsense.”

A shrewd political operator as well as a war enthusiast, Lieberman obviously would not have made blatant mention to Israel’s “secret” nuclear arsenal. But Erdogan didn’t just make up this claim either.

At the tail end of the Gaza War, Lieberman was harshly critical of ending the war, declaring instead “we must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II” and going into detail about how the US nuclear strikes had “broken the will” of Japan.

Lieberman’s comments came in the context of an opposition figure capitalizing on the Israeli public’s enthusiasm for continuing the war, which killed over 1,400 Palestinians, a political move which swept him into power months later. Technically not a “threat” since he wasn’t in power at the time, yet also far from “nonsense” that Erdogan made up on the spot.

Two major bomb blasts ripped through Baghdad Sunday, killing an estimated 130 147 men, women and children and wounded some 520 721, according to reports.

Twin car bombs targeted two government buildings in downtown Baghdad Sunday, wrecking pillars of the state’s authority and cutting like a scythe through snarled traffic during the morning rush hour. The government said at least 132 people were killed and 520 wounded in one of the worst attacks in Baghdad.

The first bomb struck an intersection near the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works at around 10:15 a.m. on the first day of the Iraqi work week, when streets are always more crowded. Less than a minute later, a second blast targeted the Baghdad provincial headquarters, draped in a sign heralding its renovation. (snip)

Bodies were hurled into the air,” said Mohammed Fadhil, a 19-year-old bystander. “I saw women and children cut in half.” He looked down at a curb smeared with blood. “What’s the sin that those people commited? They are so innocent.”

Ali Hassan, an employee at the provincial headquarters, said the building was filled with women with their children seeking compensation for past terrorist actions.

“Now they’ve become the victims again,” he said.

American lawmakers and bloviating think tankers among the Washington establishment have long since shelved Iraq like a neat little box, cross-posted under the categories of “Model COIN Operations” and “Why George Bush Was Right.” That basic services are still lacking,  violence remains a threat, ethnic tensions are flaring and there is still no political reconciliation, seems to bother no one, anymore. Like trees falling in a forest.

So what am I missing in Afghanistan?

Isn’t this like a really dumb bank robber being caught in the act (stealing almost a million votes) – and then – instead of booking him on charges, being given another chance to rob the same bank?

The U.S. government and NATO are going to let Karzai take another swing at the ballot boxes. Why? To see if he became a smarter vote thief since August?

Military.com has done a story on Sibel Edmonds’s allegations of widespread espionage in the U.S. by the Israeli and Turkish governments and their allies in the U.S. government. For the first time, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have gone on record to deny her allegations.

BradBlog.com has more coverage here.