Antiwar.com Blog

It was all over the media yesterday:

“Soldiers Tell Gates They Back Surge”

CNN TV reported that “a small but representative sample” of troops met with Gates and unanimously urged him to send more troops, presenting this view as a contrast to the views of US commanders in Iraq, who oppose such a surge and told Gates so the day before.

Where did the reporters and news readers get the idea that the 15 soldiers that Gates had breakfast with were representative of the 150,000 soldiers in Iraq?

According to the transcript of a news conference posted on the Pentagon’s website, an unidentified reporter asked the following question of Gates:

Secretary Gates, this morning you met with a small but representative group of senior enlisted U.S. soldiers. And you asked them whether they thought, whether they thought, more U.S. troops should be sent to Iraq and to Baghdad, and they seemed to indicate that they could use the help. How will that influence your thinking about the possible options as you look at the way ahead?

Gates didn’t even need to respond to this, the “reporter” did his work for him. Instead, he talked about how great it is that the soldiers support the mission.

This “reporter,” and the others who repeated his assertion that 15 hand-picked soldiers were representative of the 150,000 in Iraq have no business calling themselves journalists. At best, they are acting like second-rate press secretaries.

On December 21, 1995, Antiwar.com was born. On that day, I made the first posting to the site. Since then, we have continued to upgrade, adding daily news updates starting in 1998, going to round-the-clock coverage during the Kosovo War in 1999.

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David Beito of Liberty & Power sends along this petition urging an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Though the big names at the top skew very left, the statement strikes this libertarian as admirably focused and unobjectionable in its particulars.

UPDATE: A reader suggests that those who get to the petition from here write “Antiwar.com reader” in the space for organization – y’know, show everybody who’s boss.

This “Dialogue Session with President Bush” gets my vote for the funniest Bush video ever.

In response to today’s column, a reader writes:

Wow… I was just saying that I liked the fact that Obama is anti-war. Guess I was wrong. I believe of all the people who have been mentioned in the news as possible ’08 candidates… that he is the least pro war next to Kucinich of Ohio. Unfortunately… only Kucinich has called for an immediate removal of US troops.

The point is not that Obama fails to call for an immediate withdrawal: his position is that he wants to set no deadline, nor even an approximation of one, for Iraqi forces to entirely supplant the U.S. presence.

And we don’t know what other candidates — on the Republican side — might leap into the breach. There’s Chuck Hagel, who was calling for starting the withdrawal process in six months this past August — and don’t forget third party candidates. The idea, after all, is to push the idea of a noninterventionist foreign policy, and not any particular candidate or party.

At first glance, I figured I’d be amused, but I was quickly sickened by what I read in Ha’aretz today. A female American tourist was riding a bus to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and when a gang of Haredi men ordered her to the back of the bus, she refused. She was subsequently spat upon, smacked, punched, had her headcovering pulled off, and was even kicked in the face when she was down. The bus driver didn’t help, and most of the passengers cursed at her and called her a “stupid American.”

These men felt it was fine to beat the crap out of a woman, but not to sit in the same section of the bus with her. And the whole rest of the bus thought they were justified. Is Israel all it’s cracked up to be by its American adulators?

To their credit, Israelis and Jews around the world chimed in with plain disgust in Ha’aretz’s comments section, many calling for an end to the welfare bummitude of Israel’s sidecurled class, who don’t work, don’t serve in the Army, and have gigantic litters of children for which they get gobs of money mugged from Israeli taxpayers (not to mention American taxpayers). It’s worth a read.

Meanwhile, American Jews should think twice before spending money in a place where people have such low opinions of them, especially considering how much Israel owes its existence to American Jews and their massive, steady flow of investment and charity dollars.