Antiwar.com Blog

(see 10 for introduction)
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In his Capital Times column Thursday, John Nichols offered Democrats advice, good advice, but not Advance U.S. — Not Israel’s — Interests, so the streak continues. He has yet to use “Israel” or “Palestine” this year in my “local progressive newspaper.”

Rules are rules, it doesn’t count, but he did use “Palestinian” on October 12, a fleeting reference to Abu Nidal. Last year, when he finally used “Israel” on December 30, he had used “Palestinian” on September 29 in an eulogy for Edward Said. The bad, the good, that leaves the ugly, look for Yassir Arafat on October 5, 2005.

John recycled the eulogy, Said Spoke Truth To Power, from The Nation, for which Edward occasionally wrote:

In A New Current in Palestine (02/04/2002), he asks “So where are Israeli and American liberals, so quick to condemn violence while saying little about the disgraceful and criminal occupation itself?”

In Bombs and Bulldozers (09/08/97), he insists that “Western liberals must remember that Oslo was not a tabula rosa; it came after twenty-six years of Israeli military occupation and, before that, nineteen years of Palestinian dispossession.”

And Oslo I to Oslo II: The Mirage of Peace finds him “particularly disheartened by the role played in all this by liberal Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Silence is not a response, and neither is some fairly tepid endorsement of a Palestinian state, with Israeli settlements and the army more or less still there, still in charge. The peace process must be demystified and spoken about plainly.”

“Mirage” appeared on about the same day as the Capital Times editorial “To heal and transform,” presumably written by John Nichols (9/26/95). Oslo II represents “a monumental stride in the direction of producing regional tranquility and global justice.” While “militants condemn the agreement as too much or too little,” it “certainly meets the definition of tikkun.” That is, it “can and must” lead to “mending, repairing and ultimately transforming the world.” Tikkun, “a lovely Hebrew word.”

John could have written “Said Spoke Truth To Power And Me.” He could have added an acknowledgment that it was, in particular, he and other “progressives” who “frustrated” Edward and a promise to try to mend his ways, but he didn’t. Since then, he has only reaffirmed his silence, 104 Capital Times columns down, six to go.

note:

The question Edward Said asks in “A New Current,” can liberals be roused into supporting nonviolent Palestinian resistance, couldn’t be more germane, Ran HaCohen indicates today in The Third Intifada.

zeynep at Under the Same Sun is in Venezuela looking for good news, but Jonathan Schwartz has the keys to the blog. As zeynep says, Johnathan “also writes about the scary stuff but he’s funny.”

Read Jonathan on the giraffe in the kitchen.

I ran across this picture from Fallujah last night. I’m going to make it a thumbnail image, so those who can’t bear looking at a photo of a dog dining on an Iraqi, please just don’t click on it. I think everyone should look at it, though, because this is the result of the US military’s Fallujah Solution.

That picture, and the accompanying story describing how dogs eating corpses has created a rabies threat in Fallujah, is horrifying enough, but now we have Dahr Jamail’s gallery of photos from Fallujah. I’m just going to quote Helena’s reaction to viewing them and ask everyone to read her post before viewing the album.

I’m weeping inside of me. What can we do about this? How can we explain to that majority of US citizens that seems still to support this war the depths of depravity to which it has led?

This is only the beginning of the exposure of the Fallujah horrors.

Dahr Jamail’s Gallery

Remember this guy?

Apparently his getaway didn’t work out very well:

‘Abducted’ Marine’s desertion charge

A US Marine who was reported abducted in Iraq and later turned up in his native Jordan was charged today with desertion.

Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun was charged following a five month investigation into his June disappearance from a US military camp near Fallujah, Iraq, according a statement from the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

Corporal Hassoun, of West Jordan, Utah, is accused of taking unauthorised leave from the unit where he served as an Arabic interpreter.

He is also is charged with the loss of government property and the theft of a military firearm for allegedly leaving the Marine camp while still in possession of his 9mm service pistol, as well as theft and wrongful appropriation of a government vehicle.

UPDATE: An alert reader points out that Hassoun is a native of Lebanon, not Jordan.

There have been a quite a few reports in the news the past day on the higher survival rate of US soldiers due to superior body armor and trauma care based on the report in the New England Journal of Medicine, Casualties of War — Military Care for the Wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan

Each Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense provides an online update of American military casualties (the number of wounded or dead) from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.1 According to this update, as of November 16, 2004, a total of 10,726 service members had suffered war injuries. Of these, 1361 died, 1004 of them killed in action; 5174 were wounded in action and could not return to duty; and 4191 were less severely wounded and returned to duty within 72 hours. No reliable estimates of the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, or American civilians injured are available. Nonetheless, these figures represent, by a considerable margin, the largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War.

Read the rest here. The accompanying pictures, Caring for the Wounded in Iraq — A Photo Essay,(warning…they are very graphic) are also available here.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting point made in an email to me from AntiWar reader Jim Jensen:

I think mention should be made that the New England Journal article made three important observations. The first was that fewer soldiers are now dying. The second is relative to the first observation: More soldiers are left wounded than before. Third, homicide rates in the U.S. have been dramatically reduced. The NEJ says that all of these items are a direct result of the advanced made in medicine over the years, something that I don’t think is being stated in the mainstream press.

AFP is reporting that Moqtada al-Sadr is not on the list assembled by Ayatollah al-Sistani’s United Iraqi Alliance.

The United Iraqi Alliance, backed by highly revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, includes the Dawa party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, Dawa’s Ali Adib said.

But Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia battled US-led forces in Baghdad and Najaf before calling a truce, “is not on the list” after not registering his movement for the elections, said Hussein Shahrastani, a member of the coalition’s organising committee.

Oddly, several reports still claim that the Sadrists are on the list.