Antiwar.com Blog

UPDATE (9/17 6:30EST): One Marine killed on Friday.

UPDATE (9/16 8pm EST): The number keeps rising.

Recently, the Department of Defense and CentCom have made a habit out of not reporting US fatalities in Iraq until days if not weeks after they occur. This week was especially bloody and silent. Since Sunday, twenty US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. They are:

1st Lt. Tyler H. Brown
Maj. Kevin M. Shea
Sgt. Jacob H. Demand
Lance Cpl. Cesar F. Machado-Olmos
Lance Cpl. Dominic C. Brown
Lance Cpl. Michael J. Halal
Staff Sgt. Guy S. Hagy
Sgt. Carl Thomas
Staff Sgt. David J. Weisenburg
Spc. Benjamin W. Isenberg
Lance Cpl. Mathew D. Puckett
1st Lt. Alexander E. Wetherbee
Pfc. Jason T. Poindexter
Cpl. Adrian V. Soltau
Cpl. Jaygee Meluat
1st Lieutenant Andrew K. Stern
Lance Cpl. Drew M. Uhles
Three still unnamed

The DoD’s new press tactics have helped to keep these soldiers’ names under the media’s radar.

Riverbend:

September 11… he sat there, reading the paper. As he reached out for the cup in front of him for a sip of tea, he could vaguely hear the sound of an airplane overhead. It was a bright, fresh day and there was much he had to do… but the world suddenly went black- a colossal explosion and then crushed bones under the weight of concrete and iron… screams rose up around him… men, women and children… shards of glass sought out tender, unprotected skin … he thought of his family and tried to rise, but something inside of him was broken… there was a rising heat and the pungent smell of burning flesh mingled sickeningly with the smoke and the dust… and suddenly it was blackness.

9/11/01? New York? World Trade Center?

No.

9/11/04. Falloojeh. An Iraqi home.

What will the Taiwan lobby scream?

Ex-State Official Charged in Taiwan Trip

A former high-ranking State Department official who is one of the nation’s leading experts on China passed documents to Taiwanese intelligence agents and was charged yesterday with concealing a trip to Taiwan, court papers say.

Donald W. Keyser made the trip last year when he was deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, according to an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. Keyser, 61, who was a top adviser to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on China issues, met with one of the agents in Taipei last September during an official trip to China and Japan, the affidavit says.

Tailed by the FBI a year later, Keyser and two Taiwanese agents conducted a series of covert meetings around Washington. At a meeting July 31 at the Potowmack Landing restaurant, the affidavit says, Keyser handed the Taiwanese two envelopes “that appeared to bear U.S. government printing.” . . .

Hmmm. A tiny country whose partisans wield undue influence over U.S. foreign policy. Sounds familiar . . .

Don’t forget: this is an administration that will win reelection because of its purported dedication to national security.

One of the worst things about this war (and the cluster of quasi-libertarian arguments used to justify it) has been the incredible mental toll it has inflicted on libertarianism. Instead of tending our own garden – working to smash, reduce, or at least slow the state that oppresses us – libertarians have typed keyboards to death over fundamental issues even goddamn liberals understand. To wit: Matthew Yglesias:

[T]he notion that anything even remotely resembling libertarianism could underwrite an effort to conscript huge quantities of resources from the American public and deploy them in an attempt to wholly remake the social and political order in a foreign country is too absurd to merit a rebuttal. … As long as the conversation is supposed to be proceeding on the shared basis of libertarianism, however, one hardly needs to say anything. It’s coercion, it’s planning, it’s every non-libertarian thing under the sun.

Yet I can’t go to a libertarian site without enduring some soporific marathon debate about a no-brainer, i.e., that waging preemptive (read: aggressive) war (read: death and destruction) to impose democracy (fer Chrissakes!) on people who never even posed a threat to us is, uh, wrong. As Gene Healy once wrote,

I continue to be perplexed by the fact that smarter people than me think that a political philosophy that tells you what to think about mandatory recycling has nothing to offer on the question of when one might morally employ daisy cutters and thermobaric bombs.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad:

Yesterday, sitting in the office, another photographer who was looking at my pictures exclaimed: “So the Arabiya journalist was alive when you were taking pictures!”

“I didn’t see the Arabiya journalist.”

He pointed at the picture of the guy with V-neck T-shirt. It was him. He was dead. All the people I had shared my shelter with were dead.

Read about the US Apache assault on Iraqi civilians in Haifa Street, Baghdad.

Here’s the BBC video of the Mazin Tumaizi killing on live television.

Lawrence of Cyberia writes an interesting argument about the genesis of HAMAS, why Al Qaeda has never been involved in the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation and why Israel’s tactics might bring Al Qaeda into Palestine in the future. He introduces this excellent post with this intriguing quotation that you may not have seen:

The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it.

— Larry Johnson, Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, 1989 – 1993.

Read Careful What You Wish For