Free Iraq

Imad
I noticed that you posted this early. It is still Good Friday, Amen.

On a topic relating to the above posting. Did you gat a chance to read The War Drums Are Sounding A Clear Message? about "Again, It's for the oil stupid, and the third and fourth targets are Iran and Venezuela".

Well, very believable, but you notice that the originator of the appended article correctly pointed out that however insane the plans of the Bush Administration to start two or three more wars (e.g. Iran and Venezuela, maybe North Korea as a special offer for this order only?) simultaneously, like Hitler, may be -- actually I think the parallel with Mussolini invading Albania and Greece in 1940, or maybe Stalin invading Finland the same year, is more apt -- an insane leadership cannot simply wish away military realities.

The hard facts are that Imperial America's storm troopers are terribly overcommitted in Iraq (have you noticed the many Op-Ed pieces, by recently retired and very senior U.S. generals, warning Bush that the situation in Iraq is near collapse, all the while calling for Rumsfeld's resignation? this type of thing is unprecedented and is a clear indication of the desperation of the generals, who are trying to warn the Average Amerikan of what is coming) and simply cannot follow through these other attacks through to completion, even though, of course, it would be fairly simple to just start wars wherever Mr. Bush wants to, just fire a few cruise missiles and "we're good to go!".

Take Venezuela, for example. There is no doubt that the CIA could try (again) to assassinate Chavez, but they have tried that before and it badly backfired against them. Up to (roughly) the late 1990s, they could simply order their puppet dictatorships in Latin America to help them invade an errant colony, but nowadays, how credible do you think it is that they could simply order (say) the Colombian or Brazilian governments, both of which have their own tensions with the U.S. and both of which are far more dependent on popular support, than the puppet dictatorships of yesteryear ever were, to support a conventional invasion of Venezuela?

The fact is, whether Mssrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld want to acknowledge it, THEY DON'T HAVE THE POWER TO ENFORCE THEIR WILL, ANY MORE.

(Oh, happy day, when parts of the world are slipping from America's poisonous, bloodsucking grasp!)

This would be the case whether or not their army, or what remains of it, is tied up in Iraq with no exit strategy anywhere on the horizon, but the Iraq thing just makes it not just militarily unlikely, but militarily impossible.

What worries me considerably more is the possibility (remember, this is by no means unprecedented in American military thinking, in fact the concept of "Massive Retaliation", which involved the early, overwhelming use of nuclear weapons to offset a supposed Soviet conventional forces advantage, was the official U.S. policy for much of the Cold War) that, faced with the above facts, Bush and his crew will fall back on nuclear weapons to terrorize and intimidate his enemies (real or imagined). The rationale for doing so would be that (as noted above) the Americans don't have the necessary conventional ground forces, so they would use nukes as a "force multiplier" to "clear the way for small groups of mobile, elite commandos to finish the job".

There is already open talk in conservative circles in Washington about using "clean" nukes (specifically the B61-11 "bunker buster" hydrogen bomb, in fact this is just a detuned version of a very powerful megaton range H-bomb) to "surgically take out" the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities, which are, so we are told, "buried deep underground so as to make their destruction by conventional weapons next to impossible".

(Note the implication here, that the nasty Iranians are being terribly uncooperative by not deploying their nuke factories above ground with big bulls-eyes painted on them, so American and Israeli bombers can blow them up cheaply and efficiently. I mean, that proves that them bagheads are all terrorists, don't it Jethro?)

This type of thinking was confined only to a few militarist lunatics (for example Barry Goldwater) in the Cold War but with the Bush Administration it evidently is being seriously considered as a viable option, because this time, unlike with the Soviets, the nukes would be (at least initially) used only against non nuclear armed victims.

The moral implications of using hydrogen bombs as a "preventative war" tool against non nuclear armed Third World nations needs no elaboration here, although obviously the average, patriotic, brutal, self-indulgent swine American couldn't care less about war crimes -- Abu Ghraib etc., to say nothing of My Lai, proved that beyond reasonable doubt.

What I worry about is that, emboldened by their "success" in doing so, Bush, or his successors, will then go on to use them against someone like China -- this is the absolutely consistent pattern of megalomaniac imperialists, because, like all bullies, if they can intimidate a weak opponent, they usually conclude that they can intimidate all opponents... Hitler thought that when he invaded Poland. We all know what happened then.

Except that this time, the Americans will be provoking someone -- it may be the Chinese, maybe the Indians, maybe the Russians, maybe even the French, who CAN strike back with H-bombs. To see the result, rent "The Day After" from your local video store. Would I be sorry to see a few million Americans get vaporized in the same way they have so cruelly, knowingly and recklessly done to countless thousands of helpless victims, all over the world? Not in the least (except that, when you're right underneath it, the H-bomb kills you instantly and painlessly, unlike say when you die from depleted uranium-caused cancer). I'm just worried that I might get caught in the crossfire.
 

tape 1: US soldiers celebrate the 4th of July courtesy of the insurgency.

I've seen this tape quite a while back so it's not new.

tape 2: this could be new.

Nice shot, insurgents.

info management: diminish the bad news, exaggerate the good news.
 

Marines Suffer 2 Dead, 22 Wounded in Iraq


Daily Look at U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq


Dahr Jamail & Arken Hamed, Baghdad Morgue Overflowing Daily: "The average is probably over 85," ...
 

Christian Science Monitor, Poll: Americans stung by Iraq, wary of attacking Iran
 

Photographs From Iraq: March 22 - April 12, 2006
(We all will be long dead before these are seen on CNN)
 

Eleven killed in Iraq attacks


Beaten, burnt and bullied: the families hounded out by religious vigilantes: ON ANY normal spring weekend the amusement park in al-Kut would be filled with families barbecuing lamb by the big wheel and playing football.

But recently the dusty stretch of grass in this overwhelmingly Shia town south of Baghdad has become a scene of despondency. It is covered with the makeshift tents of nearly a thousand refugees, driven from their homes in predominantly Sunni areas of the capital.

The frightened people of Baghdad believe that they are witnessing the start of the ethnic cleansing of their city, and every day brings chilling accounts of families being burnt and bullied from their homes.

They depend on food handouts from sympathetic townspeople. Clean drinking water is scarce, and there is little sanitation. Dysentery is spreading, and soon the temperature will reach 50C (122F). But the camp is at least safe, whereas bound and mutilated corpses are discovered in and around Baghdad daily, dumped in sewers and on rubbish tips.

Encampments of Shia refugees like this have sprung up all over southern Iraq, while Sunni families have been forced into tented camps in the infamous Sunni triangle, west of Baghdad. The exodus threatens to turn a capital where Sunni and Shia once intermarried freely into a divided city with two communities confronting each other across the River Tigris.

The tactics used by the religious vigilantes include black crosses painted on doors — a symbol now known in Baghdad as “the mark of death”.

Gunmen in luxury saloons throw leaflets from their vehicles instructing Shia families to leave. Threatening messages are scrawled on school walls. Militias abduct youngsters off the street and send them home a couple of hours later with a message for their parents to clear out or watch their children be executed.
 

Bomb wounds 4 British soldiers in Iraq


Makeshift Bomb Kills Marine In Iraq


Nine US troops killed in Iraq over 4 days
 

"Culture of Life" (more) -
Britain took part in mock Iran invasion
 

Russian Missile Designer: Sleep Peacefully, We Have Plenty of Nukes
(Title gratefully 'borrowed' from Antiwar.com)
 

Kurt Nimmo, Mission Accomplished: Al-CIA-duh Leaves Iraq: “Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday,” reports the Moonie, er Washington Times. “They no longer view Iraq as fertile ground to establish a caliphate and as a place to conduct international terrorism,” Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commands the XVIII Airborne Corps, said in an address at the neocon Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a criminal organization joined at the hip with the likes of the Project for the New American Century and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, criminal syndicates responsible for the intellectual basis behind the murder of a couple hundred thousand Iraqis and Afghans. ...
 

US spy threatens to squeal if Israeli handler joins cabinet: In a letter written through his Israeli lawyer to Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Jonathan Pollard complained about his longtime handler Rafi Eitan refusing to hand over an important document requested by US officials.

As long as he keeps the document, Pollard charged that he would remain in jail in the US where he is serving a life sentence, according to a copy of the letter seen by the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

Eitan, a former agent of Israel's Mossad overseas intelligence agency, in the 1980s headed the anti-terrorist branch of the service that handled Pollard.

Pollard, an American Jew and former analyst for the navy, gave thousands of secret documents about US spy activities in the Arab world to Israel between May 1984 and his arrest in November 1985.
 

xymphora, Cleanser rather than cleansee: Isn’t it funny how Jews in Russia were upset at the antics of extreme nationalist Russian political parties who advocated the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people from Russia, decided to escape the anti-Semitism by moving to Israel, and then set up an extreme nationalist Israeli political party which advocates the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel? In other words, it wasn’t the concept of ethnic cleansing that bothered them. They just wanted to be sure that they were the cleanser and not the cleansee. Due to the faulty Israeli electoral system, this party, Yisrael Beiteinu, will probably end up holding a vastly disproportionate amount of power, with no doubt disastrous consequences. Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the party, has some striking similarities to Ariel Sharon.
 

Gideon Levy, Shooting Nasarin; A Story About a Little Girl: Her mouth is closed, sealed, locked. Her words are filtered through clamped jaws. She is 9 years old, a third-grader. Sometimes a transparent tear rolls down her swollen cheek. A rubber-coated bullet shot from medium range, which penetrated her mouth on the right side two weeks ago, shattered her jaw. A minor story. There are 11 fatherless children at home, Nasarin is the youngest, they have had no income for the past six years, they are not on anyone's social agenda. And now this injury and the splintered jaw.

There are no dead people in this story, and it is almost certain that little Nasarin Abu Hashhash will recover from her injury. Then she will return to her home in the Al-Fawar refugee camp, south of Hebron, to the house that her father began to build with the compensation money he received from the Polgat textile firm in Kiryat Gat, where he worked for 17 years as a tailor until he was fired, along with all the workers from the territories at the plant. He didn't manage to complete the construction of the house, and it stands half built, without a floor and with second-hand doors. A short time after his dismissal, the father died at an early age, leaving 12 souls in the house, whom nobody can support.

The mother didn't even have money for a taxi to transfer the injured girl from one hospital to another in Hebron, until the child was finally transferred to the children's ward in Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem.

This is a little story about a little girl, orphaned and poor, who peered out from the door of her home into the street, at a time when the Israel Defense Forces came to capture wanted men and the children were throwing stones at the soldiers. A rubber bullet fired by the soldiers at the stone-throwers hit her jaw and shattered it. [ . . . ]
 

Madis Senner, Jesus Didn't Lie, Mr. Bush... Talking Points for Easter Weekend: We need to follow Jesus' advice and tell President Bush and his faithful followers that lying, deceiving and killing are sins that defy the teachings of Jesus. Worse by claiming to be a Christian, particularly one who feels called, President Bush is dissing Jesus with all his lies, misdeeds and anti-Christian behavior of war. He is a resounding confirmation of Jesus' apocalyptic prediction that there would be many pretending to be like him (Jesus) (Mt 24: 23-25).
 

(A brief extract from a very informative article)
Kristoffer Larrson, Are 40 Percent of All Swedes "Anti-Semites?" - Anatomy of a Statistical Flim-Flam: On March 14, 2006, a report on anti-Semitism in Sweden was published with sensation findings. It claimed that a significant proportion of the Swedish public harbor "anti-Semitic views." As one could expect, this finding caught the attention of the Jewish world. The Israeli daily Ha'aretz warned, "41 percent of Swedes are prejudiced against Jews."

Anti-Semitism does exist in Sweden, but it has been strongly exaggerated in this report, most of whose conclusions are highly questionable. This is especially clear when the authors of the report explain that sometimes criticising the state of Israel could be regarded as anti-Semitism.

Similarly, Swedes are tarnished with the anti-Semitism brush for concurring with a statement about a Jewish conspiracy controlling the U.S. and that the Jews killed Jesus, without knowing what they are concurring to. [ . . . ]

A far more interesting report was issued in Israel just a week later. A 68 per cent majority of the Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab Israeli, and 40 per cent think that the Israeli government should encourage them to leave the country. Instead of going on about anti-Semitism that doesn't exist, Bachner and Ring should be far more worried about what is happening in the Middle East. Israel welcomes reports about a widespread anti-Semitism in the world, and as the Arab Israeli MK Taleb el-Sana noted: "Yet when it happens at their home, they're quiet, and that's why this is a two-fold failure--they are racist, and they're also not attempting to address their own racism."
 

Brian Cloughley, Risking the Ultimate Blowback; Don't Blitz Iran: [ . . . ]
The Pentagon has packed the Persian Gulf with dozens of warships that have identified and tracked almost every radar and missile site along the Iraqi coast. Satellites have done the same inland. Strike aircraft from US carriers have been trailing their coats and practicing attacks on Iranian defense installations for years. The shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner by the USS Vincennes was only part of the game. (300 innocent people were murdered and the captain of the ship was decorated, which gave Iran the message about where it stands in the US scheme of things.)
[ . . . ]

Even if Cheney and Bush are not lunatic enough to send their cruise missiles and bombers to attack Iran they might manage to have harsh economic sanctions imposed, additional to the unilateral ones in place by the US for years. They usually ignore warning signals, so doubtless they dismissed the unmistakable threat in September 2005 that Iran could endure a self-inflicted cut in oil exports in the national interest of combating what it would consider rabidly hostile action. It is estimated that cutting exports would raise the price of oil to $80-100 a barrel. This wouldn't matter to the rich in America, who are all that Cheney and Bush care about. But it would matter to the average man and woman who are even now struggling to make ends meet as a result of the rich-supportive tax policy of the present Administration.

There is no point in putting the moral position against attacking Iran. The Cheney-Bush administration has shown itself impervious to argument, and presenting a case against killing thousands of innocent people cuts no ice with blinkered zealots. The planned blitzkrieg of divine strikes will probably take place. It will alter the entire world and create hatred of America that will never be eradicated. And there is nothing we can do about it. At this Easter time (and Thai New Year), God help us all.
 

Jim Lobe, Iran Showdown Tests Power of "Israel Lobby"
 

Greg Szymanski, Cindy Sheehan Wants To Spend Easter With President Bush As Protestors Gather In Crawford For Peace Rally; But Bush At Last Minute Cancels Trip Home, Wanting To Spend The Holiday With People Who Paint Their Easter Eggs 'Blood Red': Cindy Sheehan is in Crawford again, heading up a peace rally at the doorstep of President Bush's Texas White House.
 

US marines offer Babylon apology: US forces built a helicopter pad on the ancient ruins and filled their sandbags with archaeological material in the months following the 2003 invasion.

Col Coleman told the BBC that if the Iraqis wanted an apology for the destruction caused by his men he was willing to give one.