Reality in Iraq

"The Marines constantly debated the morality of what they were engaged in. A sergeant in the platoon told me he had consulted with his priest about killing. The priest had told him it was all right to kill for his government so long as he didn't enjoy it. By the time the unit reached the outskirts of Baghdad, this sergeant was certain he had already killed at least four men. When his battalion commander praised the unit for "slaying dragons" on the way to Baghdad, the sergeant later told his men, "If we did half the shit back home we've done here, we'd be in prison." By then, the sergeant told me, he'd reconsidered what his priest had told him about killing. "Where the fuck did Jesus say it's OK to kill people for your government? Any priest who tells me that has got no credibility."

-from an article by Evan Wright, who is the author of Generation Kill, about a Marine reconnaissance unit in Iraq.

No thanks for this

From: "Wall St. Drooling Over Privatization "
by Dave Zweifel
Madison Capital (Wisconsin)
Nov. 24, 2004:

If you're wondering what all this Bush administration talk about private Social Security accounts is all about, you need look no further than Wall Street.

Thanks to Bush's win on Nov. 2, the industry that makes lots of money off of other people's money is already lining up to share in the spoils should the president get his way with his self-described "reform" of Social Security.

That, after all, is what it's always been about - freeing up tens of billions of dollars on which the big financial houses can earn commissions, taking that role away from the federal government, which, incidentally, has been able to administer the entire system at a cost of less than 2 percent of the assets...

If Bush would now allow wage earners to siphon a portion of their Social Security payroll deductions into their own personal private accounts, either another way must be found to make up for the shortfall that will occur for existing retirees - or benefits for those retirees and the widowed and orphaned will have to be cut.

Generals speak out on Iraq war

Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94: "The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world."

Adm. Stansfield Turner, NATO Allied commander for Southern Europe, 1975-77; CIA director, 1977-81: "I think we are in a real mess. There are eighty-seven attacks on Americans every day..."

Lt. Gen. William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88: "It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse. The sooner we leave, the less the damage."

Gen. Anthony Zinni, Commander in chief of the United States Central Command, 1997-2000: "Did we have to do this? I saw the intelligence right up to the day of the war, and I did not see any imminent threat there."

Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 1997-2000: "Iraq is a blood bath, and we need to be dealing with this in a much more sophisticated way than the cowboy named Bush."

Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO supreme Allied commander for Europe, 1997-2000: "Have you seen an American strategic blunder this large? The answer is: not in fifty years."

Adm. William Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89: "Is what we are achieving in Iraq worth what we're paying? Weighing the good against the bad, we have got to get out."

Facing reality

"Free elections, a free press, and independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available for sale to the highest bidder...The machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted."

Arundhati Roy

(At least we have signs of hope like some regional election successes, journalists like Bill Moyers, and prosecutors
who are willing to go after criminals like Tom DeLay. ricardo)

Should Canada indict Bush?

From a Nov. 16 article by Thomas Walkom in the Toronto Star:

First, there is the fact of the Iraq war itself. After 1945, Allied tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo — in an astonishing precedent — ruled that states no longer had the unfettered right to invade other countries and that leaders who started such conflicts could be tried for waging illegal war.

Concurrently, the new United Nations outlawed all aggressive wars except those authorized by its Security Council.

Today, a strong case could be made that Bush violated the Nuremberg principles by invading Iraq. Indeed, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already labelled that war illegal in terms of the U.N. Charter.

Second, there is the manner in which the U.S. conducted this war. The mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison is a clear contravention of the Geneva Accord. The U.S. is also deporting selected prisoners to camps outside of Iraq (another contravention). U.S. press reports also talk of shadowy prisons in Jordan run by the CIA, where suspects are routinely tortured. And the estimated civilian death toll of 100,000 may well contravene the Geneva Accords prohibition against the use of excessive force.

How many more Iraqis do we kill for revenge?

"A recent report suggested that if one compares the number of deaths that usually occur in Iraq per year with the number since Bush's invasion, the cost of the war in dead Iraqis may be more than a hundred thousand human beings. Now Iraqi deaths don't count because they look funny and talk funny and have a funny religion. Besides they're Arabs, and we have a score to settle with Arabs because of their attack on the World Trade Center. Yet if we are able to sustain the number of deaths that have happened as a consequence of the invasion, we will soon have accounted for as many as Saddam Hussein did. That's a lot of dead Arabs -- and a lot of bereaved spouses, parents, children, other relatives and friends. How many more will we have to kill before we're satisfied with our revenge?"

-- Andrew Greeley in Chicago Sun Times, Nov. 12, 2004

Torture Guy nominated

"The president is putting his own counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who wrote the famous memo defending torture, in charge of America's civil liberties. Torture Guy, who blithely threw off 75 years of international law and set the stage for the grotesque abuses at Abu Ghraib and dubious detentions at Guantánamo, seems to have a good grasp of what's just. No doubt we'll soon learn what other protections, besides the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution, Gonzales finds 'quaint' and 'obsolete.'"

--Maureen Dowd, in International Herald Tribune, Nov. 11, 2004

The monstrosity before us

Yes, millions of Americans were moved by fear. Yes, many were moved by their apocalyptic religious beliefs. Yes, many were drawn to Bush's "down home" mannerisms. But the monstrous policy of the Bushites still stares us all in the face. I do believe that the eyes of the majority will yet open before the reality described last week by Mark Mofford in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"It simply boggles the mind: we've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant."

Why did they believe him?

"George W. Bush has ensured that Americans, who once occupied a veritable shining city on the hill, are more hated, more imperiled and more in debt than ever. He has made America less respected, less secure and less democratic. These are demonstrable facts. Yet Bush has the unmitigated gall to assert that his record is, in many respects, exactly opposite of what it actually is.
"And the American people — half of them, at least — believed him. Why? Did they simply believe the distortions of the campaign? Or do they truly think Bush has led us in the right direction? If it's the latter, may God save us from ourselves. And from our president."

 Clint Talbott
A Sad End to Appalling Campaign
Published on Wednesday, November 3, 2004 by the Boulder Daily Camera

Four more gruesome years?

After six hours of being glued to the TV switching among PBS, ABC and CNN, I can thoughtfully say that this is one of the worst days of my life. Unless we see a miracle in the Ohio count, our country and our planet now face four more years of
George W. Bush.

How many more young Americans will be sent to their deaths? Will Bush kill another 100,000 Iraqi children, women and
men? How much more can he stoke Arab and Muslim rage? How many more young terrorists will he create? Will he start another illegal, premptive war? And how many more forests will see bulldozers cutting roads for corporate trucks? How many more environmental protections will be trashed? Will we get another Scalia, another Thomas? How much wider and deeper can Bush dig the chasm between the rich and the poor? How much more can he take from education and health care to put into the pockets of his millionaire and billionaire buddies? How much more will he cater to religious fanatics?

And how on earth did over fifty percent of voters come to support this man?

From here the future looks ghastly.

A view from Canada

From "It's the War, Stupid"
by Eric Margolis
Toronto Sun, Oct. 31, 2004

Unless the next U.S. administration imposes a just peace on Israelis and Palestinians and ends the occupation of Iraq, anti-U.S. terrorism will intensify.

Bush has debauched America's finances by his $290-billion US wars and $521-billion deficit. Whoever wins, the global economy will be hit by waves of inflation caused by Bush's ruinous spending.

Kerry is a weak candidate with a lacklustre record. But at least he is a sensible, educated man who will bring in a team of moderate advisers that do not want to launch catastrophic foreign crusades or spend like drunken sailors. Kerry is a cautious internationalist; Bush an unapologetic Bible-belt imperialist.

Most non-Americans believe the U.S. under Bush has become a dangerous rogue state that threatens world stability and peace. For them, anyone is better than George W. Bush.