RNC Chairman Steele: an idiot again
"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."What is this asshat thinking?UPDATE
ABC News is reporting the RNC may relegate
Chairman Steele to irrelevance while maintaining his post at the RNC.
Isn't that redundant?
Labels: Afghanistan, GOP, Michael Steele, President Obama, Republicans
Six Years of War
For what?
Three days from now, on the 19th of March, the United States invasion of Iraq will mark its sixth year. A million dead Iraqis, more than 4,000 dead U.S. military persons, an eventual cost, according to the economist Joseph Stiglitz, of 3 trillion dollars.
Many people who voted for President Obama believed, quite irrationally as far as I’m concerned, that once elected, Obama would remove all U. S. troops from Iraq within sixteen months. I said many times on my radio program that Obama was being too clever by half with his semantics about withdrawal. He said then, and he confirmed my worst suspicions a couple weeks ago, that he would remove “combat” troops from Iraq, as if every service person there is not in combat. His intension during the campaign, confirmed in a late February speech, was to leave thousands of U.S. military personnel in Iraq beyond the now 19 month period of his supposed withdrawal. 50,000 troops to be exact. Non-combat troops to be sure. I suspect that by the time August 2011 rolls around the 50,000 will have grown considerably, more in line with the 60 to 90,000 I predicted during the campaign.
According to the withdrawal agreement drawn up by W. and his puppet in Iraq, the United States must have all troops out of Iraq by the end of 2012 - - just in time for the November 2012 election. Don’t count on it.
The speech Obama gave at the end of February could very well have been delivered by W. We found no mention in the speech of the on-going and worsening conflict between the Shia and the Kurds that will undermine any Iraqi government. We heard no mention of what is now to happen to the Suni forces the United States has been paying not to kill U. S. soldiers for the last two years.
According to the highly respected military correspondent Tom Ricks, author of The Gamble, Obama’s plan for exiting Iraq is the “sixth plan he has covered that attempts to get U. S. forces out of Iraq.” Mr. Ricks warns in his book that Bush’s war is about to engulf Obama. He writes that the United States will be in Iraq for many years to come, “and that in the end, we will be the losers.” What will emerge, Ricks told MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, “is not a democracy, not an American ally, run by a strongman, probably tougher, smarter and more adept than Saddam Hussein and who is, ironically, an even worse guy.” The winners, as far as I’m concerned, are the mullahs in Iran who will be quite content to have the war continue to bleed billions from the United States every month.
If you are concerned about the continued occupation of Iraq and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, join with your fellow citizens for an anti-war vigil on Thursday, 19 March, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm at Zelasko Park, in Aberdeen, Washington.
Labels: Afghanistan, costs of war, Iraq, Iraq War, war crimes, war dead
Obama in Afghanistan
Some of the wounded lay where they fell, waiting for what they knew would come. For others, a comradely shot to the head was thought humane. Rudyard Kipling captured the essence of the terrible decision:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
That was January 1842. A British army of 5,000 troops and 12,000 civilians left Kabul, Afghanistan in a mad retreat to Jalalabad. As the Afghanis cut them to pieces, chaos prevailed among the British soldiers who, it is reported, knocked down their officers with the butts of their muskets. On the 13th of January, just seven days after the retreat commenced, one man, bloody 
and torn, mounted on a miserable pony, and pursued by horsemen, was seen riding furiously across the plains. The other 17,000 lay dead on the snowy ground.
Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Alexander the Great, Moghuls, the British, and the Soviet Union were all driven from Afghanistan.
The United States now has 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. It’s Bush’s war. “We are on the verge of significantly expanding the war in Afghanistan,” Ray Bonner wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “which will inevitably affect Pakistan as well. Unfortunately, there has been little or no debate about President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to send in more troops,” Bonner concluded. When he does that, when Obama escalates the war by sending in 20,000 more troops, on that day it will be Obama’s war.
Why is the United States in Afghanistan? Contrary to the propaganda of the Bush and now Obama administrations, as Bonner points out, “the threat presented by Al Qaeda has been exaggerated.” Al Qaeda’s “importance in the general scheme of things is greatly overstated by the West,” Tariq Ali writes in his new book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and adviser to three presidents, “acknowledges that enlarging the war in Afghanistan is exactly what Al Qaeda wants, just as it wants the conflict in Iraq to continue. ‘In its view,’ Riedal says, the bleeding wars offer the best opportunity to defeat the United States’.”
Have we learned nothing from history? Does no one remember that Osama bin Laden is a creation of the United States? Does no one remember that some of the weapons he now uses on U. S. soldiers were supplied to him through the largess of Congressmen Norm Dicks and Charlie Wilson?
After seven years of war and occupation, Afghanistan is a failed, narco-state. It has a puppet president whose authority does not extend beyond Kabul. He depends for his survival on NATO and U. S. mercenaries. It has, according to Ali, “a corrupt and abusive police force, a nonfunctioning judiciary, a burgeoning criminal layer and a deepening social and economic crisis.”
Sounds to me a lot like Vietnam under U.S. tutelage in the 1950s and 1960s. I hope Obama does not go down this road, to compound the tragedy we have already induced..
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's
Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Empire, imperialism, Iraq War
Obama Inaguration
As I write this commentary, Barack Obama has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.
The first black president.
Now, we can begin the process of redemption for our original sin as a nation - - slavery. Obama’s inauguration does not mark the end of white racism, it does not mean that the inequalities and discrimination faced by generations of black people in this country has ended.
It does mean that finally, the process has started.
As one who has long fought for racial equality, openly and defiantly since that day in 1967 when the commanding general at Keesler Air Force base in Bilouxi, Mississippi attempted to cover-up a racial incident and ordered several of us to deny the truth, which we refused to do, I am feeling an overwhelming sense of pride that that a black man will lead this country.
I can still hardly believe it.
I did not vote for Obama. I couldn’t - - not after spending the last eight years protesting the illegal and immoral actions of the United States’ government and demanding the impeachment and prosecution of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell and the rest of the criminal conspiracy in control of our government.
I could not vote for Obama because he promised to continue some of those policies and embark on similar crimes.
How could I protest Bush’s illegal war in and occupation of and then vote for Obama who intends to continue that occupation through the too clever by half manipulation of language regarding “combat troops?”
How could I protest Bush’s illegal war in and occupation of Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, and then vote for Obama who promised during the campaign to escalate that war? Not only escalate the war in Afghanistan but enlarge that war by continuing Bush’s covert invasion of Pakistan Pakistan
How could I vote for Obama when, like Bush, he attempts to erase the Palestinians as if the root of the solution to the crisis in the Middle East did not go through Jerusalem.
The inauguration of Barack Obama holds great promise for our country. I want Obama to succeed. I want our country to succeed as a beacon of freedom and justice. I’m just not sanguine in either case. I guess I read too much history.
Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq War, Obama, war crimes
