And every day that Hillary hangs on; every vote she gets; every dollar that some "progressive" gives her; every blogger that supports her...
pushes back the day that Obama can really go after Bush, the GOOP, and Bush III---AKA John McCain, for creating and sustaining this misery.
LM- when you weigh in on a topic like this the hammer always comes down heavy. I for one wouldn't want it any other way. Fight on!
LM,
There are some matters which should never make us comfortable, so thanks for the reminder.
Thank you. I hate to my soul that you have to write this, and I thank you from that same soul that you do.
If there are any of the soul-dead who could wake up, DailyKos' IGTNT diaries could do it -they break my heart anew each time I read them.
IGTNT stands for "I Got the News Today"
When will the US realize that this Iraqi expedition is as pointless as the Crimean War (1854-56). Sure, initially, the reasoning seemed 'overwhelming', but what with the inept prosecution, minds changed decidedly. A British government fell because of it and people had the sense to just make an end of it.......... reasonably quickly. Reading the diary of a British officer who served throughout is quite enlightening.
And 4,000 lives sucked away is nothing to them at all. A mere apéritif...
Jesus...I don't think I've ever seen a more succinct assessment of how these villains perceive the sacrifice of the lives of our troops.
The Iraq numbers are actually far far worse than the comparison to NYPD or LAPD for a whole lot of reasons.
First, military units, especially in Iraq, require much larger teams. In an ordinary American city you can have two cops in a squad car and they can handle most of what they need to. What is the size of the average American unit on patrol in Iraq? I guarantee it isn't two soldiers in a single vehicle. I expect that more realistically we're looking at least a 10-1 ratio between Iraq and the average American police force which means that it takes at least 10-times the number of soldiers to patrol a given patch of ground compared to the average police force.
Second, a whole lot of soldiers are occupied with non-police duties. For example, Iraq is full of military hospitals, trauma wards, and EMT services that are staffed with thousands of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who are all uniformed military. In an ordinary American city all those people are present as well, but they aren't wearing blue.
At the end of WW-II I think there were something like 5 million allied forces occupying the western sectors of Germany and another 6+ million soviet troops occupying their half. This for a country about the size of Iraq with most of the adult male population either dead or behind barbed wire.
Now that's how you do an occupation.
I also enjoy that those 4000 (and more soon) died to make Iran more present and powerful in Iraq.
Again, to reiterate: We, the USA, are fighting on behalf of Maliki, who is a puppet of Hakim, who is a puppet of IRAN.
We are fighting against a nationalist al-Sadr, who, while also a Shia, is more of a nationalist than Hakim.
This is all now a sick joke.
I'm not to stir up shit, nor lay waste to the lives lost of our troops, and the MILLION+ of Iraqi's that our sick fuck invasion kilt.
But Country Joe McDonald was on the raydeo last week. He's been a voice many of us have heard, listned to, and honored.
He said, Vietnam, 50,000 dead.
Millions of Viet's dead.
13 years?
So, what's the comparison?
Um, I got nuttin.
He also said, he don't think street protests do much. This from a guy who PUT many of us into the streets.
So he got me going.
Did the street action of the late 60's to early 70's REALLY have an impact on policy?
I'm not sure. I'll leave that for those who know more than I do.
But I gotta say, having been there then, and here now. I'm about as hateful, jaded, pissed and angry as then, only, more so.
And I guess, others are, too, of my generation.
And of other generations.
So if Country Joe says takin it to the streets is NOT the way? What is?
Are the old ways of effective protest from Selma to Berkeley, from The Bus to The War, and the music on the airwaves (um, not happenin now), people on the radio antiwar (Um, not happenin now), public demonstrations (DEFINITELY not happenin now), are they passe?
We HAVE been booted off of mainstream tv, radio, and such.
But we have the internet, and the blogs.
Is our HISTORY, that we progressives have lived thru as boomers, is THAT strong enuff to say, 4,000 is ENOUGH!!!! IRAQ WAS WRONG!
But if we don't take it to the masses, are we not the dead tree falling in the forest with no one there?
The Blogs. I love them.
They can't sway mass public opinion, like we did, in the streets, the last time around.
So. Where do we go for change? Electoral process?
I got nuttin. You?
There'll probably always be debate over whether or not the protests back in the 60s were the decisive factor in ending the Viet Nam War.
Some say the PTB/Establishment/Whateverthefuckyouwannacallit finally decided to cut their losses after Nixon's "secret plan to end the war" turned out to be a dud; others maintain the end of college deferments was what did it, since it put so many white middle-and-upper-class asses at risk.
And Steve often reminded us what lousy shape the military was in, by the early 70s: There were mutinies, riots, fragging, and rampant drug abuse.
I'm afraid it's going to take something similar to end the Occupation, and given how it's been so profitable to certain sectors, I don't see the PTB putting a stop to it any time soon.
You see, that's the evil beauty of this thing: After considerable experimentation, Bush's Real Base have found a nicely calibrated level of mayhem. It enables them to extract maximum war profiteering with minimum oversight, while the apparent body count is low enough to keep the populace from reaching for the torches and pitchforks.
They'll string it out as long as they can, then walk away with the loot.
The math is meaningless without setting these numbers within a stategic framework. After all, 4000 dead would be a small, but obviously painful, price to pay in order, for example, to defeat the Nazis.
The problem with the war in Iraq is that it has helped, not hurt, our two supposed enemies in the War on Terror; Saudi Arabia and Iran.
It was Saudi Arabia, with the aid of its state ideology, Wahabbi Islam, that attacked us on 9/11. Bush, due to his long standing family links to the House of Saud, classified most of the evidence of Saudi involvement. The invasion of Iraq was a diversion away from invading Saudi Arabia and shutting down all the Wahabbi madrassas. 4000 soldiers have died and Saudi Arabia continues to produce Wahabbi terrorists on an industrial scale. To let the Saudis attack us like that with no response was the greatest act of cowardness in US history. Can you imagine the outcry if after Pearl Harbor we had decided not to declare war on Japan but had instead invaded one of Japan's enemies?
And the fact that Iran now controls much of Iraq speaks volumes to the utter defeat the US has suffered to militant Islam under Bush. Iraq was secular but now Shari'a law is in effect everywhere, much to the chagrin of Iraqi women.
So the real catastrophe is that all the human tragedy and financial waste has only served to make the world a more dangerous place for everyone except militant Islamists
The part that makes me the saddest is the 100's of 1000's of innocent Iraqi's that have been killed. A massive number of people that left behind family as well, 4000, hell there were probably days when America killed that many people in their own country,
Remember that the evil fuckers who started this war refuse to even count the Iraqi dead, like they are some sub-species of human who are flotsam floating in the wind,
War on terror they shout as they hide under their beds sending the cream of their country’s youth off to die in a far away land for profit, I truly hope there is a hell.
And McSame is fine with us there for another 100 years, and (extrapolating very roughly and conservatively) another 80,000 US casualties in Iraq. And all for what will become a regional power struggle between two branches of Islam. Oil? We won't be seeing any.
This year, Americans will be presented with the same choice they had in 2004: either start stopping the waste of blood (and trillions in treasure), or continue in their delusions of imperial power and exceptionalism. Sad to say, it could still go either way.
Correction: "casualties" at 6:12am should read "deaths." The amount of US casualties is a whole other, and much larger, "bad number."
Larue, of course it did. By the time the war in Vietnam was nearing it's end, there were, regularly, tens of thousands of americans, including a lot of Vietnam vets, marching in support of ending THAT clusterfuck.
Joe's having acid flashbacks, and they're fucking with his memory. :o)
in grant's campaign to end the civil war, he sat down with lincoln and explained "the terrible arithmetic" involved. he said "i propose to fight it out on this line all summer, or all year if need be." he knew that he could blunder (like he did at cold harbor), he could falter (like he did in the wilderness) but he would eventually prevail simply because lee could not trade casualties.
before he left his post at the louisiana military academy to go north and prepare to fight sherman told them that shit. he told the southerners (who were his friends) that they had zero chance of winning, ever. the north was too numerous.
i would have hoped that when seaching for ground commanders they could have found at least one motherfucker who can count better than custer.
kevin thwe infuriating thign about this whole clusterfuck is that iran was changeing, befoer axis of evil, before iraq the moderates where winning the day in iran...the people where demandign cahnge and teh nation was trending mroe modern, mor emoderate....the facist in iran and the US couldn't have that..we needed weach other as major enamies to keep the fear going and to keep the facists in power...and thus was born the eternal war, with all its saber raddeling.
Moonglum's right. It boils down to this:
Too long without a bloody, useless war, and REAL peace might break out.
We couldn't have CNN running clips of thousands of Iranians holding candlelight parades in sympathy with us for 9-11. Nor, the progressives THERE, steadily gaining power.
THAT shit was a real threat to corporate amurka.
Well, Biden's not interested in manning the Surge-Koolaid stand any more:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/
2008...nrestuscongress
Street protests can work.
The street protests in Eastern Europe in the late 1980's, for example, certainly were effective. What it takes is a clear view of what you are trying to achieve and support from a suitably large fraction of the public.
Colin Kahl, Obama’s Iraq adviser, says gradual withdrawal will produce de-centralized federalism.
http://www2.nysun.com/article/74207
http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/a...guest-
post.html
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20...w-we-
fight.html
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