The Appalling And Appalled Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown seems to think that some people have the right to freedom of speech and some don’t.

From Brown irked by plan for antiwar demo:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he is appalled by an Islamic group's proposal to demonstrate against the UK's continuation of war in Afghanistan.

In a Monday statement issued in response to calls by the Islam4UK group for a protest march in the country, Brown expressed strong dismay at the plan and said he was “personally appalled” by the group's bid to protest against the government's war policies in Afghanistan.

The statement came after the Islam4UK leader, Anjem Choudary, informed families of fallen British soldiers in Afghanistan about his plan to organize an antiwar rally on Wootton Bassett streets where there has recently been a cortege of a number of killed soldiers.

Choudary told the BBC about his intention to honor “Muslim victims” of the conflict in Afghanistan, mainly Afghan civilians.

“It's to highlight the real cost of the war in Afghanistan,” the 42-year-old lawyer of Pakistani descent noted, adding, “The sad reality of the situation is that if I were to hold it somewhere else, it would not have the media attention that it has now.”

“It is worth reminding those who are still not blinded by the media propaganda that Afghanistan is not a British town near Wootton Bassett but rather Muslim land which no one has the right to occupy, with a Muslim population who do not deserve their innocent men, women and children to be killed for political mileage and for the greedy interests of the oppressive US and UK regimes,” he added.

Personally, I find war to be appalling, not speech. I also never find anti-war rallies to be appalling.

There is a comment to this news item that I find interesting:

The ones who should be ashamed are not those who stand for the Divine Principles of Truth & Justice, rather those who engage in the aggressive military invasions of other lands, oppressing and killing the innocents. In addition, each soldier, if he warrants the name, needs to look deeply into their conscience and ask if they are fighting a just war to defend their country or an oppressive, unjust one.

I'd Be Happier If He Wiped It Off

From a Kyle Michel Sullivan comment at Hullabaloo:

People never learn. Bush fucked Afghanistan up but it'll be Obama's fault when we don't win it. Bush fucked the economy up, but it'll be Obama's fault if it doesn't turn around before 2010. Bush destroyed America's credibility around the world with his policies of kidnapping and torture, but it'll be Obama's fault for not throwing every member of Bush's vile cabinet into jail. Yet Obama's acting like we can still all just get along. Obama stepped into shit, but it IS his own damn fault he hasn't wiped it off his shoe. And once again, he's allowing the shit to stay right where it is by escalating the war in Afghanistan, and history be damned for daring to show no one can win in that part of the world. Period.

The Internets Today

I’ve been reading some of what has been rattling around in the internets tubes out there today and that is the best way to describe it. Out there.

After reading this post by Jonathan Schwarz several times my reaction remains the same. Huh? I must be missing something.

There also seems to be a meme spreading out in tube land that the people who are critical of Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan are wrong to criticize Obama because:

• Obama is simply keeping his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan, you stupid fucks!
  


• Ignore history. The fact that the Soviets couldn’t win in Afghanistan is irrelevant, you stupid fucks!


• Obama says we will send more troops now so that we can leave Afghanistan in 18 months, you stupid fucks!

And this stuff is from leftist leaning sites. Go figure.

Will Obama 1.0 Help Create Osama 2.0?

From Tomasky, Moore, and Afghanistan by Lindsay Beyerstein:

…when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a lot of people in the Muslim world saw it as struggle of Christendom vs. Islam. As a result, Afghanistan became a destination for would-be jihadists from all over the world. That's how Osama bin Laden got his start. If our goal is ultimately to marginalize Islamic extremists, we should be wary about escalating the kind of fight that galvanized them in the first place.

Over There

From Here We Go Again by Robert Scheer:

It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama’s own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops to contain them.

“Over there, over there, send the word, send the word, over there,

That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,

The drums rum-tum-ming everywhere

So prepare, say a prayer, send the word, send the word to beware

We'll be over, we're coming over,
And we won't come back 'til it's over Over There!” George M. Cohan

"We're fighting them there, so we don't have to fight them here.” George W. Bush

Should Obama change his name to George to fit in? Perhaps, King George the Second?

Isn’t there something incredibly immoral about fighting our battles on someone else’s turf? I simply raise the question. I’m not saying that I want the battle to be fought in the United States. I also am not saying that nothing should be done. I simply ask the question. By way of explanation, here is another question. Why should the lives of the civilians of Afghanistan count for less than the lives of the civilians of the United States?

Will it ever be over, over there?

The Good News And The Bad News

The good news of the day:
"I have no aspirations for further office," Cheney said in an interview with Politico.

The bad news of the day:
Barack Obama seems to be morphing into Dick Cheney: Obama Sending 30,000 More Troops To Afghanistan.

Finish The Job

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

Surely Barack Obama is aware of what happened to the Soviet Union when they tried to ‘finish the job’ in Afghanistan.

From Obama May Add 30,000 Troops in Afghanistan by Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt:

President Obama said Tuesday that he was determined to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, and his aides signaled to allies that he would send as many as 25,000 to 30,000 additional American troops there even as they cautioned that the final number remained in flux.

These three comments speak for me and sum up my thoughts on this issue quite accurately:

From Baffled Observer:

"Finish the job"? What job is he talking about? The job of assuring economic ruin at home while developing an ever-increasing supply of terrorists abroad? The job of propping up one of the most corrupt regimes in the world? The job of appeasing the military-industrial complex, sponsoring and committing torture, and destroying our Bill of Rights? Or all of them?

From avrds:

Finish the job. I wonder what that means?

Bring both Afghanistan and the U.S. to its knees?

This is an occupation that neither country wants nor can afford and will probably prove to be the final blow to the U.S. empire.

Ironic indeed that President Obama will now be ultimately responsible for it, not the Bush-Cheney presidency.

When will this country ever learn?

From margaret:

Wonderful, just wonderful. So Obama has to prove he isn't an arugula eating sissy by out-Bushing Bush. The goof-ball doesn't understand that many, like me, voted for him, ‘specifically,’ because he promised to bring the troops home.

Why do I even bother to vote?

Real men end wars, they don’t prolong them.

What Do The Afghans Think?

“The world's goin' crazy and
Nobody gives a damn anymore.
And they're breakin' off relationships and
Leavin' on sailin' ships for far and distant shores.
You're my brother,
Though I didn't know you yesterday.
I'm your brother.
Together we can find a way” Ray Davies

Noam Chomsky condemns 'immoral' Afghan war

The Left thinks that Glenn Beck is crazy. The Right thinks that Noam Chomsky is crazy. Fine. To each his own, I suppose. I do have one question. Why does Glenn Beck get so much more attention than Noam Chomsky does? After all, they're both crazy, and the United States just loves crazy right now.

It must be that damn liberal media. They’re just plain crazy.

Assuming that the Afghans aren’t crazy, they probably think that all Americans are crazy.

Winter Soldier Testimony

From Winter Soldier on the Hill: War Vets Testify Before Congress:

War veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan came to Capitol Hill earlier this year to testify before Congress and give an eyewitness account about the horrors of war. Like the Winter Soldier hearings in March, when more than 200 service members gathered for four days in Silver Spring, Maryland to give their eyewitness accounts of the injustices occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, “Winter Soldier on the Hill” was designed to drive home the human cost of the war and occupation—this time, to the very people in charge of doing something about it.

Former Marine sniper, Sergio Kochergin:

Another thing I want to touch on is, problems with equipment are another big problem. Where is all the money going that is given to the military? During my first deployment, I had a Vietnam-era flak jacket without a plate. My M-16 was made back in the late ’70s. We did not have enough night-vision goggles for everyone. While Marines are patrolling in the Hummers every day and get blown up, because the only protection they have are the flak blankets hanging from the doors, while generals and colonels and other high-ranking officers that leave a base once in awhile have brand new, fully armored Hummers that are always spotless clean sitting on the base, while other Hummers are bleeding with our brothers’, sons’, daughters’, sisters’ blood every day.

Read more here.

The Lesser Of Two Evils

The move I hear from Barack Obama, the more I think of him as the lesser of two evils. This morning on the television I heard him talking about wanting to move troops out of Iraq. However, instead of bringing them back to the United States where they belong, he wants to move them to Afghanistan. I am disappointed in Obama. He seems to be willing to abandon principle after principle in order to get elected as president.

Fear should not trump what is morally right. We do not belong in anyone else's country. If we have a right to be in Iraq and Afghanistan, then the French (or any other country’s) army has a right to be here in the United States.

From My Plan for Iraq by Barack Obama:

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

Here is part of what Rob Payne says about this:

So for Obama the past is not remembered, all that exists is the here and now. We didn’t invade Iraq, lynch their leader, dismantle their government, and destroy their infrastructure. We didn’t murder them by the hundreds of thousands or send millions into exile. Quite clearly the problem all along has been that the people of Iraq have not been acting in a responsible manner. And now, at least according to Obama, we need more military, more helicopters, bombs, guns, bullets, and tanks in order to expand the war on terror into Pakistan and widen the war in Afghanistan.

So what this trip is really about is Obama needs to show us and the world that he is ready to take command of the imperial agenda and his little cock-a-doodle-do in the NYT assures the establishment that he is ready to pull the trigger. Ready, aim, fire, today Afghanistan tomorrow the world and not only will he not be afraid to slaughter and kill but he will be better and more efficient about it than his predecessor.

War is immoral. The occupation of another country is immoral. Think of all the talk you have heard about Iraq and Afghanistan for the last seven years. Rationalize this, rationalize that. Endless rationalization will never change the fact that war is immoral.

I’d like to see a president who recognized that fact, and believed it, and had the courage to act on it.

More Bush Failure

Today the BBC has a report on the Taliban and how much money they make from opium in Afghanistan. The problem of course is that opium is financing the Taliban. They use this money for arms and ammunition. And the Bush administration seems to be doing nothing about it.

From Taleban's '$100m opium takings' by Kate Clark:

The Taleban made an estimated $100m (£50m) in 2007 from Afghan farmers growing poppy for the opium trade, the United Nations says.

"The closer we look at it, the closer we see the insurgents [are] to the drugs trade," said David Belgrove, head of counter narcotics at the British embassy in Kabul.

"We can say that a lot of their arms and ammunition are being funded directly by the drugs trade."

Let’s step back in time to almost TWO years ago.

From High on Opium, Not Democracy by Robert Scheer:

The good news, for drug fiends, is that Afghanistan has just harvested its biggest opium crop ever, up a whopping 59 percent from last year and big enough to cover 130 percent of the entire world market. The street price for illegal heroin, 92 percent of which now comes from Afghanistan, should be way down from Bangkok to London, and for those shooting up in the back alleys of Chicago. The bad news, for the rest of us, is that in Bush-liberated Afghanistan, billions in drug profits are financing the Taliban.

Remember them, the guys who harbored the Al Qaeda terrorists, who gifted us with the 9/11 attacks five years ago, that President Bush promised to eliminate? Well, it turns out that while he was distracted with Iraq, the patrons of terrorism were very much in business back where the 9/11 attack was hatched, turning Afghanistan into a narco-state that provides a lucrative source of cash for the "evildoers" Bush forgot about.

What the Bush Administration will not confront in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, is that its ill-conceived and disastrously executed nation-building schemes are sinking into the swamp of local and historical realities. Enamored of American military might but having little understanding of the world beyond, Bush and his team have ignored Gen. Colin Powell's reported "you break it, you own it" warnings, floundering after initial military victories and ultimately strengthening the hand of local and international terrorists. Rather than take care of business in Afghanistan after 9/11, Bush and clueless US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed bin Laden to slip out of the Tora Bora caves to plan more attacks and the Taliban to regroup. Instead, Bush and Co. threw the bulk of our military and aid resources into a disastrous attempt to remake oil-rich Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, into an American puppet state.

Does President Bush care about this problem at all? Is he doing anything about it?

Speaking of terrorism. This is what we get from the McCain camp today.

Bush Is A Soldier Abuser

I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to be in Iraq or Afghanistan either. Bush is a coward. The only reason he isn’t reinstating the draft is because it would be political suicide. Instead he keeps sending the same soldiers back over and over again. It is a disgrace how he has taken advantage of and abused those in our military. Enough is enough.

From ‘Anything Not to Go Back’ by Tony Dokoupil:

As an internist at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Stephanie Santos is used to finding odd things in people's stomachs. So last spring when a young man, identifying himself as an Iraq-bound soldier, said he had accidentally swallowed a pen at the bus station, she believed him. That is, until she found a second pen. It read 1-800-GREYHOUND. Last summer, according to published reports, a 20-year-old Bronx soldier paid a hit man $500 to shoot him in the knee on the day he was scheduled to return to Iraq. The year before that, a 24-year-old specialist from Washington state escaped a second tour of duty, according to his sister, by strapping on a backpack full of tools and leaping off the roof of his house, injuring his spine.

Such cases of self-harm are a "rising trend" that military doctors are watching closely, says Col. Kathy Platoni, an Army Reserve psychologist who has worked with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. "There are some soldiers who will do almost anything not to go back," she says. Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychologist, agrees that we could see an uptick in intentional injuries as more U.S. soldiers serve long, repeated combat tours, "but we just don't have good, hard data on it." Intentional- injury cases are hard to identify, and even harder to prosecute. Fewer than 21 soldiers have been punitively discharged for self-harm since 2003, according to the military. What's worrying, however, is that American troops committed suicide at the highest rate on record in 2007—and the factors behind self-injury are similar: combat stress and strained relationships. "It's often the families that don't want soldiers to return to war," says Ritchie.

Read the rest here.

Perhaps President Bush Should Still Be In School

From Bush says country must not lose its nerve in Iraq by Ben Feller:

President Bush said Wednesday that rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan is proving difficult as the wars rage on, and "we're learning as we go."

And they say that Barack Obama lacks experience. At least he was smart enough to say we shouldn’t invade Iraq.

An Honorable Man

From IVAW member Matthis Chiroux announces his refusal to deploy to Iraq:

Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, who served in the Army until being honorably discharged last summer after over four years of service in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Phillipines, today publicly announced his intention to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.

Here is a part of his statement to the press:

This occupation is unconstitutional and illegal and I hereby lawfully refuse to participate as I will surely be a party to war crimes. Furthermore, deployment in support of illegal war violates all of my core values as a human being, but in keeping with those values, I choose to remain in the United States to defend myself from charges brought by the Army if they so wish to pursue them. I refuse to participate in the occupation of Iraq.

My thanks to Christiaan Briggs. Mr. Briggs also reminds of this from the Nuremberg Trial Proceedings:

To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Catapult That Propaganda

Actually it’s more like they’re using cannons:

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.

Perhaps there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, or at least a conspiracy of the powerful:

So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine?

Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.

But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.