Archive for the ‘election '08’ Category
Is ‘the Surge’ working for reasons other than advertised?
While I’m somewhat dubious about the source (my own personal opinion of Alternet is that they let too much of their opinion creep into their articles rather than let the facts speak for themselves) these paragraphs in the middle of a piece attacking John McCain caught my attention
The “surge is working” narrative’s not reality-based, and when it comes to Iraq, we’ve seen the spin give way to the ugly facts time and time again.
That the troop escalation has been anything but a success is not an ideological claim, as supporters of the occupation charge, but numerical and chronological. The surge began last February, and there was something approaching a consensus at the time that the addition of about 20,000 combat troops — the rest were support personnel — would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 25 million people. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey said at the time: “I personally think the surge of five U.S. Army brigades and a few Marine battalions dribbled out over five months is a fool’s errand.” But the troop build-up continued in March, April and May.
The period that followed was a bloodbath — last June and July were the most violent summer months of any year of the occupation. August was one of the bloodiest months, period. Then, that month, the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army to stand down. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths fell by about 50 percent the next month and decreased again in October and November. The militia is estimated to be 100,000 strong and is arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq after the U.S. military. While the change can’t be wholly ascribed to any single factor — the violence has also decreased as a result of communities that have been fully “cleansed” of one or another ethnic or sectarian group — it’s clear that al-Sadr’s order, not Bush’s “surge,” was responsible for most of whatever “success” there may have been.
Finally, there is the masterpiece of propaganda known as the “Sunni Awakening.” Spun as a sign of success, the reality is that the U.S. military turned over some of the areas where they’d encountered the most violent resistance to local Sunni authorities — many of whom they had condemned as “terrorists” previously — and started paying their fighters to stop shooting at U.S. troops. In other words, the U.S. was defeated and surrendered territory to the “enemy,” effectively paying reparations to local populations and suffering fewer casualties as a result. There are many ways to define success, but defeat and surrender are not among them. Yet, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, after four years of saying that Iraq was mostly stable aside from a few local areas and the Sunni “Triangle of Death,” the administration simply stopped using the phrase and replaced it with talk of a “Sunni Awakening.” We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
In summary - is the ‘Surge’s’ success based on the U.S claiming success while it’s retreating? It’d be rather like ‘Tricky Dicky’s’ way of dealing with Vietnam where the aim was eventually not to win, but rather to stop the South Vietnamese falling immediately after the U.S pulled. Food for thought anyway…
I shall admit that this may be a change:
Who would you think this belongs to?
Contributing greatly to _________’s perceived incompetence was his tendency to make public statements which were either self-contradictory (”We don’t want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward”), logically redundant (”The future will be better tomorrow”), obvious (”For NASA, space is still a high priority”), fallacious (”It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system”),or painfully confused and inappropriate, as when he addressed the United Negro College Fund, whose slogan is “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” ________ said “You take the United Negro College Fund model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
Oddly enough, it’s not George W. Bush
And while I realise that using wikipedia as a specific source of reference is never a great idea, its interesting because all of those quotes (bar the UNCF one) are attributed to George W. on the poster my brother gave to me for xmas…
This may be one of the first and few times that I ever give George W. credit for not being an idiot. It’s such an odd feeling that I felt I should share….
Ralph Wiggum for President
You know I’d nearly vote for him… I mean he’d be better than some of the options. Sorry the video isn’t embeddable…
So which candidate do you ‘really’ support?
Handy little flash questionnaire here that uses policy stances for candidates to see which one is ‘right’ for you. Unsurprisingly enough Edwards was my ‘first’ choice, but what really surprised me was that Hillary was, according to this anyway, my second…
Anyway, its well worth a look so pop over…
Reason to vote for Obama?
Interesting article here on the Atlantic website about Obama. The author lays out their reasons for why they feel Obama is the best choice, but this passage in particular I feel is interesting food for thought about the American political system and the relative lack of difference in the presidential candidates:
Take the biggest foreign-policy question—the war in Iraq. The rhetoric ranges from John McCain’s “No Surrender” banner to the “End the War Now” absolutism of much of the Democratic base. Yet the substantive issue is almost comically removed from this hyperventilation. Every potential president, Republican or Democrat, would likely inherit more than 100,000 occupying troops in January 2009; every one would be attempting to redeploy them as prudently as possible and to build stronger alliances both in the region and in the world. Every major candidate, moreover, will pledge to use targeted military force against al-Qaeda if necessary; every one is committed to ensuring that Iran will not have a nuclear bomb; every one is committed to an open-ended deployment in Afghanistan and an unbending alliance with Israel. We are fighting over something, to be sure. But it is more a fight over how we define ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on the ground.
Eddie Vedder: ”I Am A Patriot” and along with Jack Johnson: ’soon forget’
Really nice acoustic number from the ‘Pearl Jam’ lead singer. I have to admit, I love the guy’s voice…
The various lies of Rudi Giulani;
Wasn’t it Rudi who’s daughter put on her facebook that she supports Obama? Anyway regardless I don’t really like the man and am generally inclined to believe that he has simply piggybacked off the mythology of 9/11 to give himself a shot at the presidency. The writer of this (addmittedly rather long, but good) article feels the same. Have a look here.
‘Permanent Damage’ to the American system of govt?
This is from Steven Grant’s ‘Permanent Damage’ column over at comicbookresources - an extremely scary look at the way things in America could go - and while this is a ‘worst-case scenario’ thing its still quite interesting…
When the Ghost insists on sticking with Iraq (despite that country’s president saying America’s free to leave whenever it wants, though that may be just for consumption by Iraqi constituents, but if it is it’s basically putting an official stamp on the widespread perception of the American army as an occupation force) until it has fully achieved “American-style democracy,” it’s difficult to know for sure what he means. Since his grandfather Prescott was involved in the ’30s in a planned coup to replace Roosevelt with a military dictator ala Mussolini (BBC radio has just done a documentary on it, so you don’t have to take my word for it) and was a major financier of smear campaigns against Democratic Congressional candidates in the post-war ’40s, and the Ghost himself has railed against the Constitution as “a goddamned piece of paper” and praised the value of a dictator as long as that dictator was him, it’s kind of open to interpretation. Certainly his behavior in the White House indicates he doesn’t seem to believe it has anything to do with the rule of law or a system of checks and balances. And in the last week or so he has been on a real tear of trying to rule by fiat rather than process.
First it was the White House staff summoned by Congress to testify about possible White House involvement in the Justice Dept.’s replacement of a number of U.S. attorneys on apparently purely political grounds (one replacement shut down an Enron-level financial fraud case for no apparent reason, it was recently revealed); the Ghost ordered those subpoenaed to refuse to testify. Because he truly believes Congress has no right of oversight on any White House action, or to cover up the interference that Congress suspects? It’s looking a lot like both. New information shows the Ghost’s svengali Karl Rove sticking his nose into attorney appointments as far back as 2002, though the result didn’t do much for the Republican cause (the attorney ended up prosecuting Republicans who backed his appointment), and supposedly no-longer-existing e-mails sent between the White House and the DoJ on a backchannel computer network provided by the Republican Party to transfer documents and information they didn’t want on the public records keep cropping up. Undoubtedly Congress will now go to court to enforce the subpoenas - those summoned are already threatened with contempt of Congress charges - and this could turn into a major Constitutional brouhaha just in time for next year’s elections.
Then Rep. Peter DeFazio, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee with full security clearance, asked for a look at the plans the White House drew up to maintain “continuity of government” in the event of a major crisis, the White House, after initially agreeing, simply told him no. No explanation. Ironically, his main objective in reviewing the plan, details of which are known to no one outside a tiny White House clique but which have been effectively given the force of law via the Ghost’s signature, was to be able to soothe the growing number of Americans who see in the secret plan a conspiracy by a tiny clique to seize power, using a national emergency as an excuse. This “conspiracy theory” crops up periodically, but the White House sure hasn’t been doing much lately to deny it credibility, especially as reports continue to suggest that Dick Cheney, who has consistently shrouded all his movements and records in as much secrecy as he can muster, is the one who really makes the decisions in the administration, even when counter-arguments come from other advisors en masse, as when he was recently pushing very hard (and presumably still is) for military action against Iran. If you’re of a paranoid bent, you can easily see the Ghost’s recent policy signings as setting up a row of dominoes waiting to be knocked over: our most aged battleship, the Enterprise, has been sent into the Persian Gulf to replace more modern craft there; any sort of Iranian incursion on the Enterprise provides an excuse to attack Iran; our invasion of Iran prompts another terrorist attack on American soil; a state of emergency is declared; the “continuity of government” contingencies that no one, not even those allowed to know, are allowed to know about. And Prescott Bush’s ’30s dream is suddenly our reality. Read the rest of this entry »