FRENCH EXPERTS SEE OUR IRAQ PROJECT AS DOOMED: The French Information Agency, doing research on Internatl. issues, says there's no way we can stop the guerilla war in Iraq: "When the whole population is against you..."/
"U.S. troop morale is at lowest ebb."/
"More reinforcements will just mean higher casualties."
"U.S. WILL leave Iraq and lose face among Arab countries." /Agence France Presse29Oct
----
Oh well, who cares what the FROGS say ?!
-----------
Bush said again that it would be 'wrong for us to leave prematurely.' That's another sign that a pullout is thinkable. "We're taking this fight to the enemy!"--a familiar bleat...the enemy is taking the fight to us.
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GIs face RIOT outside Baghdad: 2 Iraqis dead, 17 wounded; 2 GIs wounded /AssocPress1nov/--a riot shows more widespread population anger than secret bomb-attacks--although 36 attacks per day for the last MONTH (!) is a bad index also. / 2 GIs killed by bomb in Northern Iraq on Saturday/Reuters1NOV /Our Gen.Sanchez:"We'll endure casualties as long as we stay here."
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U.S. is spending about $1 billion per week in Iraq. /GUARDIAN1NOV/ That's over and above the more-than one thousand millions of dollars shovelled to the Pentagon each DAY.
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Before the war, Wolfowitz predicted that Iraqi oil would bring in $50-$100 billion a year. Now the prediction is for a puny $12 billion a year--IF we could stop the sabotage! (another bomb/fire Saturday)/INDEPENDENT/--with only $4 billion a year in oil money available for reconstruction.GUARDIAN1nov/
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Maybe the Frogs are on to something.
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Brookings Inst. expert says we'll pull out in less than 6 months. GUARDIAN says Brit.govt. endorses a quick pullout./
Ordinary American loses nothing if we 'lose face' among Arab nations.
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57% of Americans polled want a pullout (USATODAY 28,29oct)
The longer Bush waits, the closer (and more vivid) the embarrassing pullout will be to the '04 elections.
We're rushing training of Iraqi 'security forces'. Who cares if they're adequate for the job? We can declare victory and bug out.

 
SACRED MONEY: Congress is voting $87 billion MORE for 'Iraq', in spite of NEWSWEEK's cold look at the corruption and ignorance in 'king' Bremer's gang.
There was a big fuss about the $20 billion going for Iraq reconstruction, approval for which you'd think would be automatic, since it's paying to rebuild what we foolishly destroyed.
But no one has dared to question the $65 billion MORE going to the PENTAGON, presumably for 'security purposes' in Iraq..but in fact with no outside audit to show where it's going.
The $65 billion more is supposedly going to 'support our troops'--that's what makes it sacred. (You'd think the previous one thousand millions of dollars each DAY (actually more) going to the Pentagon would be enough to support our troops!) But scandals about the LACK OF SUPPORT for our troops abound: e.g., the story that wounded combat troops have to pay for their own hospital food.
Go figure.

 
INEPT ANALYST
Thos. Friedman is getting ever-lamer in trying to defend our Iraq fiasco. To show that the Iraq situation is not 'a repeat of Vietnam' (NYT31OCT) , he notes that 'these people' are not like the Vietcong: idealistic liberators from a foreign invader.They're not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves, but so they can rule Iraq.
Wrong on all counts: HoChiMinh intended all along to rule Vietnam--and he succeeded. Secondly, 'these people' are not all the same type. Suicide bombers may be motivated by ideals or by sheer hate; but they are NOT trying to take over Iraq! (No VietCong manifested the bizarre unselfishness of suicide bombers.)
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The sense in which Iraq IS another Vietnam is this: in both cases, the Pentagon could not win at a price Americans would ultimately accept--for the simple reason that Americans had no real stake in these two demented wars. This war is even crazier than 'Vietnam' because here we're taking on some significant portion of one billion enraged Muslims worldwide.
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Friedman admits again that our Iraq invasion was a 'WAR OF CHOICE'--[vs. a 'war of necessity': what a euphemism!] --that all the slaughter was never necessary to defend ourselves or other countries.
He fondly thinks the war was for a staggeringly ambitious goal: to 'install some democracy' in the Middle East! He notes correctly that such a 'liberal' goal would not be expected from the Bush-team (as the $8 billion for 'reconstruction' would be expected that has gone already to big Republican contributors /GUARDIAN31OCT).
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Then Tom worries that the Bush team might not do it RIGHT. He's right about those clowns; the question is why he ever thought they could bring off such a utopian goal.
In fact, no U.S. administration could bring off a successful occupation and reform
-of a people famously hostile to alien, non-Muslim invaders, a people to whom secular democracy is not congenial! (56% want some kind of theocracy, like Iran's or worse!)
-an occupation by troops trained to kill, not to pacify or stabilize;
-troops very insular, uneducated, and suspicious of strange-acting foreigners;
-troops totally inept at handling guerilla opponents;
-troops (and officers) who don't even speak the local language!
All these inauspicious omens should have been obvious to competent analysts before the invasion, should have cancelled these dreamy plans. Friedman is as loony as Wolfowitz or Woolsey.

 
ARGUMENT-STOPPER: U.S. scientists have modified mousepox and other animal-poxes to resist vaccines. When this research was criticized, a Yank scientist yelled from the back, "NINE-ELEVEN !" Other American scientists roared agreement. /NEW SCIENTIST
It's magic how that short formula can support any proposal you prefer.

 
PULLOUT SOON? An analyst for respected Brookings Institute predicted that 'U.S. engagement in Iraq' would be reduced in from 3 to 6 months!
The British government are backing those in Washington who favor 'as speedy an exit as possible.'
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The hope is to hand over 'security' to Iraqi police. But it is admitted that the guerilla attacks on police HQ may make recruiting more difficult. /GUARDIAN30OCT
Also, Iraqi police feel their function should be to protect Iraqis from criminals, not to fight off anti-American attacks. /INDEPENDENT30OCT
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Yeah. We'll have to bug out sooner or later. The sooner the better, the later the worse.

 
'WE LIKE(idolatrous) MUSLIMS..HONEST ! '
Ever since Gen.Boykin seemed to say that Muslims were idolaters (!) , the Bushies have been distancing themselves from that opinion...BUT they haven't fired or disciplined Boykin at all! That sends an approving message happily, to Bush's yahoo fundamentalist constituents--and unhappily, to the Muslim world.
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Wolfowitrz, back from dangerous Baghdad, said that the trouble was that 'some think we're soft!' (Rather, some think we're sane enough to pull out of an impossible guerilla war! For now, they may be wrong.)
Wolfie said we want to get Iraqi police/soldiers on the job:"Their knowledge of the language and culture give them some advantages that our brave soldiers, with the best training and equipment in the world, will never have.." /FinTimes30OCT. DUH ! How should we assess the training an occupation army has, when the troops (and their officers) don't understand the local language ?!

 
WHO'D HAVE DREAMED...?! News story starts "Surprisingly strong results in military sales" caused a 'pop in profits' at military contractors Boeing, Northrup and Lockheed..[USATODAY30oct ] The surprise is that analysts were surprised.

 
NEW IRAQ WILL BE A NASTY SURPRISE: says N. Feldman, a top adviser to 'king'Bremer, and a scholar in Islamic Law.
"A democratically-elected Iraq regime will not be secular, nor pro-Israel, nor pro-American."
(Hot reaction in D.C. to his view: he's called 'soft on Islam'. He's Jewish.)
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Americans planned to split up the Kurds into 18 provinces, to neutralize their power.
But the Kurds say NO! and the Kurds have 40,000 trained soldiers under arms. (So far they're the only faction that SEEMS to be on our side.)
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Before the war, a top Administration guy said that the first foreign policy move of the New Iraq would be to recognize Israel. / "I don't know what he was smoking," says F. /London DAILY TELEGRAPH29OCT

 
ESTIMATED CIVILIAN DEATHS IN INVASION: (from 19Mar to 20Apr.) from PROJECT FOR DEFENSE ALTERNATIVES (research institute in Cambridge,Mass.): 3200-4300. /GUARDIAN29OCT
Of course, far more were MAIMED or injured. Many have been killed,maimed or wounded (by guerillas, GIs, or gangsters) after 20 April.
|
Pentagon says loftily , "We're not counting Iraqi casualties!" Well, then, we have to go by the most plausible private estimates--e.g., the one above.

 
HOW MANY GUERILLA ATTACKS IN THE LAST 7 DAYS?
TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE. /PBSnews, 29OCT./also AssocPress30OCT
Average of 36 attacks per day for the last month: that's over 900 attacks. /NYT30oct
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A monstrous, monstrously expensive Abrams tank was just destroyed by a mine, with the crew killed or wounded. "If they can get a tank like that, they can get anything!"
Red Cross, & UN, pulling out many personnel (in spite of Powell's plea). [Powell said,"If AID agencies are driven out, then the terrorists win!" /Assoc.Press28OCT/ Well?)
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In another vote of NO-CONFIDENCE, the Spanish embassy is pulling out personnel. A spokesman said, "This is Baghdad, after all!"/Reuters4nov/
(The Spanish people oppose our whole Iraq project by 2 to 1. The Spanish government, perhaps bribed by us, has posed as one of our staunchest allies.)
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First ambush against Ukrainians in Polish-manned sector of Iraq. /AssocPress30OCT
--------------
"NOT LEAVING?" Bush shows his desperation by asserting 'We're not leaving!"
[Lyons: I wonder how often that was said by the Nixon flacks, just before we bugged out of Vietnam ? ]
Of course Bush repeated the dubious claim that the guerillas are either Saddamites or foreigners..ignoring the common opinion that many guerillas are nationalist or islamist Iraqis outraged by our occupation.]
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" The mere fact that Bush felt he had to allow one of his rare press conferences shows the pressure he is under."
During the conference he said THIRTEEN TIMES: "Iraq is a dangerous place."
/FinTimes29OCT Yeah. He's catching on.

 
'SOLEMN' vs.'SERIOUS':
To Mr.Vincent Carroll(at RMNEWS): we can always count on you to echo the Bush-team line. So of course you oppose the move to change the grants to Iraq into loans. But your rationale is just silly./29oct
"[One of our war aims was] to see if we could help Iraqis create a federal govt. that respected individual liberties...etc.blah,blah"
You concede this was a 'maybe too ambitious goal'. But then you say its only chance of success is if we are 'as generous in victory...as [we were] in Europe & Japan.'
Let's assume you knew you were speaking euphemisms; let's assume you know that our utopian project is not just 'maybe-too-ambitious' but wildly unfeasible.
Then you're saying: "This project has almost no chance to succeed--but we must pour in billions and billions of dollars, or it will have NO chance!" That might make sense IF the project were vital to our interests; but the truth is that ordinary Americans have little to gain or lose in the foreseeable future from this project's success or failure.
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When people say, "We reconstructed Germany and Japan; why can't we reconstruct and reform Iraq?", there is a long answer, involving the differences between the 3 countries. But the short answer is this: "In those days three wise men were in charge: Roosevelt, Truman, and George Marshall. Now we have Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush: the Three Stooges."
================
[V.Carroll dismissed my above criticism of his position because it involved a joke about Bush.]
Mr.C:
We are in bizarre situation, at once comic and tragic: the parable for our time is
DR. STRANGELOVE. On the one hand our situation is horrible: (Millions of Muslims enraged, thousands of terrorists eager for our blood, our homeland incredibly vulnerable, home-defence absurdly underfunded).
On the other hand, we must not forget that Bush & his buddies are ridiculous ('The BLACK WEEKEND attacks show that we're making progress!"/ deserter Bush strutting on the carrier in flight suit with genitals enhanced, with sign MISSION ACCOMPLISHED--this embarrassing sign later disowned--c'mon!).
Years ago Bob Newhart had a TV sketch about a GIANT (mutated) CHICKEN, bigger than a house. If you were within range of that awful beak & claws, she was terrifying. But from further back she was, like all hens, faintly ridiculous.
The correct reaction: snicker at Bushie follies during the day; weep at night.

 
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO WIN THIS GUERILLA WAR ?
--Perhaps super-ruthlessness toward Iraqis: we could simply bomb Tikrit and Fallujah & surrounding areas off the map..that MIGHT HELP (or it might not)--but the world media would describe the carnage in great detail, and most Americans would not tolerate such slaughter--for the simple reason that Americans have LITTLE TO GAIN BY SUCH A VICTORY!
[Of course the hawks have a lot to lose: humiliation--so they're not so restrained by queasiness. Sen.Trent Lott: "If we have to, WE JUST MOW THE WHOLE PLACE DOWN, SEE WHAT HAPPENS. You're dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people; we need to be VERY AGGRESSIVE in taking them out.]" /TheHill29oct. ] [Lyons: Trouble is we don't know who 'they' are (the suicide bombers) until they strike; then it's too late. Oh, well, we'll just mow the whole place down ! [Lott must want to 'mow down' BAGHDAD; that's where the suicide attacks are concentrated.]
When we 'see what happens', we'll discover that thousands of new terrorists have been generated all over the Muslim world. ]
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---or perhaps a ruthless willingness to sacrifice our own troops:an analyst in NYTIMES described the successful Egyptian response to Islamist guerillas: small, agile squads of govt. troops moving around to respond to ad-lib guerilla attacks. However, one presumes that govt. casualties were very high; Americans wouldn't tolerate that..again, because we have LITTLE TO GAIN from such an expensive victory.
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The basic problem is the same one Pentagon faced in Vietnam; we can't win except at a very high price, and the U.S. public absent-mindedly tolerates our involvement in such wars ONLY AS LONG AS they think** the PRICE IS NOT VERY HIGH--because Americans have LITTLE AT STAKE in such goofy wars !
We WILL bug out, sooner or later; the sooner the better, the later the worse.
---------------
**We were led to believe that Gulf War I was almost costless in terms of U.S. casualties. But later, almost one in three veterans of that war complained of GULF WAR SYNDROME /USATODAY28OCT/ After long attempts at denial, Vet Bureau finally certified ONE IN FOUR as disabled for life.
=========
Indeed, American support for the war is already shrinking fast: [usatoday28,29oct}
AMERICANS IN GENERAL:
"The war was worth it!" April 71%, now 52%.
(a blip: yes 54%(4nov)/NO 44%, up from 27%.
--Men say yes: down from 76% to 55%.
--Age 18-49 say yes: down from 70% to 53%.
--Over 65 yrs old: down from 71% to 44%
-------------
Approve of Bush's handling of the war? NO, 51% (for the 1st time, a negative majority!)/GUARDIAN4nov / yES 47%(down from 75%)
----------------------------
"Do you favor war with Iraq?"
---YES: April 71% ,now 54%/
--NO:April 26% now 43%.
"Approve of U.S. policy since major combat ended?"
---YES: April 80%, now 47%//
--NO: April 18%, now 50%.
"Withdraw some or all GIs from Iraq?
---NO: end of August 51%, now (3 months later) 42%/
---YES: August 46%/ now: 57% (!!!)
(It would be insane to withdraw SOME BUT NOT ALL GIs, leaving the others even more vulnerable! So we can assume that 57% really want us to withdraw them all.)
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Definiitely wd. vote for Bush: 38%/ Definitely wouldn't: 44%!
However, Bush wd win vs. known Dems/e.g., Bush 48%, Gebhardt43%. ???? /GUARDIAN4NOV
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INDEPENDENTS: Independents (vs. Republicans/Dems) are the swing votes that decide elections. says an expert"Bush must split (get 50% of) the Independent vote to win."
--'I favor the war." : April 69% /now 48%
--Only 39% of independents now approve of Bush's handling Iraq since combat-end.
"Would you vote for Bush or for some (unnamed!) Democrat?" [registered Independents]
--Bush 35%/ some Democrat 42%.
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Only Republicans now staunchly support the war (84%).
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This poll was taken before this black weekend when guerillas showed this: we can't protect our police stations nor even our top Headquarters;
--..nor our monstrous, 'invulnerable' Abrams tanks !
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we knew before: that we can't protect our GIs,
-nor international aid workers,
-nor our 'collaborating' Iraqi allies (even a member of our Top Council got shot, as did a deputy mayor of Baghdad just now)';
-we can't protect the pipelines;
-we can't even protect Baghdad Airport! [see below.]
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A top member of our puppet Council just said that we should turn security ASAP over to Iraqis (since we are so inept at it.) /Guardian.co.uk29OCT

Iraq won't lose that much security if we BRING'EMHOME NOW!

 
WE CAN'T EVEN PROTECT BAHDAD AIRPORT !
VIVID EYEWITNESS BAGHDAD: (R.Fisk is top Iraq reporter/LondonINDEPENDENT28OCT):

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You need to take a military escort to reach Baghdad airport these days. Yes,
things are getting better in Iraq, according to President Bush - remember
that each hour that goes by - but the guerrillas are getting so close to the
runways that the Americans have chopped down every tree, every palm bush, every scrap of undergrowth on the way.
Rocket-propelled grenades have killed so many GIs on this stretch of highway that the US army - like the Israelis in southern Lebanon in the mid-80s - have erased nature. You travel to Baghdad airport through a wasteland. Heathrow it isn't.
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"OK folks, now you can leave your bags here and go inside for your boarding
passes," a cheery US army engineer tells the first arrivals for Amman. So we
collect slips of paper that show no flight number, no seat number, no
destination, not even a take-off time. There's a Burger King across the lot,
but it's in a "high-security zone" which mere passengers cannot visit.
There's no water for sale. There are so few seats that passengers stand in
the heat outside what must be the biggest post office in the world, a vast
US military sorting hanger with packets of mail for every one of the 146,000
troops in Iraq, standing 30ft high in racks.
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But take a look at the passengers. There's a lady from the aid organisation
Care heading off for a holiday in Thailand, and there's the Bishop of Basra
in his black and red robes and dangling crucifix, and there's an outgoing
television crew and the International Red Cross representative with a little
Red Cross plane to catch to Kirkuk. There's also a British construction man
up from Hilla who spent the previous night under fire with the local Polish
battalion. "Rocket-propelled grenades and heavy rifle fire for two hours,"he mutters. Of course, the occupation authorities never revealed that. Because things are getting better in Iraq.
|
Behind us, a series of giant four-engined jets are climbing in circles into
the hot morning sky, big unmarked jobs that fly 180 degrees to the ground in
tight circles to take off and land, so low you'd think they would trip the
runway with their wing-tips - anything to avoid the ground-to-air missilesthat America's enemies are now firing at aircraft in the "New Iraq". "It's routine," one of the American engineers confides to us. "We get shot at every night."
|
Among the other passengers, there's a humanitarian worker who's clearly had
a nervous breakdown and some rather lordly Iraqi ladies escorted to check-in
by an RAF officer with too much hair over his collar and, across the lot, a
squad of American Special Forces soldiers enjoying the sun, heavy with black
webbing, automatic rifles and pistols. Why do they all wear shades, I ask
them? One of them takes off his sun-glasses. "What girl would look at us if
they could see our real faces?" I agree. But they're an intelligent bunch of
men, heavy with innuendo. Yes, they've got a safe house near Fallujah and
combat casualties are sometimes "contained" within[i.e., disguised as] road accidents or drownings. |
A guy called Chuck wants to confide in me. "You know the most precious
resource about this country, Bob?" he asks. "It's the Iraqi people. There's
a lot of protoplasm here." I was contemplating the definition of protoplasm
when the first mortar came in, a thundering roar that had the passengers ducking like a theatrical chorus and a big white circle of smoke rising
lazily from the other side of the runway. There's a whizzing noise and another clap of sound.
|
"They're getting better," Chuck tells me. "They must have put that one close to the runway." The other Special Forces lads nod approvingly. Another tremendous explosion, and they all nod together. Another big white ring rippling skywards, as if a giant cigar addict had sat down for a smoke by the runway. "Not bad at all," says Chuck's friend.
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"We used to have a five-mile safety perimeter round the airport," Chuck
says. "That's now down to two miles. The max anti-aircraft range is 8,000ft.
So two miles is on the edge."
Translation: US forces used to control FIVE miles round the airport - too far to permit a man with a hand-held launcher to hit a plane. However, ambushes and attacks on the Americans have reduced their control to a mere TWO miles. On the edge of that radius, a man might just hit a plane with a missile range of 8,000ft.|
The Americans say there are two planes flying to Amman, at 10am and noon.
Then another mortar round explodes in front of the hangars on the far side of the airport. And another.
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"This," the Bishop of Basra sermonises to me, "is the continuation of our
22-year war." I call a colleague in Baghdad. Airport under mortar fire, I helpfully report. "Heard nothing about it, Bob," comes the reply. "How many mortars did you say?" But the Special Forces men are enjoying themselves. An Apache helicopter races over us to strafe the Iraqi guerrillas. "Some hope,"says Chuck. "They've already pissed off." Technicians in guerrilla warfare, the Special Forces men are coolly appreciative of anyone's professionalism, including that of the enemy.
|
An American engineer pops up. If the TV crew will buy his guys Cokes, they
can visit Burger King. A crackle of rifle fire from way beyond the airport perimeter. There must be a movie here, Walt Disney meets Vietnam.
|
The Airbus belongs, incredibly, to Royal Jordanian, the only international
carrier to risk the run to Baghdad once a day. At the steps, there's a squad of Jordanian security men in white socks - Jordanian and Syrian
plain-clothes cops always wear white socks - and they insist, right there on
the runway, in checking over all our gear again. Computers turned on,
computers turned off, cameras opened, closed, notebooks out, even a sheaf of
readers' letters to be prowled over. The Apache flies back, rockets still in
their pods.
|
Take-off is rather faster than usual. But there's no steady climb to
cruising altitude. The Airbus turns sharply to port, G-forces pushing us into our seats, and there outside my window is the tented prison-camp city
where the Americans keep more than 4,000 of their Iraqi prisoners without
trial. The tents start to spin as the plane twists to starboard and then to
port again, [to evade possible missiles] and there is the same prison camp outside my window, but this time upside down and turning anti-clockwise. I look around the cabin and notice fingers dug deep into arm-rests. The Airbus engines are howling, biting into the thinner air, and our eyes are searching for that thin trail of smoke that no one wants to see.[from a possible shoulder-fired missile.]
Then the pilot levels out. A Royal Jordanian stewardess in a bright white
blouse arrives at our seats. Things are getting better in Iraq. "Juice or
red wine, which would you like?" she asks me. Reader, which did I choose?
==============
On JIM LEHRER'S NEWS (public radio) 27OCT, a really haggard NYT reporter said that after the Sunday/Monday Baghdad bombings, U.S. reporters were mobbed by 200 Iraqis (who blamed U.S. for security gaps!)-- the reporters barely escaped with their lives.

 
SUBSIDIZING 'AMERICAN' CORPORATIONS:
PERSPECTIVE: All that counts ultimately about 'economic health' (for sensible people) is NOT stock prices, consumer confidence, GDP growth--it is the number of jobs available for Americans, the number of long-term unemployed (including those who have quit looking for jobs!) and the number of people working part-time just because they can't get full-time jobs. (That's more important even than the level of wages; hopeless unemployment has really bad effects on the American male's psyche--for instance, domestic violence and child-abuse rates correlate closely with unemployment rates.)
CORPORATION SUBSIDIES:
-Our government has been subsidizing (by tax-breaks) corporations that export--e.g., McDonald's(!) This enables these corporations to sell their goods cheaper overseas, increasing their power to compete with foreign corporations. Naturally, this angers foreign competitors, and is a measure forbidden by the rules of the WorldTradeOrg. So Congress has to withdraw these subsidies.
-So now the Republican Congress wants to lower the tax rates for ALL manufacturers! The pretence is to help the U.S. economy, but critics point out that it would encourage shipping jobs overseas. /USATODAY28OCT/
It's important to understand that 'American' corporations are not really American; Money has no national loyalty.
|
If Congress really wanted to increase jobs available to Americans, it could seemingly do several things:
--it could quit taxing firms extra for every dollar they spend on wages for Americans ! (the FICA tax).
|
--it could pay for health insurance from the federal budget (perhaps nibbling at the more than $1 billion per Day that now goes to the Pentagon!). As things are now, employers are expected to pay for health insurance (though they are balking at this, leaving tens of thousands of workers with little or no insurance!) This would make firms less hesitant about hiring new people, less eager to replace workers with computers/robots, less willing to ship jobs overseas.
By the way, almost no other industrial country makes employers pay health insurance costs. That seemingly enables their exporters to undersell ours.
|
--it could subsidize firms for each American they have on their payroll. (If that would break WTO rules, we should insist that these rules be changed.)
-------------
I am no economist...but since no economists writing for the press seem to raise these issues, I'd like these QUESTIONS to be addressed. Long-term unemployed males may back radical politics--probably right-wing! so we all have an interest in this problem.

 
FORGOTTEN WAR: There's big trouble in AFGHANISTAN. 1/3d of country is unsafe for Aid distribution. A European diplomat, there a long time, said, "During the Jihad vs. Soviets, guerillas came across from Pakistan in 2s and 3s. Now they come across in the hundreds.' /Another diplomat: "The situation here is worse than in Iraq."/
Before, U.S. got false tips (people denouncing their enemies as terrorists). But now, they get few tips, because natives fear the Taliban coming back to the village when GIs leave..one group of 7 'collaborators' had their throats slit. /TIME MAGAZINE3NOV
Only a few GIs get killed because few are outside Kabul, in the field.
------
Two CIA operatives got killed by a Taliban ambush. "The enemy had sufficient advance info on the patrol to set up the ambush." [Why wouldn't they?!]
A departing U.S. general: outside the biggest Afghan cities, the U.S.-backed government has little control. /usatoday29oct
===========
WORLD BETTER OFF WITH U.S. RUNNING AFGHANS? Areas growing opium are up 8% over last year; provinces involved now 28, vs. 18 in 1999 (when Taliban was in control).
Production in tons is up 6% / 7% of population is involved./ Afghanistan produces 3/4 of world supply. World price of opium has dropped because of oversupply./Value of crop is 1/2 of Afghan GDP./UN newsCtr/29OCT

 
CAN WE AFFORD MORE SUCCESS LIKE THIS? Bush just said that the horrendous Baghdad bombings were a sign of guerillas' desperation in the face of our success.
His generals said that now the evil organizers have to pay more to get people to attack Americans (how do they know?)..that shows our security is improving.
However, the most horrendous attacks in Baghdad involved suicide bombers.
Apparently they didn't much care about the pay-scale./
ABCnews27oct

 
NO SURPRISE: A recent poll shows that 2 out of 3 Europeans (not just Frenchmen!) still think a) our invasion was unjustified, and (b) we should pay for Iraq reconstruction. Reuters/27OCT
They're saying : YOU BROKE IT, YOU BOUGHT IT!
|
Americans bridle at any foreign criticism. But when all those millions agree invasion was unjustified--and when evidence shows that the Bushies' justification was based on lies..shouldn't we pay attention?

 
GUERILLA WEAPONS: They have up to ONE MILLION TONS AVAILABLE.
Even when we grab them, WE CAN'T GUARD THEM! /USATODAY27OCT
=========
The machine which bombarded Wolfowitz' hotel (in U.S. HQ compound) was simple and cheap: 'a science project assembled with baling wire'. /USATODAY27OCT/
|
But it worked. (So did the $50 weapon that downed our multi-million-dollar helicopter.)
=====
It's said, " Maybe we shouldn't have gone in, but that's moot now. We have to stay, to protect Iraqis. " /(That was also said about Vietnam!) /However, It's become obvious that we can't protect GIs OR IRAQ! Bring home the GIs.
Maybe we should send over the civilian warmongers (including all the Congress) to 'defend' the Iraqi people. As Joe Stern has noted, they could set off land-mines as easily as young GIs.

 
wow. / U.S. airlines are joining in a campaign to get Americans to contribute their 'frequent flier' miles to help Iraq GIs on leave to get home. /CNN26OCT
This reminds us that GIs HAVE TO PAY THEIR OWN AIRFARE to get home on leave from combat! This ranks right up there with the news that wounded GIs must pay for their own hospital food.
And that reminds us that Pentagon gets well over one thousand millions of dollars EACH DAY.
Pentagon antics are as absurd as they are lethal: 'The situation is critical but not serious'.

 
DON'T WANT US TO SEE? A U.S.Congressional delegation was scheduled to visit the site in North Korea where plutonium is allegedly being produced. (There has been disagreement outside N.K. whether their brag is justified that they're ready to produce more nukes, to deter a U.S. attack.)
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At the last minute, the Bush-team said NO! to the visit. Why? North Korea suggests, plausibly, that the Bushies don't want Americans to see for themselves that N.K. is making progress in developing nukes--that might make some sane Americans hesitate to bomb or invade N.K., as our frothing 'tough-guys' want to do./Reuters26OCT

 
'FORWARD POSITIONING': Good news: Pentagon is finally going to pull 116,000 troops out of pointless stations in Western Europe. Bad news: they're not going to 'bring them home'. Oh, no, they're going to settle them in EASTERN Europe, in Africa, etc. !!
Why? This is move called 'forward positioning'. "The idea is to have troops on hand to go after terrorists where they congregate and strike them before they can attack the U.S."/AssocPress26OCT
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Think about this: we could keep all our troops in U.S., and, in a crisis, move tens of thousands of them quickly (and relatively cheaply) anywhere in the world (we moved them to Iraq). So why the hell should we 'position' them permanently in these 'forward' positions?
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Such overseas positioning (a) will be enormously expensive (b) will divert stationing expenditures overseas, while army bases in the U.S. (contributing to prosperity of U.S. neighbors) are being closed;
and (c) will be stressful on GIs, who don't like to be overseas, in countries where they're usually not popular.
(d) American troops are famously inept at handling terrorists/guerillas; it will be the terrorists who go after these sitting ducks., as they went after the marines in Lebanon. (The 40,000 GIs in So.Korea are now hostages to the awesome firepower of N.Korea!)
e)Pentagon may not have that many troops available to man all these stations--not after the slump in enlistments/reenlistments which is likely from now on, after Pentagon mistreatment of GIs in Iraq!
(f) Terrorists don't NEED to 'congregate'--terrorist training camps will likely be in the jungles of Indonesia.
In no way will all this wasteful fuss minimize chances of terrorist attacks on America!
|
You can bet the main reason for this folly is some trick of 'positioning' billions and billions of federal DOLLARS with Republican-friendly corporate contractors.

 
IRAQI OPINION: the number who say we're 'liberators' has sunk from 43% to 15%.
The number who say we're 'occupiers' rose from 45% to 67%.
33% want a theocratic government. 23% more want an 'islamic democracy'--like that in Iran (!)
One Kurdish member of our puppet Council says: "When we can't control the budget, or security, or create jobs, we might as well give up. We're seen as puppets of U.S.
If we fail, they fail." /OBSERVER26OCT
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Ominously: "It used to be the Sunnis against the Americans. But now I notice that some of my Shiite friends are turning hostile." Ominous because Shiites are the majority in Iraq.
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A Baghdad grocer said (after shelling of Wolfowitz' hotel): " I wish he had been killed. I wish all Americans here would be killed. They are not human beings. They are monsters. They lied to the Iraqi people."/Reuters26OCT

 
RECKLESS INSULTS / (letter to DENVERPOST) Your prominent cartoon on 26Oct showed North Korea's Kim trampling on Uncle Sam's hat--then, unreasonably, demanding a nonaggression treaty. In other words, insults can justify a refusal to promise not attacking; in other words, insults can justify our launching a first-strike at North Korea. (40,000 GIs could be slaughtered in the first day of such a war.)
There is a longstanding principle, outside of war, against one Head of State insulting another. Bizarrely enough, though, Pres. Bush has been hurling personal insults at Mr. Kim for several years. Gen.Boykin just said that one billion Muslims are idolators--(He couldn't have picked an insult more likely to further galvanize them into murderous rage against The Great Satan.)
-and Rumsfeld just lumped Germany together with Cuba and Libya as 'unhelpful' in the 'war' on terror.
The theory seems to go like this: it's OK for us to react violently to insults, but not for other nations--because we're stronger. However, we now know there are many ways for weaker nations to undermine 'stronger' ones; the gratuitous insults our leaders hurl at the outside world--while they may play well before Bush's Yahoo supporters--make us all less safe in this unique emergency.

 
WOLFIE'S INCURABLE CHEERINESS: Paul Wolfowitz (a main pusher for the Iraq fiasco) is in Iraq now. So far, our Iraqi police have showed little inclination to fight the guerillas; they tend to disappear during crises. Yet W. rejoices at the (relatively few) recruits; the other day he gushed, "These young Iraqis are stepping forward to fight for their country along with us. It is a wonderful success story that speaks volumes."
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Volumes have been spoken, all right. Guerillas just shot down one of our multi-million-dollar helicopters with a $50 grenade-launcher. The number of guerilla attacks each day has surged higher, as well as the number of GIs killed (and the much higher number of those maimed or wounded) each week.
Indeed, the posh hotel in Baghdad where Wolfie was sleeping was pummeled with impunity by guerilla rocketeers, with one U.S. colonel killed and many people injured. Later, other explosions were heard near U.S. HQ.
A spokesman said the obvious: "Everyone working with the (U.S.) Coalition will be targetted." No high poobah on our side is safe: we couldn't protect UN honcho, or member of our puppet Council who was shot, or important Shiite clerics.
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Wolfie was still grimly in denial, as he was rushed out of a side door. In a shaking voice, he said, "There are a few who refuse to accept the reality of a free Iraq. We're getting the job done; This was the desperate act of a dying regime of criminals." /Reuters & FinTimes26OCT
Bush echoed him: this bombardment was an 'act of desperation' , not of triumph.
/PublBroadcastingNews27OCT
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One is reminded of Mark Twain's sunny description of a fight he was in: "I thrust my nose firmly between his teeth, and threw him to the ground on top of me."
========
Secy.Powell was more honest: he admitted that "we did not expect the resistance to be this intense for this long." /GUARDIAN26OCT

 
RESTATEMENT ON WOUNDED: [from EDITOR & PUBLISHER23OCT]: Pentagon now admits 1926 wounded. 1 in 5 (about 400) have severe brain injuries; 7 in 10 (about 1400) have injuries with 'potential for resulting in brain injuries.' Many have 'deleterious' injuries or loss of limbs.
( Army regularly announces that wounds were 'not life-threatening'; but brain-damage may be much worse than life-threatening.)
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About the total wounded: UPI says nearly 4000 have been medically evacuated from Iraq. (Other estimates are higher.) Pentagon until recently (at least!) has been fudging numbers (they rebuked officers who revealed casualty figures); so we have to rely on other sources.
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Nearly 500 GIs have been evacuated from Iraq 'for mental health reasons'. /GUARDIAN25OCT. Only 13 confirmed GI suicides have been reported; but that is far higher than the normal rate for U.S. soldiers.
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U.S. MEDIA HAVE NOT REPORTED NUMBERS, SEVERITY OF WOUNDS ! (Americans have this foible: they tend not to count the wounded, only the dead.)
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Pentagon talks only of GIs killed by 'enemy'; but many others are killed in accidents, 'friendly fire' or suicides.
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In previous wars, coffins returned to U.S. were pictured. But now the Pentagon refuses to let this happen, lest Americans realize the toll.[NYT26oct] Dead GIs, victims of our pointless war, are now kept OUT OF SIGHT; let them not slip OUT OF MIND.

 
DUBYA'S CHOICE:
While walking down the street one day, George "Dubya" Bush is shot by a
disgruntled NRA member.  His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter
at the Pearly Gates.
 
"Welcome to heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, it seems there
is a problem: We seldom see a Republican around these parts, so we're not
sure what to do with you."
 
"No problem, just let me in; I'm a believer,² says Dubya.
 
"I'd like to just let you in, but I have orders from the Man Himself: He
says you have to spend one day in hell and one day in heaven. Then you must
choose where you'll live for eternity."
 
"But, I've already made up my mind; I want to be in heaven."
 
 "I'm sorry, but we have our rules." And with that, St. Peter escorts him to
an elevator and he goes down, down, down, all the way to hell. The doors
open and he finds himself in the middle of a lush golf course; the sun is
shining in a cloudless sky, the temperature a perfect 72 degrees. In the
distance is a beautiful clubhouse.
 
Standing in front of it his dad and thousands of other Republicans who had
helped him out over the years: Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Jerry Falwell.  The
whole of the "Right" is here, everyone laughing, happy; casually but
expensively dressed. They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the
good times they had getting rich at expense of the "suckers and peasants."
They play a friendly game of golf, then dine on lobster and caviar. The
devil himself comes up to Bush with a frosty drink and says, "Have a
Margarita and relax, Dubya!"
 
 "Uh, I can't drink no more, I took a pledge," says Junior, dejectedly.
 
"This is Hell, son: you can drink and eat all you want and not worry, and it
just gets better from here!" says the devil.  Dubya takes the drink and
finds himself liking the devil, who is a very friendly guy who tells funny
jokes and pulls hilarious nasty pranks, kind of like a Yale Skull and Bones
brother with real horns.
 
They are having such a great time that, before he realizes it, it's time to
go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves as Bush steps on the elevator and
heads upward. When the elevator door reopens, he is in heaven again and St.
Peter is waiting for him.
 
"Now it's time to visit heaven," the old man says, opening the gate.
 
So for 24 hours Bush is made to hang out with a bunch of honest,
good-natured people who enjoy each other's company, talk about things other
than money, and treat each other decently. Not a nasty prank or frat boy
joke among them; no fancy country clubs and, while the food tastes great,
it's not caviar or lobster. And these people are all poor; he doesn't see
anybody he knows, and he isn't even treated like someone special! Worst of
all, to Dubya, Jesus turns out to be some kind of Jewish hippie with his
endless 'peace' and 'do unto others' jive.
 
"Whoa," he says uncomfortably to himself, "Pat Robertson never prepared me
for this!"
 
The day done, St. Peter returns and says, "Well, then, you've spent a day in
Hell and a day in Heaven. Now choose where you want to live for eternity."
 
With the 'Jeopardy' theme playing softly in the background, Dubya reflects
for a minute, then answers, "Well, I would never have thought I'd say this
-- I mean, heaven has been delightful and all -- but I really think I belong
in hell with my friends."
 
So Saint Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down, all
the way to hell.  The doors of the elevator open, and he finds himself in
the middle of barren, scorched earth covered with garbage and toxic
industrial waste...kind of like Houston.
 
He is horrified to see all of his friends dressed in rags and chained
together, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. They are
groaning and moaning in pain, faces and hands black with grime. The Devil
comes over to Dubya and puts an arm around his shoulder.
 
"I don't understand," stammers a shocked Dubya.  "Yesterday I was here and
there was a golf course and a clubhouse and we ate lobster and caviar and
drank booze. We screwed around and had a great time. Now there's just a
wasteland full of garbage and everybody looks miserable!"
 
The Devil looks at him, smiles slyly, and purrs, "Yesterday we were
campaigning; this morning you voted for us."

 
33 BILLIONS PLEDGED FROM OTHER NATIONS FOR IRAQ:
That's a surprise!
2 reflections:
--this money came only after countries were assured that the money they give can actually be paid to corporations within their country, to help Iraq.
--$4.5 Billions were pledged earlier to reconstruct Afghanistan, but only half that amount has actually been given.
--------------------------
OR WAS ONLY $ THIRTEEEN BILLION PLEDGED? ['at least $13 billion over 5 years', says NYT25OCT] (over the years:grants & loans--to a nation already $125 billion in debt (!) ).GannettNewsSvc. [25OCT] says: $56 billion needed over 4 years.
$20 billion (more!) scheduled from U.S. /WEALTHY, CHINTZY SAUDI ARABIA $1billion (half in LOANS) thru 2007./ Total $5 billion from other countries pledged for 2004./
It still remains true that WE BROKE IT, WE BOUGHT IT.

 
TELL OUR SENATORS TO BRING 'EM HOME!
If you want to send this message to our Senators, and don't know how to do it:
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EITHER: a) type in WAYNE ALLARD and SENATOR BEN CAMPBELL as websites, then find 'contact us' and go thru the rigamarole to send them e-mail;
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OR ELSE: Click on COMMENT below here, list your name, and I'll add your name to my letter.
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Neither Senator will heed us yet; but their flunkies will gossip about how many BRING'EMHOME letters came in.
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and, more important: you will have told the world that
THIS BLOODY FIASCO IS NOT DRAGGING ON IN YOUR NAME !

 
RUMMIE'S MEMO: Rumsfeld is unofficially being dumped, replaced de facto in running our wars(humiliating!) by a WOMAN, Condoleeza Rice. So he has decided to start telling the truth. Most amazingly, he said that the Pentagon may not be suited to 'fight' our 'war' vs. terror--we might need a new Institution!
He also wondered if we're killing terrorists around the world as fast as 'Muslim clerics' are recruiting new youths as terrorists in their schools. He never mentioned the terrific AMMUNITION we've given these recruiters by our bombing Afghanistan and Iraq.

 
'STUPID' RECRUITMENT OF TURKS: Even the prowar flack Thos.Friedman says that our attempt to bring Turkish troops into Iraq was STUPID (NYT24OCT): Iraqis still resent the Turks who tyrannized over them for 400 years!
The Turkish leaders really foxed us. They took an $8 billion bribe from us to provide the troops--in the face of a huge majority of Turks opposing the whole Iraq project. Then they just waited for the Iraqi rage-reaction to excuse their backing off from sending the troops.

 
WAR FROM INSULTS? (letter to USATODAY) A cartoon (24OCT) was an interesting piece of propaganda. It showed Kim of North Korea stomping on Uncle Sam's hat, then (unreasonably) demanding a nonaggression treaty. If insults to America are reason for refusing this treaty, it seems to follow that mere insults are reasons to attack North Korea..an alarming extension of our alarming preemption doctrine!
It's not normal for one Head of State to insult another Head of State personally. Kim has never insulted our Head of State, Pres. Bush, in the way that Bush has hurled personal insults at Kim, insults repeated over several years--seemingly intended to provoke a war with North Korea.
If this war happens, Seoul could disappear and 40,000 Americans could be slaughtered in the first few hours. What are our rulers thinking of ?!

 
WORLD IS NOT BETTER OFF: When Bush hears about thousands protesting against him in Australia, he responds with his usual slogan: "Surely the world is better off without Saddam in power!" However:
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I might be better off with a fancy car if it was free; but would I be better off if I paid an excessive PRICE for a fancy car? Is the world better off because we incurred the invasion-price to topple Saddam? The tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed or wounded in our attack are not better off. Nor the further thousands of casualties from our failure to restore law'norder in Iraq. /
Nor the thousands of GIs wounded so far in our campaign (2 in ten suffering serious brain-injuries, facing perhaps a fate worse than death).
Nor, perhaps, the Iraqi women (50% of the population!) who are already moving from relative liberation under atheist Saddam into Muslim subjugation--and right now are being raped wholesale by gangsters running wild, because we recklessly dissolved Iraq police and army, being unable to restore lawn'order ourselves! (If pregnancy results, they resort to at-home abortions, lest they be killed by their own male relatives, to save the Family Honor!)
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What about the rest of the world, including U.S.? Expert observers agree that our invasion has inflamed world-Muslims even further, recruiting more terrorists from all over the world. (Osama must be delighted in his cave!) / Also, our spectacular failure to diminish guerilla attacks in Iraq (now 35 a day!) displays our humiliating weakness to terrorists worldwide, and turns Iraq into a training ground for terrorists (like Chechnya). / Also, the rift caused by the invasion between U.S. and the rest of the world has undoubtedly weakened international cooperation in nabbing terrorists. / Also the billions and billions of dollars we have spent and need yet to spend on our Iraq fiasco--such prodigal expenditure means even less money for our pathetically underfunded 'Home Defense' campaign.
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To answer Bush: No, the world is NOT better off because we moved Saddam from power into hiding; the whole world will be paying an excessive price for that modest improvement.

 
REGIME-CHANGE NOT REALLY PEACEFUL? Max Boot, a regular hawk contributor to USATODAY, offers a plausible proposal (23OCT) for dealing with North Korea: neither attacking it, nor allowing its nuclear program. We should, says Boot, try to encourage 'peaceful' regime change,by further undermining N.K's faltering economy. However:
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Some parts of Boot's proposal are absurd; no neighbors will increase the numbers of N.K. refugees that they will accept. Nor will China back a proposal to cut off all food aid (thus worsening the starvation that Boot and Bush pretend to find so shocking). That would increase the unwelcome flow of refugees into China. Bankrupting N.K. further, by harassing N.K.'s shipping (pretending to seek illegal exports) may not get the backing of China or Russia, both of whom have overland export-routes to offer N.K.
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Why would we want to increase misery in N.K., on the wan hope we can get the people to throw out their admittedly unsavory rulers? If the policy did work, the desperately threatened rulers might conceivably launch a (suicidal) first-strike attack [for which they are awesomely prepared] on always-hated Japan (our subservient ally) and on our 40 thousand vulnerable troops in South Korea. That might please the Bush-team, which seems to try to provoke N.K. into a first-strike (e.g., by personal insults hurled repeatedly at their leader by our President, for God's sake!)--a first-strike which would justify our nuclear strike at N.K.
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It's not clear that even such a nuke retaliation would eliminate the N.K. threat. Their n-plants are probably buried deep under mountains (the North Koreans may be the world's champion tunnelers!) so their survivors could retaliate against us 'from their grave'--by offering plutonium to terrorists to use in 'dirty bombs' here, or by offering them designer war-germs--or both.
And of course the 40 thousand Americans might well perish in the first day of conflict. That risk seems not to concern the Bush-team.
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It seems hard, but our only sensible alternative now is to let the N.K. regime go ahead and build a few nukes, even to sell them to other naughty nations. (After all, Russia and China have hundreds or thousands of nukes available for possible sale. The dream of 'non-proliferation' is quite dead.) These nukes would never be used by any nation as first-strike weapons against America, for fear of our dreadful retaliation.
N.K. already have a few nukes, anyway, if they want to donate them to terrorists--and by the time the regime changed, they'd have more..What's more, the NEXT regime might want nukes! (That's why Bushie-Sharonista Woolsey screams, in WallStreetJournal, that we must invade N.K. right away!)
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The Bush-team may worry that other nations could have a second-strike deterrent against our imperial threats; they don't want any more nations to be able to say [as China and France can say now] , "You can destroy us in a day; but 'from our grave' we could MAIM your vulnerable homeland--so IF you're sane, you won't want to attack us--so we don't have to yield to your imperial decrees."
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That's the most likely explanation for the Bushies' incredibly ferocious attitude to North Korea--when we are already rather entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 
FIGHTING A WAR ? IN GEORGIA ?!
Living conditions for sick and wounded GIs in a Georgia military hospital are so bad as to trigger a Pentagon investigation. (For instance, the men must hobble out on crutches to outdoor toilets; they must wait for days or weeks to see a doctor.) The base commandant admitted there are problems, and (of course!) said they're working to correct them. (Now remember that the Pentagon gets well over one thousand millions of dollars every DAY to perform their mysterious functions.) The commander said, "But remember, we're fighting a war here!"/NYT21OCT

 
BUSH INSULTS KIM AGAIN: It's not customary for one head-of-state to personally insult another--even when insult is justified; but the Shrub goes on insulting head of North Korea, doing what he can to undermine any chance of negotiated agreement over N.K's nuclear program. He also said we have no intention to 'invade' N.K. /Reuters22OCT/; he has repeated this exact phrase often; he cunningly skips over any commitment that we won't bomb the hell out of them--which is their real worry.

 
AMERICANS WAKING UP,SLOWLY: a new poll shows 39% (up from 32% last month!) wanting to BRING TROOPS HOME NOW! (58%--down from 64% last month--say we should stay in until the country is 'stabilized'.). 4 in 10 say that the News Media are painting our project too pessimistically. /USATODAY22OCT.
It may be that many of the 58% who still say 'stay in'--they may believe Bush's pollyanna words and think we'll only have to 'stay in' for a short time.
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The poll would be more honest if they asked, "Should we stay in for several more years, with a few GIS killed every week and more than a dozen maimed or wounded (with 2 in 10 of the wounded suffering severe brain injury--a fate perhaps worse than death) ?" (Our Gen.Sanchez: "We'll sustain casualties as long as we stay here.")
Rumsfeld's memo to his senior aides says we're in for a long, hard slog in Iraq and--lest we forget!--also in Afghanistan. [USATODAY22OCT]
(Other Bush-team flaks rushed to downplay his pessimism.) / FinTimes22OCT
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Virginia has voted for Republican Presidents since 1964. Nevertheless, support for Bush has dropped from 68% (13 months ago) to 51% today. /RichmondTimes/Leader25OC
------------------------------
Why should the typical American want to continue this 'slog'? He won't benefit, though the big Oil Companies might.
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The Iraqis won't benefit, because we can't maintain law'norder there (600-800 violent deaths per month now in Baghdad, vs. 6 a month under Saddam).
Guerilla attacks have surged to thirty-five each day ! in the last 3 weeks, says Gen.Sanchez. /GUARDIAN22OCT
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Whatever the Iraqis need--perhaps a dictator!--they don't need our unlucky, badly trained GIs--they and their officers don't understand a word of Arabic!

 
ISRAELI POWER: The head of Malaysia said, absurdly, that Jews now control the world by proxy. But he might have said more plausibly that nutty Sharon has the mysterious power to lead around by the nose Pres. Bush (the top honcho of the world's 'sole superpower').
For instance: Israel is building a huge wall, partly on PALESTINIAN TERRITORY! The UN Assembly voted to condemn the wall by 144 nations favoring the condemnation, 4 opposed, and 12 abstentions. The 4 opposed votes were Israel, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and United States. /RockyMtnNews22Oct/
------------------
Sharon announced that he also may 'preempt' (attack first) any country, anywhere in the world (!) that HE DECIDES is helping Palestinian warriors. Bush helped Sharon mount nuclear missiles on his submarines to back up his threats.

 
GLOOMY GIs/
STARS & STRIPES ( a paper funded by Pentagon, but independent of P.control) got so many negative opinions in letters from Iraq GIs, that it ran an (unscientific) poll./
49% said their unit's morale was low; 49% said they wouldn't likely reenlist; 35% said the war wasn't 'worth it'. (The negative responses might have been higher, except that soldiers giving negative opinions have sometimes been punished.)
/GUARDIAN21oct

 
THE DOGS WHO HANDLE THE DOGS: GIs detained a woman engineer in Baghdad when she refused to submit her handbag (containing the sacred book KORAN) to a dog sniffing for explosives. (Muslims see dogs as unclean.)
Then the GIs tactfully threw the sacred book onto the ground.
Immediately a large protest rally formed. "We don't just want the dogs removed," said one man, "We want the dogs who handle the dogs to leave!"/Reuters21OCT
Getting that excited over a dog?!
-------------------
We've offered $25 million for binLaden, dead or alive; also $25 million for Saddam. NEITHER HAS BEEN TURNED IN! Nasty Saddam is protected by his tribe, but Ossama is a foreign Saudi in Pakistan!
They're different from us! I would certainly not hand over my MOTHER for $25 million--but think of all the GOOD I could do with $25 million! Perhaps my brother-in-law.
-----------
GIs complain that Iraqis have no respect for telling the literal truth about what actually happened. Their concern for family honor comes ahead of 'avoiding lies'.
There are some questions that can't be asked. If an American can't face that fact, his translator simply asks some other question.
And of course hardly any Americans, amateur or expert, can understand Arabic; while Russian diplomats (of course!) speak fluent Arabic, American diplomats talk through a translator. Can one comprehend a government so stupid that it sets out to occupy a country without having anyone to speak their language? ! Even fewer Yanks can read Arabic. /NYT22OCT
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I don't understand those Iraqis; Bush for sure doesn't understand them.
We should not be meddling with people we can never understand.
BRING HOME OUR BEFUDDLED TROOPS NOW!
===============
Sabotage-explosions ripped the Northern oil-pipeline in 4 places. This was the worst sabotage ever. A source said, "I don't think the pipeline can function in the near future, because the sabotage will continue." /Reuters22OCT
All that blood for oil. And now we can't use the goddamned oil! (The oil is God-damned.)
-------------
Turkish troops into Iraq? Not likely, said Turkish spokesmen--because of Iraqi opposition. / Reuters21OCT>
Bangladesh also said they would not be sending troops.
----------
Earlier it was said that South Korea would send 5000 troops to Iraq. Now we hear that Seoul is 'postponing' that decision. /FinTimes22OCT

 
ABOUT 'BUSH-HATERS': a common move among war-defenders is to note that many sensible people find the smirking, strutting little President personally offensive; then they say gravely that we shouldn't let our personal dislike for Bush push us into opposing all his policies, e.g., the invasion.
To set the record straight: people like myself FIRST find his economic, environmental, and especially his foreign policies very offensive; then we feel a DERIVED loathing--not so much for the pathetic little man himself, who is a mere puppet and speech-reader--but for the puppet-masters behind him.

 
LET'S HAVE 2 MORE WARS! Richard Perle, a top unofficial consultant for Bush-team, says that if the North Koreans can't be stopped in some other way from developing (a few) nukes (which they could sell to other naughty nations) , we'll have to use FORCE.
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This use of force could be problematical:
--Presumably we wouldn't INVADE them; [though Woolsey, an even nuttier Bushie, says we should invade, right away!] they have a million troops, and our troops are pretty busy in Iraq right now--but boy, could we BOMB them!
--their nuke plants are probably buried under mountains, so we couldn't get at these directly.
--Would they surrender? Fifty years ago, we leveled almost every building in North Korea; afterwards they came out of their caves meaner than ever.
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--We now have about 40 thousand GIs within artillery range of their 11,000 guns, which could get off 40,000 shells per hour. (The great city of Seoul could disappear the first day.) They have missiles that can reach Japan. They already have a couple of nukes they could use on hated Japan, our flunkey ally.
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--Why do the Bushies talk this way? It seems they want to PROVOKE N.K. into attacking US first (slaughtering our 40 thousand troops). Then they'd have an excuse to NUKE N.K., which is what they want to do. Our troops would do what troops are supposed to do--die.
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After we nuke them, 'from their grave', survivors could give plutonium for dirty bombs (they have plenty of that already) and war-germs to alQaeda to deliver to us.
-------------
Perle also says that IRAN should be our next target in 'war on terror'. The fact that these guys are running loose, and taken seriously, fills me with enough terror./
Perle was interviewed from Israel by FOX TV, acc. to NewsMaxWires,20OCT/ Woolsey's invasion-proposal was printed earlier in WallStreetJournal.

 
IRAQI 'INGRATITUDE': A huge picture in RockyMtnNews (20OCT) shows Iraqis dancing in jubilation on wrecked U.S. vehicles, celebrating the killing of GIs.
TV pictures showed blazing U.S.Humvee on its side near Fallujah, with locals throwing petrol on the fire, chanting "God is Great!" /reuters22oct
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Said one GI, "They're ungrateful; we brought them freedom, but now they're trying to kill us."
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Our unlucky GIs (who don't understand a word of Arabic) were never trained for police duties against guerillas--especially among a very alien people who are famous for hating any foreign occupiers. (Earlier they drove out the British and the puppet 'king' they foisted on Iraq. The British said they were liberating the Iraqis from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire. The Iraqis were not impressed.)
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GIs have committed many acts that Iraqis see as hostile: breaking into houses, using dogs against them, groping their women, bulldozing orchards to punish farmers for not turning in guerillas, shooting civilians randomly when attacked, and so on. (One Iraqi was seen by reporters, after a U.S. raid, with his hands tied behind him and a bullet in the back of his head.)
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Soldiers strike out blindly when maddened by guerillas; stories of horrific GI atrocities vs. Viet civilians are still coming out! /AssocPress19OCT ]
Therefore, a sane government would never get into a war that will turn into a guerilla war! (Bush team was warned this would happen in Iraq./nytimes19oct)
|
Again and again, occupiers have learned that many peoples would prefer a dictator
from among their own people to crude alien 'liberators'. Afghans might well have been better off under the rule of Soviet invaders--but they drove them out anyway.
Irish have resisted Brit occupation, off and on, for 700 years. Brits are slow learners.
It was understandable that the Viets drove out their French colonial masters. But if they had accepted U.S. rule, we would likely have shovelled money at them. Yet they drove us out also.
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Meddlers always complain that the people they're 'trying to help' are ungrateful.
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The meddlers here are the Bush-team; GIs are the first victims.
BRING 'EM HOME NOW!

 
MAIMED or wounded: Americans tend to ignore the number of GIs wounded; the media talks only of those dead. We seem to think 'being wounded' means being scratched, with a hurt quickly healed at a first-aid tent.
However, it is now said that Seven out of Ten of those wounded in Iraq have a wound that 'has the potential for causing a neural injury'. Two out of ten injuries are severe brain injuries (perhaps putting the soldier into a condition worse than death.)
/BOSTON GLOBE16oct
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How many have been wounded? You can't get a straight answer from the Pentagon--but people at the German hospital and the U.S. hospital where SERIOUSLY wounded or sick GIs are airlifted count the wounded in the thousands.
To be more precise: the German hospital says it's now admitting 44 per day (not just from Iraq)..three times as many as in peacetime. They say they've admitted 1800 from the Afghanistan war, and 7100 from the Iraq war.
They also say they treated 4000 wounded from Gulf War I. /Assoc.Press18OCT
Americans thought we suffered almost no casualties during that war.
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A colonel at Andrews Airforce Base said that 8000 SERIOUSLY sick or wounded GIs had been AIRLIFTED there. [..not all from Iraq, but MOSTLY....]

 
IRAQI ARMY? An oped in NYT by the interim head of our puppet Council called for restoring Saddam's scattered army, as a counsel of desperation to restore law'norder.
But an anonymous source in Bremer's HQ said, "I don't think there's a vast swath of people out there who want to serve in an Iraqi army."/GUARDIAN19OCT
It was perhaps a mistake to disband Saddam's army when we first moved in; but by now, many enraged soldiers may have sided with the guerillas--so when we reinstate them, they will not be a reliable pro-U.S. force.
So the inept, linguistically crippled U.S. Army will continue to generate as many new terrorists (shooting randomly in a circle as they retreat) as they kill.

 
LUDDITES RULE! U.S. is turning anti-technology by default, not by design. For instance,Colorado collegians: At Community College in Denver, enrollment has risen 25%,but infotech enrollment has dropped 40%. Only one in a hundred students declare infotech as their major.
At Colorado State U., infotech enrollment has dropped 60% in 3 years. Computer enrollment is down 50% at RedRocksCommun.College. "This is really scary!" says the head of our new Technology Institute.
WHY? Computer jobs are being shipped to places like India, and they're not coming back. Only low-pay computer-jobs are opening up here./DenvPost19OCT
For decades, Colorado has assumed that our mountains would attract enough well-trained youths from out-of-state, so we didn't have to invest in educating our native youth. By the time our tv-drugged youths get to college, they haven't the mental stamina to study any subjects demanding real concentration and work--for instance, they can't train as nurses or pharmacists, or in foreign language.
They're flocking to 'general education' courses where they can get a 'B' while learning very little. (The ones studying philosophy could learn important skills of reading-comprehension and logical analysis--but the standards in many Colorado philosophy courses are so lax they don't have to learn much besides bull-shit.)
By the way, out-of-state students attracted to our mountains are not necessarily attracted to intense academic effort. U of C at Boulder was just named the top party school in U.S.--one of the criteria was the low level of academic effort required.
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This slackening of mental 'muscle' among our youth is found all over U.S.
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS: a) The Pentagon will have to hire any high-skill-level computer people available, as high-paid civilians..the military can't ship its jobs overseas (especially now that most other countries are hostile--the technicians there might sabotage our military programs.) But many intelligent youths won't want to work for today's Pentagon.

b) the military won't be able to persuade enough skilled technicians in any field to enlist, after the foolishly-ruthless way they treat our troops (e.g., wounded soldiers must pay for their hospital food! troops must pay their own air-fares to come home for R & R! the troops must deal with defective equipment, though the Pentagon gets far over $1 thousand millions per DAY.) **footnote
So blunders [from poorly-trained operatives] with our high-tech equipment (and casualties from accidents or from 'friendly fire': Americans killing Americans)--these mishaps will continue at a high level, or get worse.)
The only people they can persuade to enlist will be unemployed losers.
(The intelligent youth who could have studied computer will drift as overqualified people to low-skill civilian jobs [tendency noted in USATODAY23OCT]; they will displace the weaker minds who will then, alone, be desperate enough to enlist.)
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**See the horrifying story of mistreatment of sick and wounded GIs at Ft.Stewart,GA: (UPI, Mark Benjamin--cited at this website INFORMATIONCLEARINGHOUSE.INFO)

 
GOODBYE,HONEST SANCHEZ: Statements from U.S. general Sanchez in Iraq have not echoed the nutty Bush line; his most devastating line was this: "We will continue to suffer casualties as long as we stay here." Unsurprisingly, we hear now that Sanchez is to be 'kicked upstairs', away from power in Iraq./AssocPress19Oct.
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DREAMS OF CUTTING OUR FORCE: U.S. plans to cut our troop-numbers in Iraq to 40,000 by mid-2005. The optimistic reason: the hope that the 'Iraqi security forces' we're training can take over policing activities...so far there is no sign of success here.
Also, we hope that other countries will supplement our 'peace-keeping' force..there is no hope of any significant such contribution; indeed, now the Turks are hinting that they WON'T send troops into Iraq as long as the Iraqis don't want them..which rejection shows no sign of lessening.
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The pessimistic, real reasons for cutting down on # of troops:
a) the main role of our troops now is to serve as SITTING DUCKS for guerilla-attacks. (Crude activities by our troops just increase the number of terrorists.)The fewer troops, the fewer sitting ducks.
b) "There is deep worry..that the Army would have to maintain its current troop levels beyond Spring '04, which could create a personnel exodus [drop in enlistments/reenlistments, plus possible desertions] that threatens the viability of our all-volunteer force." [Suppose the next time the Pentagon gave a war, almost no young Americans would come!] /AssocPress19OCT
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3000 Iraq GIs have been granted leave since Sept. (It's not said how many returnedto U.S.--they must pay their own air-fare!) Of those--however many--who came here, 16 have failed to report back or to explain their absence. /USATODAY22OCT
GUARDIAN(25oct) says that THIRTY have not checked in after leave.
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Once desertion becomes thinkable (Canada would not extradite deserters back here) it may become quite common.

 
CLASH OF CRAZIES: After a bigoted anti-Muslim statement from a top U.S.general, and a bigoted anti-Jewish statement from the leader of Malaysia, talk has started again about a 'clash of civilizations'--which is misleading, because the contenders here are not very civilized!
Rather, we should refer to a 'clash of fundamentalist crazies': 'Texas-type' Protestants who think Jesus' 2d coming will be hastened by the 'Holy Land' coming under Israeli control--(how the Jews must laugh at this position, privately!); Zionist crazies who think that God awarded them the whole land 3000 years ago, and believe this dubious title-deed is worth dieing for and killing for; and Muslim crazies of the bin Laden type.
In fact, most nominal 'Christians' and 'Jews' are really secular pagans. There are one billion nominal Catholics in the world--the small minority of fundamentalist Catholics, like the Pope, are fanatic mainly on issues of sex and abortion, not about world-control. (They like the Protestant fundamentalists and also Muslims who agree with them in opposing non-standard sex and abortion--they don't know that Muslims DON'T agree fully on early abortion!)
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The Protestant/Zionist fanatics (numbering one or two hundred million) [including the surprisingly large number of American Fundamentalists] are armed with mountains of hi-tech weapons; the Islamist advantage is a) a much higher proportion of zealots among the one billion Muslims scattered all over the world; (b) a much more intense fanaticism, endorsing martyr-murders. The conflict is more evenly-matched than appears at first sight.

 
Oil flowed for a few hours from Iraq to Turkey--then a leak developed.
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There are about 20 attacks on GIs on our allies each day--not just in the 'Sunni Triangle' any more, but also North in Mosul and in the Shiite South. /INDEPENDENT19OCT
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An attack in Falluja wounded some Americans. A crowd of Iraqi men and boys celebrated, "Falluja has destroyed the Americans!"/Reuters19OCT
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UNDERSTATEMENT: "It's clear that we have not yet secured the confidence of the Iraqi people"--from a British official to a German magazine/ FinTimes18OCT

 
MONEY FOR IRAQ? The World Bank says Iraq could usefully absorb only $5 billion next year. Congress has voted $20 billion for reconstruction (besides the usual gross $60 billion extra for the Pentagon!). Yet U.S. is aggressively begging other countries to chip in also.
No target amount has been set for the 'Donors' Conference' this month. That way, there's no way to say the conference was a failure, which it is expected to be.
Iraq already owes $100 billion to other countries. U.S. says this debt should be forgiven, not just postponed. /Reuters18Oct/
If you were owed a lot of money by someone who's poor now, but was expected to come into billions in the near future (Iraq's oil exports), you might be willing to postpone payment--but would you be dumb enough to forgive the debt altogether?!
/Reuters18OCT.

 
BRING 'EM ON! says Bush to Indonesian terrorists. /
On his way to hurried visits to Asian countries: the Shrub felt taller while standing next to the Gropinator, Gov.Schwarz. So he blustered against Indonesia, reminding all that he felt free to 'preempt' (launch an unprovoked first strike at) any nation he chose, uttering his usual dim slogan:
"Wars are won on the offensive." /NYT18Oct/
Terrorist toes must have curled in delight to hear his blustering, amplified by his visits. The Bush-team is dying to take over (and screw up) the anti-terrorist fight in Phillipines; Bush offered to help the Philipines, but had to leave Manila early for fear of being attacked.
Next the Bushies will want to attack the dozens of jungle-islands in Indonesia. If there are any of the 200 millions [**footnote] of Indonesian Muslims who are not siding with alQaeda yet, this should move them closer to helping terrorists, or volunteering themselves as terrorists. What a beautiful place those jungles will be to hide terrorist training camps!
One tries to guess at a rational explanation of these seemingly-nutty scripts given to Bush to read. Are they to distract Americans from the Iraq fiasco? Will that work?
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About Bush's silly 'offense' slogan: Historians will ask why our posture was 'ALL SWORD & NO SHIELD!' when what we needed for Homeland Defense was obviously shields!
The answer is simple: the SWORD-MAKERS own (or lease) all our politicians!
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**footnote: Indonesian population is over 200 million; largest group are Muslims.But one source refers to only '70 million Indonesian Muslims'..Well, that's still a lot of Muslims to offend!

 
HAPPY TALK--the Bush-team is on an optimism campaign to paint the Iraq fiasco as successful. One player in this game is a Republican Congressman who said cheerfully, "The story of what we've done..is remarkable. It's more important than losing a couple of soldiers every day."/
Maureen Dowd comments: "This guy puts the 'casual' back into 'casualties." /DenvPost17Oct
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TROUBLE WITH SHIITES! The Bremer line has been that the guerillas are Saddamite (Sunni) leftovers or foreign infiltrators. But Friday 3 GIs were killed and 3 wounded (and several of our police were killed or wounded) in an open fire-fight with 20/30 bodyguards of a Shiite cleric in KARBALA. a Shiite city ! /CNN17OCT
People said we'd never be able to unite the 3 sects in Iraq. But we may succeed in uniting them AGAINST US!
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A GI expressed the situation succinctly: "It's very frustrating; it's not traditional warfare...no military targets..no known enemy. / They're ungrateful..we bring them freedom, and they still try to kill us."/Reuters17OCT
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ANOTHER PIPELINE BURN:[Assoc.Press17Oct] This pattern dampens any hope we have of quickly restoring oil exports to help pay for our Iraq project. After all that Blood for Oil, we can't use the Goddamned oil! And it is God-damned.
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SOME LOAN! Congress is demanding that $10 billion (of the new$20 billion for Iraq construction) count as a LOAN from Iraq. Unfortunately, a loan signed by occupiers(Bremer gang) or by puppet Council imposes NO OBLIGATION on any future legitimate Iraq govt. But if it makes Congressional nincompoops feel better...
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OUR UN RESOLUTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY: Big Deal ! Powell admits there's little prospect of many new troops being 'donated' by other countries (Pakistan,India, France,Germany, & Russia just said NO again)--and 'Donor's Conference' is likely to come up with $5 billion at the most--when the need is for $50 billion PLUS our money!
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I'M NOT GLOATING ! over Bushies' problems in Iraq. These failures involve many deaths and much suffering.
But God help us if the Iraq project succeeded splendidly--one Bushie (Woolsey) planned that they would then attack or intimidate Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, Syria...and Egypt! (not to mention North Korea!) His happy Nazi-like phrase was this: WE ARE ON THE MARCH!
Huge slaughters can be avoided only if U.S. rulers finally realize that a nation as ignorant and childish and narcissist as ourselves can never hope to be an imperial power..we must crawl back to our (quite comfortable) den, as our founding fathers intended--and stay at home, concentrating on the defense of our Homeland. (Indeed, hardly any of our populace WANT us to be an imperial power!)

 
BUSH PRIORITIES: U.S. manufacturers and exporters are raising hell about the policies of China and Japan to hold their currency-rates low, thus making their exports cheaper and their imports (including U.S. exports) more expensive--when both countries have huge trade surpluses (sell more than buy) with U.S. (Of course, U.S. is trying to make its dollar cheaper for the same reasons, but never mind...in fact, Japan's buying of dollars to keep them expensive is directly underming our attempt to 'print more money' and cheapen the dollar.)
Bush is visiting Japan, but he's not expected to protest the currency issue--because Japan has just offered $1.5 billion to Bush's zany Iraq project./Reuters16OCT/
So Bush is willing to sell out U.S. exporters for this relatively piddling amount of subsidy for Iraq. [We're spending over $100 billion so far on Iraq fiasco. That's besides the regular shovelling of $1 billion per DAY to the Pentagon.]
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Bush did mention his currency-concerns to China and Japan (to appease Congressmen back home.) Both nations REFUSED TO CHANGE THEIR CURRENCY-POLICIES AT ALL.
/USATODAY20OCT.

 
TRYING TO IMITATE THE BRITISH IN IRAQ:
A 1996 book by J.Wallach: THE DESERT QUEEN, gives a fascinating insight into
a) the model 'successful' (?) British takeover in Iraq that the Bush-team was probably trying to imitate;
b) the obvious reasons why the clowns in our government could never hope to match even the limited success the British had.
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THE STORY: In 1917, at the end of WWI, the Ottoman (Turk) Empire was destroyed. The British knew a) the future world would depend on oil, and (b) "Mesopotamia' (including present-day Iraq) had a Sea of Oil.
So the British, brutally enough, just took over Mesopotamia. They counted on the inhabitants being grateful to be liberated from 600 years of slavery under Turkey. (The speeches of the new 'High Commissioner' emphasized that they were there to liberate, not to exploit.) Brutal indeed: they didn't mind airplane-gunning hapless nomads to enforce their rule, or kidnapping a recalcitrant Iraqi leader and shipping him to Ceylon.
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An incredible British woman was involved in the occupation of Iraq, GERTRUDE BELL..an archaologist fluent in Arabic, knowledgeable about the culture of the area, skilled and subtle in diplomatic sneakiness.
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The gratitude didn't last long...the inhabitants soon realized they had been suppressed by still another conqueror--and these were INFIDELS, like the hated Crusaders--not Muslims. So there soon were a string of uprisings, costing hundreds of lives of English and (tame) Indian/Gurkha troops. Millions of pounds were also expended, rousing many complaints in Britain. But the lives and the money were a small price to pay for OIL !| [Of course, as is usual with imperial projects: Britain as a whole paid the costs, while the oil-profits went mainly to a few millionaires. This phenomenon was noted 250 years ago by Adam Smith. But the average Briton was paid off in IMPERIAL VANITY.]
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The Brit Occupation was staffed by people like Bell, sophisticated about the MiddleEast and fluent OF COURSE in Arabic. Bell complained that the wives of the officials DIDN'T KNOW ARABIC, and were therefore obstacles to success. (Bell and other British colonialists wrote hundreds of letters, which make a good historical record.)
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Bell and other enlighted occupiers knew they'd eventually be thrown out--so they made a clever (and lucky) move. They found an unemployed king named FAISAL (just thrown out of Damascus by the French) who was a DESCENDENT OF MOHAMMED. He knew nothing of Mesopotamia, but they tutored him and he was a bright, quick learner. They rigged a referendum and announced that he had been elected, by a huge majority, as King Of Iraq.
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The British wangled a 'Mandate' from the supine League of Nations to rule Mesopotamia, so their High Commissioner had the last word over the puppet king. But Faisal insisted on dropping the Mandate and setting up Iraq as a separate independent State. After much British grumbling, (with Bell pushing for independence as a better alternative than being shoved out)--Faisal got his way..but everyone knew he was a British puppet, kept in power only by British guns. (The intelligence the Brits showed in backing out gracefully is appreciated only when you realize that AT THAT TIME they showed no intention of giving up their world-spanning empire! However, they recognized that the Iraqis, like the Afghans, were too mean and stubborn to remain subjects of a Western power for long.)
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What counts is that Faisal (and the puppet Council) finally signed a 75-year contract with a Western Oil Consortium. So backing out was acceptable to the British.
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Faisal died young, replaced by an inept son, who also died young. The infant grandson was nominally King, but rule was actually by a Regent. But this Regent was ousted by a socialist revolution, in the Fifties, by the Baath party. Then the Baath dictator was overthrown by Saddam Hussein. And there we are.
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Bushies IMITATING THE GOALS of the British: they would oust the tyrannous Hussein, enter Iraq as welcomed liberators,set up a puppet government which would give them power over all that oil.
( Wm.Pfaff has the most plausible explanation of our stubborn determination to stay in power in Baghdad despite embarrassing signs that we can't control the place (guerilla attacks at will' on GIs, 'collaborators', and oil-pipelines). We dream of setting up a puppet government (as the British did) which will be accepted by the world as legitimate, so they can sign valid contracts giving us power over the oil.)
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Daddy Bush (not so dumb) seemed to want to keep the Baathists in power (giving us power of oil), but without nasty Saddam. So in Gulf War I he didn't attack Baghdad, hoping that Saddam would then be ousted.
Not so..Saddam stayed in power, now really hostile to U.S. (who had once backed him in war with Iran!)
CRUCIAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE 2 PROJECTS:
--The Bushies, unlike the Brits, had NO FIRST-HAND INTELLIGENCE about real conditions in Iraq. They had to trust Iraq refugees like the convicted embezzler Chalabi, who enthusiastically encouraged our invasion, wanting to get back in power in Iraq! (Later, they wondered if some of their emigre informants weren't planted in fact by Saddam, just to plant false info! ) DUH !
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-The British populace grumbled about the lives lost and the money spent in Iraq--but they had a long-run view, since previous patience had led to the triumphant Empire in India and other places. They grudgingly accepted losses, in lives and money, for about EIGHT YEARS before they got that oil-contract.
-The Americans, on the other hand, are a childish people totally uninterested in the outside world, expecting success in months--if there are any U.S. casualties to remind them of the project--or to hell with it. (They've accepted our absurd stationing of troops for years in a half-dozen other countries because they're not even aware of it!)
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-One side-effect of U.S. disinterest in the outside world is that we have almost NO people--not even among our intellectual elite--who understand Arabic! (In 2000, only 6 Americans majored in Arabic; in 2001 (after we had worried for years about AlQaeda), only 6 people in the FBI understood Arabic..not many more in CIA. And almost none of the Arabic-speakers studied MiddleEast cultures.
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-We don't have available a talented DESCENDENT OF MOHAMMED like King Faisal,able and willing to serve as our puppet.--(or a woman like Bell who could manipulate the king.) We have only about 2 people in our 'ruling circle' in Iraq who speak Arabic, one general and one imported Englishman. Instead of supple, sly, super-educated GERTRUDE BELL to maneuver for us, we have the clod Bremer (of whom it was said, "What he knows about Iraq would fit in a thimble." )
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- Also, the British didn't face a worldwide population of One Billion Muslims, enraged especially by our poodle-like subservience to nutty Sharon of Israel, and inspired by the seemingly superhuman exploits of Osama bin Laden. Nor did they face his decentralized, effective, worldwide AlQuaeda network. Nor did their guerilla foes have the enormous money-resources AlQuaeda has.
Nor did the Brits face the relatively new guerilla-custom of suicide-bombing (super-efficient because you don't have to worry about getting away! Also the bombers don't get captured, so they can't be tortured into giving information to the invading enemy.)
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-A few U.S. casualties a week constantly remind Americans of our humilating helplessness in Iraq. Our national Treasury is depleted from other Bush follies, and we get no money either from the immediate oil revenues we had hoped for, or from other nations (who detest our project).
And we're so culturally blind that we're ready to call for the loathed Turks to enter Iraq again !
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|Those are the considerations that persuade me that sooner or later, we will have to bug out, as we did in Vietnam. So, the sooner the better, the later the worse. As the respected right-wing CATO INSTITUTE said several months ago, BRING'EM HOME NOW!

 
EMPTY UN RESOLUTION on Iraq: U.S. is offering a 'timetable for getting a timetable'.
(for handing power over to Iraqis).
That impresses few. Then, top honcho in our puppet Council said that elections will take place in 2004. He said.. but no timetable is mentioned in the resolution.
The resolution will likely get 9 votes to 'pass'. (Our 'opponents'--France, Germany, Russia--don't think it's worth vetoing.] So what?
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Will the silly resolution get more foreign troops into Iraq? [The new bomb at Turk embassy in Iraq seems to show that guerillas will not be pacified by introduction of foreign 'Muslim' troops. Guerillas have killed IRAQI 'police' set up by us without much popular resentment.]
Never mind: at the pan-Islamic conference in Malaysia, it was said that NO Muslim country (except Turkey, loathed and feared inIraq) planned to send troops to Iraq.
/Assoc.Press14OCT
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No one expects that the resolution will bring in much much-needed money from other countries./Reuters15OCT/We broke it, we bought it./
THE RESOLUTION PASSED UNANIMOUSLY..but France, Germany & Russia said that its present form justified NO MONEY FROM THEM. And Pakistan said its present form meant NO TROOPS FROM PAKISTAN. Big deal.

 
COMMON-SENSE CONFIRMED: BUSH HELPED OSAMA:
The highly-respected Internatl.Inst.forStrategicStudies (hardly a 'dove' group!) says this: On the one (optimistic) side , our Iraq invasion deprived AlQaeda of 'potential' supply of WMDs from Saddam.
[Lyons: some potential! Presumably Saddam had some war-germ stocks--easy to hide-- presumably germs more lethal than those now available to terrorists. If he wanted to help terrorists, he'd supply them NOW..what could we do, bomb Iraq again?! ]
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-and (said the IISS) the invasion discouraged State support for terrorists. [Lyons: ..discouraged VISIBLE support, from supporting states that can be bombed. The worry is Indonesia's jungles being used for AQ training camps. It wouldn't help to bomb Jakarta..the terrorists would love that.
-AQ-type terrorists don't NEED state support! The only reason 'State Support' is constantly brought up is that bombing nations is the only thing our Pentagon does well..the irrelevance of Pentagon to countering terrorists must be concealed, to conceal waste of over $1 thousand millions per day. ]
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On The other, realistic side:
--the invasion, IISS said, aided AQ recruiting (by further alienating 1 billion Muslims from West) and galvanized their will. Already decentralized and evasive before the invasion, terrorists are now even harder to identify and neutralize./Reuters15OCT

 
OUR NEW PREEMPTIVE-ATTACK STRATEGY:
--In Sept.'02, the Bush-team issued, as official U.S. policy, a paper
['THE NATL.SECURITY STRATEGY OF U.S.'] that said, basically, that we would feel free to launch a first-strike (nuclear strikes not barred!)--not just against any nation that threatened us imminently, but against any nation (which WE decided was hostile) which tried to catch up with us in weaponry! "With our thousands of nukes, we now have you at our mercy," we said to every other nation, "and we intend to keep you at our mercy." [**footnote]
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--Then we showed that we meant it, by invading puny Iraq, which posed no imminent threat to us at all. (Because our populace wasn't enthusiastic about 'preemption'--or had ever heard of it!--our leaders also lied blatantly to us to convince us that Iraq DID pose an 'imminent' threat to us--our British poodles actually said Iraq could launch a devastating first strike in 45 minutes!)
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--We also threatened North Korea and Iran--who promptly hurried to get enough plutonium to make nukes, or at least to make cheap and easy 'dirty bombs' that could render city-centers uninhabitable for long periods of time. They wanted to have a '2d-strike deterrent': so they could say to us, "You can indeed destroy our nation in a day, with your thousands of nukes--but our survivors, FROM OUR GRAVE, can at least MAIM the [incredibly vulnerable] U.S. Homeland..so, IF you're sane, you won't want to attack us."
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--Both of these nations, you can bet, are also developing designer war-germs resistant to our (pathetically inadequate) vaccines. You can also bet that every other nation without a nuclear 2d-strike deterrent is working on a cheap war-germ deterrent, so they can resist our imperial threats. Saudi Arabia (rich as Croesus) now says it might develop its own nukes.
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--Now we (and our fellow-rogues in Sharonista Israel) are eager to bomb any nuke-developing plant we can find. (Iran seems next on the list, because North Korea is prudently hiding its plants under mountains.)
But Russia and China might worry that Germany and Japan might be forced into our empire, against them--so they might find it prudent to sell these rich countries a few completed nukes--which would give THEM a 2d-strike deterrent, making them immune to our imperial threats. (Even without such sales, I'd imagine that Germany and Japan are developing war-germs and material for dirty-bombs as fast as they can.)
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--It turns out that this preemption has unofficially been our zany policy for some time; but as the old hawk Brent Scowcroft pointed out, laying it out officially may not have been too bright--because it would stimulate these counter-responses.
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Not only is our new 'preemptive' doctrine triggering these dangerous '2d-strike' responses; it has also made preemption morally respectable. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for every gander.
So Russia has just announced that IT will feel free to strike first at any country that IT DEEMS threatens its INTERESTS (not just its safety, but its interests). Russia did say it wouldn't use nukes unless it is attacked (presumably by us)..but it reminded the world that it has thousands of awesome nuke-armed missiles.
And Israel announced that it would attack any country, anywhere in the world, which IT DECIDES is backing anti-Israel terrorists. Why shouldn't China follow suit?
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So our new pre-emption doctrine has made us EVEN LESS SAFE than before, and has made the whole world a more dangerous place. One is reminded of a nasty poster found in Austin,Texas, showing George W.Bush smirking: "..and they said I was too dumb to cause much trouble!"
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**For anyone who disagrees with my interpretation of this document..please tell what real limits it puts on the doctrine that I have not mentioned.
We DON'T have Russia at our mercy! If we nuke them, their nuke-submarines can wipe us out 'from their grave'. Also, Britain & France, with their nuke-subs, could MAIM us severely from their grave. Also: China,India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea could inflict 'nukes' on us, to maim us from their grave, since they can deliver them without needing ICBMs.


COMMENTS WELCOME!