Even as we speak congress is debating a resolution supposedly to reaffirm their commitment to the "war on terror" that's a pretty transparent effort to smear opponents to the war in iraq. no surprise there. but i'm surprised at the strength of the democratic counterattack -- they're really sticking it to the republicans and not letting themselves get cowed and i think it might backfire on the repubs.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20060615/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_15

well, i spoke too soon. dems wussed out again.

oh well.

The Democrat leadership is a fifth column. The Republican party is dead. A neo-nazi faction is just using the name.

There is no "war on terror." No such thing. It does not exist. Period. The "war on terror" is just a stalking horse for the fascist state. Where terrorism exists in the world it is a Frankenstein monster created by the greed-driven foreign policy of our big business-controlled government.

Islam isn't our problem. How many Muslims sit on the Supreme Court? It wasn't guys named Mohammed who just gave "law enforcement" the permission to kick in our front doors any time their bosses order them to. Strict constructionists my azz! How many of our Founding Fathers envisioned a government allowed to invade our homes at its pleasure? One thing I know, if Thomas Paine were alive today, the Bushies would label him a terrorist for what he would say about them.

now you're just scarin' me.

although yeah, the illegal search and seizure decision by the supremes is just prespammersite, absolutely a big in your face fudge you and your pissant rights. it's five black-robed middle fingers shoved right in our faces.

now you're just scarin' me.

although yeah, the illegal search and seizure decision by the supremes is just prespammersite, absolutely a big in your face fudge you and your pissant rights. it's five black-robed middle fingers shoved right in our faces.

I ain't scarin' you.  I'm just a dude typing on a computer terminal hundreds of miles away. I'm just tellin' it like it is, and maybe THAT'S scarin' you!

well, i spoke too soon. dems wussed out again.

oh well.


Wussed out, or are having second thoughts about the way their party wants to handle this war?

When you have 3 Republicans vote against it and 42 Democrats (almost 1/3 of Democrats in the House) vote for it, that makes a large statement by itself.  The final vote was 256 to 153, in other words not even close.

And on a similar note, Sen. Kerry sponsored a similar proposal in the Senate.  That one was shot down, 93-6.  An even more one-sided result.

In other words, the war is not as un-popular as a lot of people would like us to believe.  And in the last several years, there have been numerous achievements.  Al-Queda is on the run, both Afganistan and Iraq have had free public elections, and the rights of both women and minorities in each country is guaranteed.

Not to mention that several documents recovered from Al-Zarqawi himself state that things were looking bad for them, and their best chance would be to create a Civil War in Iraq, or to start a war between the US and Iran.

Now if we can only do something to help solve the mess we left in Somalia.  The Union of Islamic Courts has taken over the capitol of Mogadishu, and has close ties with Al-Queda and the Taliban.  Several of the leaders got their training in Afganistan during the 1990's.

Wussed out, or are having second thoughts about the way their party wants to handle this war?

i think the way war gets politicked in this country is really interesting. you start a war and then the momentum goes in the direction of, you can't criticize it or else people jeer at you for being anti-american. chances are lot of the people jeering have their doubts about the war too but everybody's so afraid of getting jeered at that they jeer in order to avoid getting jeered at. i think the demos are having similar problems -- they want the war to end but they're so afraid of getting smeared by the republicans, who are very excellent smearers, that they're voting in ways at odd with their conscience. it's really rather embarrassing.

When you have 3 Republicans vote against it and 42 Democrats (almost 1/3 of Democrats in the House) vote for it, that makes a large statement by itself.  The final vote was 256 to 153, in other words not even close.

And on a similar note, Sen. Kerry sponsored a similar proposal in the Senate.  That one was shot down, 93-6.  An even more one-sided result.

In other words, the war is not as un-popular as a lot of people would like us to believe.

well, an antiwar vote is seen as potentially politically damaging, not because the war itself, this specific war, is really going that well, or because it's popular, but because of the knee-jerk prohibition against opposing war no matter how incorrigible a failure it is. anyway, the vote in congress hardly makes the war popular, it's just another vote highly at odds with the will of the people, if the polls are to be believed. (i know, i know, you can't wage a war by looking at the polls, i heard the tony snow soundbite today, but that's another point entirely.)

And in the last several years, there have been numerous achievements.  Al-Queda is on the run, both Afganistan and Iraq have had free public elections, and the rights of both women and minorities in each country is guaranteed.

this must be tough to do with a straight face.  :)

this must be tough to do with a straight face.  :)


Hmmm, let's see:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - #1 Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq - Dead
Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman - Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq - Dead
Ezzat Ahmed Salman - al-Zarqawi deputy - killed 14 June firefight with Iraqi military
Haji Omar - Taliban leader - killed by Pakistani military
Younis Mohammad Ibrahim al-Hayyari - #1 Al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia - killed in Saudi Arabia
Salih Muhammad al-Awfi - #1 Al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia - killed in Saudi Arabia
Abdulaziz al-Muqrin - #1 Al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia - killed in Saudi Arabia (has been a bad year for Al-Qadea leaders in Saudi Arabia)
Mullah Ibrahim - Taliban leader - captured in Afganistan
Khaled Ali bin Haj - #2 Al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia - Killed in Saudi Arabia
Midhat Mursi al-Sayid 'Umar - #2 Al-Qaeda in Afganistan - killed in Pakistan (along with 3 other high ranking leaders)

In fact, so many #2 and #3 leaders have been killed in Iraq in the last year that it is impossible to keep track of them all.  It seems that as soon as one is killed, another then takes his place, only to be killed himself.  It is even worse in Saudi Arabia, where the #1 leaders are killed one after another.

In fact, in the days since al-Zarqawi was killed, over 100 Al-Qaeda members have been killed in Iraq.

If that is an Al-Qaeda victory, I would hate to see how badly chewed up they are in a defeat.

Kill all the Al Qeada you want, we'll make more. We need a bogeyman. If the Bushies get their way we'll be mired in the middle-east for the next three decades. We've already gone trillions in debt and depleted our military manpower in three years.
DIE FOR OIL, SUCKER!

al qaeda makes up something like five to ten percent of the insurgency in iraq, i'm reading?

the point i'm trying to make is, characterizing the war in iraq as a success when you've basically triggered a civil war that's tearing the country apart is prespammersite on its face.

Hate to be obtuse, but there's a certain fella here supporting the war. Easy for him to do. It ain't his azz getting shot at in the scorching sand!
It ain't the so-called "hawks" in the government either, and neither is it their precious brats. Nope, it's young men and women from the working class who joined to serve their country and build up some job skills. Now they're getting their limbs blown off in an unwanted occupation of a sovereign nation to help the parasitic robber barons get richer.
I keep hearing how four-fifths of the Iraqis don't want us there, but even if they did, we shouldn't be there in the first place.

Hate to be obtuse, but there's a certain fella here supporting the war. Easy for him to do. It ain't his azz getting shot at in the scorching sand!
It ain't the so-called "hawks" in the government either, and neither is it their precious brats. Nope, it's young men and women from the working class who joined to serve their country and build up some job skills. Now they're getting their limbs blown off in an unwanted occupation of a sovereign nation to help the parasitic robber barons get richer.
I keep hearing how four-fifths of the Iraqis don't want us there, but even if they did, we shouldn't be there in the first place.
Vis a vis the four-fifths thing, my two favorite soundbites from the right are:

a. better to fight them there than over here, and
b. we're spending our blood and treasure to liberate iraq and they're not even grateful!

which is funny because a. roughly translates into, better innocent Iraqis die than innocent Americans, which leaves a troubling open question in b. in terms of what exactly the Iraqis are supposed to be grateful for. Afghanistan was used as a staging area in the 1980s for a proxy war between the US and the USSR and strangely, afghans seem by and large to be grateful to neither America or the soviet union for it. now iraq is picked as a staging area for a war between America and -- well, whoever it is exactly we're supposed to be at war with -- and they're supposed to be grateful. It would really be rather funny if it weren't so sad.

Vis a vis the four-fifths thing, my two favorite soundbites from the right are:

a. better to fight them there than over here, and
b. we're spending our blood and treasure to liberate iraq and they're not even grateful!

which is funny because a. roughly translates into, better innocent Iraqis die than innocent Americans, which leaves a troubling open question in b. in terms of what exactly the Iraqis are supposed to be grateful for. Afghanistan was used as a staging area in the 1980s for a proxy war between the US and the USSR and strangely, afghans seem by and large to be grateful to neither America or the soviet union for it. now iraq is picked as a staging area for a war between America and -- well, whoever it is exactly we're supposed to be at war with -- and they're supposed to be grateful. It would really be rather funny if it weren't so sad.


It came as quite a shock to us in Vietnam that the funny-looking peasants in black pajamas were enmeshed in a tight political network with coordinated goals and ideals. Our war-mongering politicians and pundits sold us a racist line going into this war: the presumption the Iraqis were like forelorn children we could rescue from a wicked stepfather. I don't know if all the politicos believed this delusion, or whether they just sold it to Americans cynically. The idea that somehow because Iraqis look, dress, speak, and think differently from Americans, and their material wealth is meager, somehow makes them less-than. It seems Americans are barely conscious of the prejudice.
Why did we (for lack of a better pronoun) believe Iraqis were not aware they were used as pawns in the Iran-Iraq war and that Saddam was on our payroll for decades? Why do we assume the Iraqis are not aware of the United States' history of lying to the Native Americans and exterminating indigenous people in our own country? Why do we assume Iraqis don't know our policians used to speak of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws as being beneficial to the "unhappy black race" (as Justice Taney put it in the Dredd Scott decision)?

Why would the Iraqis trust the Americans with our country's history of racism, genocide, lying, and greed? What do we think they are...stupid?

American opinion-makers discourage us from trying to understand the reason behind suicide bombing. People do desperate and violent things when they are forced to live in on their knees generation after generation, and when political overlords lie to them time and again They may see some rationale as to why their greatest hope may be murder by terrorism...and it has nothing to do with Allah and 72 virgins.  I am not mentioning suicide bombing to justify or condemn the act. I mention it because you have to understand the enemy in order to effectively deal with the enemy...and once you understand who you think the enemy is, you might find out he is not the real enemy after all!

well, i might push back a bit on the characterization that the iraqis are in any significant way informed by the treatment of native americans several hundred years ago. i think there have always been a series of competing narratives in the middle east for understanding the west -- america was actually quite popular in the ME until around the early '50s, when they had that whole mess with mossadeq in iran. even then i think, and i'm getting a little out of my depth, that eisenhower scored many points in the suez crisis of, when was it, 56, 57? there's been a more complicated way that america has engaged in the middle east, but after 67 and 73 we seemed to get more situated on the side of the israelis and the whole travesty of 1953 came back up and led to the "student" revolution of 79. but even now a lot of people in the middle east love western popular culture and yearn in a certain sense to be "westernized," which is a semi-separate issue from the matter of american foreign policy. but even now there are two ways america could go in the Middle East, a more positive image we could grab hold of and perpetuate there. it basically involves practiciing what we preach in terms of perpetuating freedom, and not using it as a cynical ploy for exercising military force. and they could use lots of freedom in the region, but we're very far from anything like that at the moment, unfortunately.

still, i don't think america as conqueror is the only narrative out there, the only way america is understood overseas. it's at danger of becoming so, but we're not quite there yet.

I certainly think the educated leadership---secular and ecclesiastical--in Iraq understands U.S. history. The average workers and farmers, probably not. It is speculation on my part. What I object to is the assumption that Iraqis are unsophisticated and childlike. I agree with your point about "competing narratives."
Please do not assume I am sanctifying the Iraqis. They are only human. We are only human. We are all fallible. Religion makes the whole mix explosive on both sides. When you bring an infallible God/Allah, Jesus/Mohammed into politics and say, "We are infallible because our religion is infallible, and our religion is infallible because...our religion says its infallible," then you have negated any chance for common understanding.

Remember when our opinion-makers kept saying, "they hate us for our freedom"? Millions upon millions of Americans believed that and never took the analysis any further. It frightens me how many Americans don't want to think for themselves. They want Big Daddy to tell them what to think.

The Bush program, "If you're not with us you're ag'in us" is stupifying and dangerous. For instance, I agree with some things Michael Moore says in his movies, I disagree with other things he says. In general, I think Michael Moore is on the right track. However, the rightwing media cannot afford to let any of Michael Moore's message be seen as valid. So you get constant polemical warpath and no real debate!

the point i'm trying to make is, characterizing the war in iraq as a success when you've basically triggered a civil war that's tearing the country apart is prespammersite on its face.


The Civil War was mostly triggered by Al-Qaeda.  In fact, it was a major stategy of al-Zarqawi.  And in the letters captured, even he stated that it was not working as well as he had hoped.

In fact, one of the people we were fighting against last year is now calling for solidarity and an end to the fighting.  Muqtada al-Sadr disbanded his army (the largest Iraqi force at the time), and joined the political process.  Some of the most vicious attacks have been in his district, yet he continues to petition for peace, urging his own followers to not strike back against Sunni forces.

In fact, in the months after their disbandment, his forces have become among the most effective in the Iraqi military.  They are following his orders to root out all the "foreign invaders" who are trying to turn Sunni against Shi'ite.  When an opponent this strong turns into an ally, we must be doing something right over there.  And when one of the most powerful Shi'ite clerics with his own army voluntarily disbands it and urges his followers to stop fighting the US and instead go after the foreign insurgents, that says something even more important.

And nobody ever said that Al-Qaeda is the only group fighting in Iraq.  There have been members of Hammas, and several PLO break-away groups found as well.  That region has long been an "alphabet soup" of various groups, often fighting each other as much as their "sworn enemies".  Mostly they want to see modern version of Afganistan or Lebanon.  They need a home, and the best way to do that is to foster unrest in a nation, then set up their camps and work as mercenaries for whatever petty warlord wants more fighters on their side.

Remember when our opinion-makers kept saying, "they hate us for our freedom"? Millions upon millions of Americans believed that and never took the analysis any further. It frightens me how many Americans don't want to think for themselves. They want Big Daddy to tell them what to think.

The Bush program, "If you're not with us you're ag'in us" is stupifying and dangerous. For instance, I agree with some things Michael Moore says in his movies, I disagree with other things he says. In general, I think Michael Moore is on the right track. However, the rightwing media cannot afford to let any of Michael Moore's message be seen as valid. So you get constant polemical warpath and no real debate!

yeah, the right wing has more pleasant fantasies than the left wing, "they hate us for our freedoms" being principal among them. i honestly have my doubts that anyone could seriously believe something so simplistic, i think that people actually convince themselves of it and worship their own certitude so as to quash any doubts in their mind. it's that fundamentalist phenomenon all over again, transforming doubt into faith -- the more troubling one's doubts, the more extreme one's forced conviction that one is right. bush is on record saying he has "no doubts whatsoever" he's doing the right thing in the "war on terror," and it's weird, this certainty of his -- rather than going, well of course i have some misgivings but i think basically we're doing the right thing. he's one-hundred percent sure.