Asia

It doesn't sound like much of a strategy. Frankly it scares the hell out of me that Mr. President is so twisted stiff about Iraq that he'll risk breaking the Army and leaving our country unable to respond to any threats to our national security and/or vital interests elsewhere in the world.

For a little over 20 minutes Wednesday night, Bush is to explain why a gradual buildup of about 20,000 additional U.S. troops, along with other steps expected to include pumping $1 billion into Iraq's economy, is the answer for a more than 3 1/2-year-old war that has only gotten deadlier with no end in sight.

The administration plans to expand an existing program to decentralize reconstruction efforts. Ten units known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams will be expanded to 19, with the additional units based in Baghdad and in Anbar province, seats of most of the worst violence. The teams, under State Department control, will administer some of the economic aid, including an effort to provide small loans to start or expand businesses.

Senator Ted Kennedy says that Congress should vote on this troop surge.

“The president’s speech must be the beginning – not the end – of a new national discussion of our policy in Iraq,” Kennedy said. “Congress must have a genuine debate over the wisdom of the president’s plan. Let us hear the arguments for it and against it. Then let us vote on it in the light of day.”

Asked whether the supplemental spending request would provide a vehicle for his legislative proposal, Kennedy replied, “The horse will be out of the barn by the time we get there.” Although the request is expected to reach Capitol Hill next month, Congress typically spends months working on such spending proposals. Kennedy said immediate action is needed to forestall the troop surge.

With our nation perhaps more vulnerable and unprepared for foreign (non-nuclear) threats since perhaps World War I, maybe such a vote would be a good idea. The President has the Constitutional responsibility to conduct foreign policy, but when he endangers the entire nation in pursuit of an escalation of a failed policy, it's in our national interest to try to avoid that.

If the President persists in spilling our national blood, treasure -- and yes, international political and moral capital -- in the middle of Iraq's civil war (or "sectarian violence," take your pick), then perhaps impeachment should be seriously considered by the don't-rock-the-boat-too-much Democrats.

(For the record, I believe that if Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying about fellatio, George W. Bush can and should be impeached for lying about Iraq and leading America into a quagmire. I don't think it will happen, but if Bush further risks our national security by over-extending our military even more, then we all should be asking, "Why not?!")

"No Surge" icon is from these T-Shirts. Very clever.

This is just so sad:

...Robert Best, a reader, was among several in the past several months who asked why the Tribune stopped writing articles about the life and death of every U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

"Here is a complaint that hopefully is not a partisan issue," Best wrote. "During the first two years or so of the war in Iraq, the Tribune published on a regular basis ... stories containing obituaries of sorts of the American troops who died in Iraq. Usually, a single story might contain stories about three or four soldiers who had died, with background information on them and quotes from family members and/or friends.

"While the soldiers were from different geographic regions of the country; represented different races, religions and ethnic groups; and were of differing age, gender and marital status, they shared a common bond in that they made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. I can't remember reading a single story without thinking to myself that this soldier was just an ordinary kid from an everyday walk of life."

Best, whose 22-year-old son is completing his third deployment to Iraq, said those stories "put an important face on the war."

Best did not raise it as a partisan issue, but many readers believe it is.

Who's to say it's partisan? But it's easy to make partisan conclusions about the war itself.

I swear that the NewsHour has sped up its Honor Roll, which almost makes it all the more horrifying. Are you watching these? They're kids -- 19, 20, 21, 22 years old -- and middle-aged -- 40s, even some in their 50s. Many of the older soldiers' photos have them in civvies, which suggests that they were called up out of their jobs, called away from their families, to go fight in Dick and George's war of choice.

A war that Bush is determined to pass on to his successor.

So as the casualty rate continues to accellerate, what will happen? Will we go back to scorecard reports, like we did in Vietnam, when our bravest were dying by the hundreds?

I'm sorry to see the Trib discontinue their regular coverage. It must be very hard to do. But I know that if I were a regular reader I would be left quite disappointed, and feel like I'd lost what must have been one of the best parts of the paper every day.

In Unforgiven, Bill Munny says:

Hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.

So much taken away. So much more.

During the crack cocaine epidemic that swept through New York in the 1980s, the murder rate topped 3,000 a year. In modern-day "democratic" Iraq, they got that number covered in a month.

An average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month, the highest monthly tally of violent deaths since the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations reported today.
They miss out on enjoying the "democracy" we've wrought in their country.

United Nations officials also said that the number of violent deaths had been steadily increasing since at least last summer. In the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.

This sharp upward trend reflected the dire security situation in Iraq as sectarian violence has worsened and Iraqi and American government forces have been powerless to stop it.
So what exactly is supposed to be getting better? How is it that our prolonged presence there is improving anything?

Last month, The Los Angeles Times, drawing from statistics provided by the Ministry of Health and the Baghdad morgue among other agencies, reported that at least 50,000 people, and perhaps many more, had been killed since the invasion.
American soldiers and Marines continue to pay a price as well. But at least Saddam Hussein is no longer "thumbing his nose at us."

The US military says the Taliban is getting stronger in Afghanistan.

Uruzgan was one of three southern provinces where U.S. military spokesman Col. Tom Collins said the insurgents have bolstered their numbers.

"We know for a fact that in recent weeks they have grown in strength and influence in some parts of Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan," he told a news conference in Kabul. "There is a hard-core group of Taliban fighters, certainly numbering in the hundreds."

He said the militants are recruiting poor villagers.

"They prey upon people who don't have a lot of hope. They recruit people to join their cause," he said. "These people may not believe much in the cause, but they need a job."Of course, we couldn't be bothered with actually helping Afghanistan grow an economy (aside from opium) or actually establish law and order.

"Taliban Schmaliban! Saddam is thumbing is nose at us! Let's fix the facts and go get him!"

And so we spend millions of dollars a minute dealing with the civil war we unleashed in Iraq, while the real terrorists who planned 9/11 get stronger in Afghanistan.

In making this choice, Bush may have been "the decider," but it sure doesn't seem to have been all that smart now.

What floated above the fold, Just the big ones.

First snowfall, winter '95-'96, on the
Korean War Veterans Memorial,
the Mall, Washington DC

From the magazine of the National Archives, Prologue:

The Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., presents in granite what for many remains its most powerful lesson— that "Freedom Is Not Free." Tourists can buy T-shirts sporting a map of Korea over which appears the judgment that this was "The Place Where Communism Was Stopped."

But since 1981 a swelling stream of books and articles reexamining not only the war itself, but U.S. policy toward Korea before June 1950, has shattered traditional beliefs about the conflict.

An artillery officer directs UN troops
as they drop white phosphorous on a
Communist-held post in February 1951.
(NARA, 111-SC-358293)

Viet-Nam

At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
a former soldier touches the granite wall
dedicated to casualties of the Vietnam War.
[National Geographic]

George Aiken's 1966 memo, Declare Victory and Withdraw:

Today, the American commitment in Viet Nam no longer involves the fundamental objective of preserving the credibility and integrity of U.S. Armed Forces - provided that the war is not extended in time or in geography to the point where a wholly n ew threat to U.S. military power exists.

The new threat might take either the form of Chinese intervention, or, more pertinent, the form of a prolonged erosion of the _credibility_ of U.S. power through harassment in a political context, namely through the disintegration of the South Vi etnamese society.

The United States government has asserted frequently and emphatically that there is no military "solution" or objective in this war.

We do not seek to destroy North Viet Nam nor its government.

This assertion is shared by virtually every type of observer, allied, official and hostile.

The greater the U.S. military commitment in South Viet Nam, however, the less possibility that any South Vietnamese government will be capable of asserting its own authority on its home ground or abroad.

The size of the U.S. commitment already clearly is suffocating any serious possibility of self-determination in South Viet Nam for the simple reason that the whole defense of that country is now totally dependent on the U.S. armed presence.

This was also true in Korea in 1954, but then the United States was operating under the umbrella of collective U.N. action, and along a well-defined battlefront which permitted organization of the rear areas.

None of this is true in South Viet Nam.

Beirut Barracks, October 1983

On October 23, 1983, a truck loaded
with thousands of pounds of explosives
destroyed the 4 storey command headquarters
of the US Marine Battalion Landing Unit
located at Beirut Airport.

A brief timeline:

On June 6,1982, Israeli troops invaded southern Lebanon to eradicate the PLO, which was launching its terrorist raids from there against Israel to the south.

On September 29, 1982, US Marines and French soldiers and Italian soldiers entered Beirut as part of a multinational peace-keeping force (MNF).

On April 18, 1983, a large car bomb exploded at the US Embassy in Beirut, causing massive structural damage and killing 61, including 17 Americans, and injuring 100.

On September 19, 1983, as a result of the buildup of tensions among numerous factions and nations operating in Lebanon, the USS Virginia, cruising with other American ships off Lebanon’s coast, shelled Druze militia in the Shouf Mountains to help the beleaguered Lebanese Armed Forces hold onto a strategic mountain village.

This shelling officially shifted the American role from a “presence� in Lebanon to the “direct support of Lebanese Armed Forces� and cost the US its appearance of neutrality.

On October 23, 1983, a truck loaded with thousands of pounds of explosives destroyed command headquarters of the US Marine Battalion Landing Unit located at Beirut Airport. An almost simultaneous suicide attack destroyed a building occupied by French paratroopers. US casualties were 241 killedand 70 wounded. French casualties were 58 killed.

In early 1984, the battleship USS New Jersey shelled Muslim Beirut and its suburbs, intensifying violent anti-American feeling.

On September 6, 1984, the US vetoed a United Nations resolution condemning Israel’s ongoing tactics in Lebanon as a result of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

On March 8, 1985, a car bomb went off near the Beirut home of Shiite Muslim cleric Sheikh Fadlallah (who was not killed in the attack), resulting in 45 Lebanese killed and 175 injured. Lebanese Shiites widely rumored that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved with the car bomb incident.

February to June 1985, Israel pulled out of Lebanon, taking 700+ Shiite hostages with them as security for their departing troops. Instead of immediately releasing the prisoners when their withdrawal was complete, however, the Israelis moved them to Atlit prison camp in northern Israel.

Mogadishu, Somalia 1993

Mogadishu timeline, 1991 forward.

The Former Yugoslavia

On patrol in Bosnia: U.S. Army Maj. Daniel Mahoney,
base commander at Camp Demi [USA Weekend]

In September, 1998 USA Today carried an exchange of emails between Maj Mahoney and his family:

Dear MacroMouse,

[W]e are putting a lot of miles on on our High-Mobility, Multi-Purpose, Wheeled Vehicle. Mine is called "the Beast." I have a three-person crew (four if you include me)... When I go out, I have 1,000 rounds for my M-60 machine gun (the main gun), 210 rounds for my driver's M-16 and 30 rounds for my M9 pistol... The armor on my vehicle can withstand up to .50 CAL machine-gun fire -- so I feel pretty safe. It is a mean little machine. Well, that's it for now, little muncher. Make sure you write back... I will be back before you know it!

Love, Dad

Kosovo

Administration officials pledged, meanwhile, that the NATO offensive would go on and denied that the allies' attacks on the Serbs had prompted Belgrade to retaliate against ethnic civilians.

"We had every reason to believe that they had both the intent and the capability to conduct massive offensive operations that would have been conducted with or without NATO airstrikes," Rubin said.

With the American public about evenly divided in its opinion of the NATO assault, the administration gave no ground either on the mission or that it holds Milosevic accountable for the havoc among Kosovo's civilian population.

"As a political matter, it is clear that Slobodan Milosevic bears responsibility for the events that led to war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and now Kosovo. Events in Kosovo obviously are being directed from Belgrade," Rubin said in suggesting the Yugoslav president could be charged by an international tribunal and face a lifetime prison sentence.

"There are indicators genocide is unfolding in Kosovo," Rubin said after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright received a detailed report Sunday from Hashim Thaci, who headed the Albanian delegation that approved proposals for a settlement in Kosovo.

A girl from Pec in western Kosovo
peers from the back of a tractor-trailer
as she and other refugees make their way
over a mountain road separating Kosovo
from Montenegro. [South Coast Today]

Jeremy Scahill's article when Milosovic died and his ''ambush'' interview with Gen. Clark in NH, January 2004

Afghanistan

[rawa.org]

Christian Parenti, London Review of Books, January 2005:

The top drug lord here is Hazrat Ali, America’s ally in the Tora Bora campaign, the man who allowed al-Qaida to escape as US forces closed in. Now Hazrat Ali - who gave himself this nom de guerre in honour of the fifth caliph of Islam during the jihad against the Soviets - is also the provincial security chief. Karzai gave him the post at the end of the summer to buy his support in the elections. [...]

A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter lands in the
Shah-e-Kot mountains, 25 kilometers (15 miles)
southeast of Gardez, Afghanistan March 15, 2002.
[AP/file]

The poppy crop has already been harvested, but some of the local farmers show me big brown blocks of opium and offer hash. They say that Mirwais Yasini, the head of the Counter-Narcotics Directorate, has done a deal with Hazrat Ali. When the harvest was over, Hazrat Ali told the farmers to burn their fields, so that Mirwais Yasini could tell the British that progress is being made. Officials in Kabul either deny these charges or decline to comment.

American officials have started to claim that Hazrat Ali’s days are numbered. ‘One day, he will wake up and discover he’s out of business,’ David Lamm, chief of staff of US forces in Afghanistan, said in a press interview. But when I went to find Hazrat Ali, he was busy meeting US forces to plan election security. It is thanks to relationships like these that one can easily imagine the poppy economy and the new Afghan state merging into a narco-mafia with a flag and a seat at the UN.

Kandahar children.
MERCY Malaysia first sent its mission
comprising four doctors and two non-medical
volunteers to Afghanistan in October 2001.
The aim was to alleviate the suffering of the
Afghan refugees who fled their homes soon
after the US and its allied forces began
bombing the impoverished nation.

Iraq:

PERSIAN GULF FLYOVER — Two U.S. Navy F/A-18C Hornets,
assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron 146, and two
U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, assigned to
Strike Fighter Squadron 154... in the Persian Gulf,
June 30, 2005.
[U.S. Navy photo by Airman Chris M. Valdez]

Sinan Antoon, native of Baghdad, "Of Bridges and Birds":

And so the city was conquered, sacked and rebuilt time and time again. In its heyday, Baghdad was the heart of an empire, and its rulers, too, wrought havoc on distant lands. But, most of its caliphs and sultans were also patrons of art and knowledge, connoisseurs, and sometimes composers, of the most beautiful poetry to have survived in the collective memory of the Arabs.

Now, it is Baghdad's ironic fate to have been subjugated by a would-be emperor, who has yet to master his mother tongue. While he is fully aware of the geo- strategic importance of Baghdad, Bush is probably the one least aware, in the history of the city's conquerors, of the precious symbolism and rich history of his booty.

Does it matter to him?

Allied warplanes destroyed 134 bridges in Iraq during 1991 Gulf War
[Middle East Online]

Rivers of blood are flowing along the Tigris as America tattoos its imperial insignia into the bodies of Iraqi children, stamping their futures with its corporate logos in order to "safeguard" it. There is an abyss in and around Iraq, and it is widening by the moment.

I used to recite Ali Ibn Al- Jahm's famous line about the enchanting, almond-shaped eyes of the Baghdadi women who used to cross from one bank to the other in the nineth century. On a lucky day, I would encounter a descendent or two of those women.

Now the moon-like faces celebrated in thousands of verses are hiding in houses on both banks, white voyeuristic satellites are hovering above and scrutinising every inch of the city's body.

March 29, 2003. Soldiers setting up barbed wire near Najef
[Benjamin Lowy, Corbis for TIME Magazine]

Orville Schell on remote reporting and the Green Zone.

Over and over, looking at the photographs of the recent wars, I think to myself, is this person alive? I occasionally still think of a young service man, from Appalachia, infantry, hunkered down at the border in February 2003, waiting for the signal to cross over and invade Iraq.... In an interview with an ABC reporter, he said he hoped the politicians would not sacrifice them. Tears at you. It just does.

We do know who is alive, no question. The western pols. And Saddam, Osama. Zawahiri.

Smedley Butler, in a letter home to his parents, while serving in Nicaragua in 1910 as a young marine:

What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wildcat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor. The whole business is rotten to the core and I am ashamed to think that a Republican [Taft] administration is, if anything, assisting the revolution.