(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
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[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
One of the blithering idiots, I mean, "concerned readers" in our comments section implied that the soldiers in Iraq, or living targets as their opposition must refer to them, really think the war is swell and all that bad talk you hear is the Evil Librul Media at work again.
Well, there is a site called Occupation Watch, must reading and I discovered it at Democracy Now (must listening and real librul media by the way), where they quote the soldiers. Okay, here are the soldiers. You tell me if we're winning.
U.S. Soldiers Talk About the Occupation of Iraq by Occupation Watch Center, Compiled by Imad Khadduri
July 11th, 2003
"Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home."
-Anonymous Army soldier in a letter to Congress, Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2003
"Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom."
-Unidentified officer from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq, Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2003
"The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all."
-Unidentified soldier in a letter to Congress, Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2003
"U.S. officials need to get our [expletive] out of here…I say that seriously. We have no business being here. We will not change the culture they have in Iraq, in Baghdad. Baghdad is so corrupted. All we are here is potential people to be killed and sitting ducks."
-43-year-old reservist from Pittsburgh, who arrived in Iraq with the 307th Military Police Company on May 24, Washington Post, July 1, 2003
"What are we getting into here? The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"
-Sergeant from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, The American Cause (founded by Patrick Buchanan), June 30, 2003
"This duty is absolutely ridiculous… We are combat troops. We are trained in combat. We are not trained in peacekeeping. We should all be home by now. It's like we won the Super Bowl, but we have to keep on playing."
-Sgt. 1st Class Richard Edwards, Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2003
"At night time you think about all the people you killed. It just never gets off your head, none of this stuff does. There's no chance to forget it, we're still here, we've been here so long. Most people leave after combat but we haven't…Some soldiers don't even f****** sleep at night. They sit up all f****** night long doing s*** to keep themselves busy - to keep their minds off this f****** stuff. It's the only way they can handle it. It's not so far from being crazy but it's their way of coping. There's one guy trying to build a little pool out the back, pointless stuff but it keeps him busy."
-Cpl. Richardson, The Evening Standard, June 19, 2003
"For me, it's like snap-shot photos. Like pictures of maggots on tongues, babies with their heads on the ground, men with their heads halfway off and their eyes wide open and mouths wide open. I see it every day, every single day. The smells and the torsos burning, the entire route up to Baghdad, from 20 March to 7 April, nothing but burned bodies."
-Sgt. Meadows, The Evening Star, June 19, 2003
''Little kids wave at us and their parents slap them in the back of the head and make them stop…It makes me feel like I wasted my time over here and they don't appreciate what we did…''
-Spc. Anthony Combs, Associated Press, June 17, 2003
Friends don't let Friends have their politics driven by this guy...
First up, Celebrity Warblogger Watch. Steven Den Beste wrote a long, and I mean a long piece about why he supports the war (I don't remember any of it mentioning 10000 dead Iraqi civilians or 1000 dead and wounded American soldiers, but that's our Steven.) I believe Hesiod has the best rebuttal:
"OK, Steve...I'll formally say it: I care LESS about the people of Iraq, than the people of the United States. I also, its fair to say, care at least as much about the people of Iraq as you do. Since, you didn't give a shit about them until after 9/11. At which point, you used their suffering [which has been going on for 30 years...even when you probably supported Saddam in his fight against the Iranian Mullahs], as a false pretense under which to invade Iraq [against all international law principles] and to support the disingenuous aims of the Bush administration.
Moreover, because President Bush's credibility with the international community is nil, and our armed forces are overstretched...the United States has little or no a bility to alleviate the suffering of any OTHER peoples on the Planet.
We are so overextended, militarily, that we can't even afford send more than a few dozen marines to guard the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia.[UPDATE: We have just positioned 4,500 troops near Liberia for possible depolyment].
Troop morale in Iraq is probably the lowest its been since Vietnam.
The opposition to our occupation in Iraq grows in strength, breadth and intensity on a daily basis.
Do I think the Iraq people are better off now that before we invaded? Yes. How much better off remains to be seen. [If the Shi'ite radicals impose an Islamic state there, it will be "not much"].
But...that's not why we invaded. That's not why President Bush CLAIMS we invaded.
It's certainly not why the American people signed on to this enterprise.
It's nothing more than an after-the-fact rationalization for most people who want to believe that the mission had some meaning.
"At least the Iraq people are free," they say. Well...so they are. They are free to want us the hell out of their country.
So...every day we continue to be there, and our troops die, and the Iraqi people are deprived of food, water, electricity, and security...is another day that radical anti-American elements get stronger.
So...we either bite the bullet, and go to the UN to internationalize peacekeeping and reconstruction operations [as we did after the Kosovo conflict], or things wind up WORSE for our security than before the invasion.
Steve's pet "remake the middle east" theory has been proven a sham. It may work, if a country moves toward free market liberalism ON ITS OWN...but it will not work if its imposed from outside.
Finally...whether President Bush lied to the American people to justify going to war against Iraq IS the issue. The "ends justify the means" rationalization being put forward by the Bush apologists is disgusting. They have NO answer for the serious constitutional and democratic problems this raises. It's a very bad precedent, and while THIS TIME we picked a deserving target for invasion and overthrow [the post-war period of which we are bungling badly], the precedent is there for another President at another time to do the same thing against a "less deserving" adversary.
That's not how great, constitutional republics that want to spread the rule of law and Democracy should behave. Countries that have nascent constitutional systems and democratic institutions will learn from our example, and discard with the "niceties" of constitutional and republican government for the sake of convenience.
How can we expect countries in the Middle East to become more democratic and liberalized, if we flout the rule of law and lie to our own people about the justifications for war?
If the humanitarian justification for war so facetiously advocated by Den Beste and his ilk were so powerful, than it made no sense for the Bush administration to NOT make the case for removing Saddam on that basis the CENTRAL reason behind the invasion.
As it was, it was thrown in as an afterthought. And, as Bush's behavior toward other despotic and human-rights abusing regimes proves [some of whom, such as Uzbekistan, are receiving "security" funding from the United States, and are counted as ALLIES], he doesn't give any more of a shit about those issues [or, I believe, the Iraqi people] than Den Beste does, despite his claims to the contrary.
They are nothing but pawns to be manipulated on a chessboard.
The ONLY people on the planet who benefitted, rather than lost, from the invasion of Iraq, were the Iraqi people. And how long their improved situation lasts, is a matter of conjecture.
You would think that an administration that claims it only wanted to "liberate" theIraqi people from the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein, and allow those same people to build a more prosperous, Democratic and free Iraq...would do more than half-assed, post-war planning for the country, and would devote adequate resources to helping those same people once the war was over.
The old saying "watch what we do, not what we say" comes to mind, and proves that the Bush administration had absolutley no concern about the fate of the Iraq people. They didn't care about them before the war, and don't care about them now.
UPDATE: My arguments also apply to Steve's discredited claim that we invaded Iraq for "security reasons." Arguably our security is worse now than before the Iraq invasion.
In addition, Steve is dissembling when he claims that the "Uranium from Niger" issue is the ONLY one on which Bush lied. Nope. It's just one of MANY issues he lied about. For example, that so-called "Al Qaeda connection".
Senator Hagel agrees, although he's much to politic to say that the President lied.
Bottom line, Steve is very good at attacking the "weakest" argument of his opponents, while totally ignoring, minimizing, or distorting the strongest arguments that make him look really bad."
