Category Archives: Iraq War

About that Surge

Iraq, Iraq War

America must be victorious, but victory is out of the question. This is the election-year paradox facing voters. Assuming Obama’s delegate count surge continues through Texas and Ohio, the national campaign will bring the surge issue front and center in the race to replace Mr. Bush, the president who started a war he cannot finish. On the Republican side, John McCain’s resurrected political fortunes will pit the man who believes he has fixed the mopping-up problem in Iraq against the man who can claim in all innocence that he was against the Iraq war from the start. Both candidates support the troops and respect General Petraeus, who came close to being Time Magazine‘s “Person of the Year.” Either McCain or Obama may grace a future cover of Time as the man who ended the war that no one no longer wants but no one also wants to lose. But this is as unpredictable as the eventual success of the “surge” as a strategy to bring about a stable Iraq.

About that surge… Republicans in the main see it as working; democrats tend to see the whole war as a unilaterally Bush diversion from the real terrorists and the surge as a desperate ploy for time, too little and too late. So is the surge working? Continue reading About that Surge →

Primary Hellfire and Born Again Brimstone

Iraq War, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Luke R. E. Publican, Osama Bin Laden

In yesterday’s Super Tuesday slapdown, John McCain appears to have bailed out in his Republican quest with a majority of the party’s caucus-oid delegates. But not without friendly, which is actually unfriendly, fire from his right. At the last minute the conservative evangelical bornagainagogue James Dobson delivered his protestant version of papal bull: “I am convinced Sen. McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are … I cannot, and will not, vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience.” It is though Dobson in his daily bible reading, found a new translation of Matthew 16:15: “And I tell you, John McCain, on this rock I will not tell my church to vote and the gates of hell will prevail is he is elected.” Or to tell the Gospel truth, Mr. Dobson cannot see the mote in his candidate’s eye for the large walk-the-plank in his own.

Adding to the smoking cigar of Rush puffed endlessly in Big Mac’ weathered face, Super Tuesday turned into the GOP version of American Gladiators. Move over, Chuck and Arnie, here comes Hulk Hogan onstage to officiate, only without the scantily clad and pumped-up Amazon models. Here is last night’s apocalypse now. The great Latter Day Conservative from Utahssachusetts lies bloodied and hanging on to the Washington-is-broken ropes, waiting for a Good Samaritan to come along and say Mormonism is not a cult. Meanwhile, down in the holler hides the Huckabilly, who is able to have his Southern cruisin’ grits and eat them too; but likely this will be his Last Supper of the primaries and not for want of Ron Paul’s fundraising ability. On the other side, Hillary and Obama both took the Jesus-like approach of saying you should love your enemy. This time around, in not-so-swift Kerry-like fashion, the Republicans seem hellbent on electoral suicide that will holocaust the party a victory in November. Think of it this way, which pile of shit would you rather avoid: that of a donkey or an elephant?

Politics astride, you would have to be severely politically anemic not to see the irony of the moral majoritarian Dobson damning Big Mac to an undisclosed level of hell and at the same time playing up the spectre of Radical Islam’s Threat to the Western World. Continue reading Primary Hellfire and Born Again Brimstone →

Huckabilly Lays an Egg, Flunks Geography

Iraq War, Jordan, Luke R. E. Publican, YouTube Watch

In last night’s GOP presidential debate, hosted by MSNBC, the Huckabilly former governor of Arkansas laid an egg and he can hardly blame Chuck Norris in absentia for such a wisecrack. Asked if the war in Iraq has been worth all the blood shed, Huckabilly defended Bush’s rationale by comparing the lack of evidence in the massive search for Iraqi WMDs to an Easter Egg hunt. A colorful comment for the Late Show, but one that ultimately leaves egg on his face. Asked later about his all-encompassing religious conservatism, the Huckabilly said he even respects Americans who do not have faith (as long as they vote for him, perhaps), although he conveniently avoided looking for Mormon support. It appears that part of his weight loss may have been in his cranium. Continue reading Huckabilly Lays an Egg, Flunks Geography →

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak

Books You Should Read, Iraq War, Poetry, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable. Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (The University of Iowa Press, 2007) conveys the voices of men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo. The collection is edited by Marc Falkoff, who has worked on behalf of many detainees from Yemen, and contains a preface by Flagg Miller, an anthropologist and professor of religious studies at the University of California, Davis. Miller’s essay combines an overview of Muslim prison poetry throughout history to an analysis of the poems in the collection, and is entitled “Forms of Suffering in Muslim Prison Poetry.” An afterward is written by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean American poet, novelist, and human rights activist who teaches at Duke University. Continue reading Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak →

Truth, Troops, Tooth and Clausewitz

Iraq War, Terrorism Issue


Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., left; General Carl von Clausewitz, right

The surge to victory for John McCain in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary is attributed by Senator McCain to his telling the truth on a statewide bus tour. Truth and politics are seldom embedded fellows, so surely there is more at stake. It may be that the seeming success of the “surge” of U.S. troops combined with McCain’s last ditch, Chuck Norris tactic of shouting that he will get Osama on Day One in the White House was a factor in rousing New England independents to brave the snowbanks. Less American soldiers are reported dead in the daily papers, the suicide bombings in Baghdad are claiming less lives, and the economy looms larger in voter minds in the current trillion-dollar-deficit-spent free fall. The Democrats, on the other partisan hand, dismiss the Bush/McCain surge as the kind of military victory that can not win the diplomatic war in the end. Most of us would like to find some kind of truth in all the spin, but the super-media-charged primary machine surges on with truth as the main casualty.

So what do the generals say we should do? Today’s New York Times carries an op-ed commentary by Charles J. Dunlap Jr., an Air Force major general, who is about to publish a monograph called Shortchanging the Joint Fight?. In the general’s gung-ho “We Still Need the Big Guns,” he writes tooth and Clausewitz that effective counter insurgency in Iraq and future conflicts still needs to be measured in dead insurgent bodies. As he states:

Many analysts understandably attribute the success to our troops’ following the dictums of the Army’s lauded new counterinsurgency manual. While the manual is a vast improvement over its predecessors, it would be a huge mistake to take it as proof — as some in the press, academia and independent policy organizations have — that victory over insurgents is achievable by anything other than traditional military force.

Unfortunately, starry-eyed enthusiasts have misread the manual to say that defeating an insurgency is all about winning hearts and minds with teams of anthropologists, propagandists and civil-affairs officers armed with democracy-in-a-box kits and volleyball nets. They dismiss as passé killing or capturing insurgents. Continue reading Truth, Troops, Tooth and Clausewitz →

Resurrecting Empire in Iraq

Books You Should Read, Iraq, Iraq War

By Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University

The United States, and the world, now faces a situation of unprecedented difficulty in Iraq. There is deep resentment among Iraqis, including those grateful for the overthrow of the Ba’th regime, at the months of chaos in Iraq since the end of the war, at the unresponsiveness of the American occupation authorities, and at the slow pace of the move toward genuine self-government. American troops increasingly risk being received as are most occupation armies, and as were the British in Iraq after World War I: with hostility and ultimately with widespread armed resistance. The paralysis of the American authorities in Baghdad, which reflects the paralysis in Washington, as the administration’s factions struggle over decisions in Iraq, and the inflexible, highly ideological, and ultimately self-defeating line that has generally prevailed, have exacerbated the situation. Reliance on Pentagon-favored exiles loathed by most Iraqis, who see them as carpetbaggers, has already hurt the position of the United States in Iraq, an may lead to an even worse situation there when the inevitable backlash against their machinations sets in. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as is manifest from reporting in the non-American media on the situation on the ground in Iraq, one whose gravity has not been fully reflected in the American media—although American casualties in Iraq, and lengthy deployments of both regulars and reservists finally seem to be having an impact on American public opinion. Continue reading Resurrecting Empire in Iraq →

Better Luck Next Year, Osama

Iraq War, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism Issue

There was a time when Osama Bin Laden owned the audio and video- hungry airwaves. Each new tape brought out the usual talking heads and whetted the non-stop talking lips of the cable newstalker hosts. Could it be a fake? Does he look healthy? Where could he be? But these days the world’s number one bearded terrorist might as well be living in the Stone Age, cave or no cave for an address. Last year, may it rest in peace, Bin Laden released five new tapes, more than Beyonce and the Dixie Chicks combined (not that they would mix that well). The last message came in under the radar of the newswire at year’s end. As reported in yesterday’s The Guardian, this time the target is fellow Sunnis in Iraq who are working with the American forces. They join the Saudi regime, which Bin Laden has similarly damned as apostates headed for hell. Continue reading Better Luck Next Year, Osama →

Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs

Ethics, Iraq, Iraq War, Terrorism Issue

[Note: The following excerpt is from a book review published in the latest New York Review of Books by Michael Massing. The full article is available free online and describes two compelling memoirs of the invasion of Iraq, one by a Marine and one by a reporter embedded with the Marine’s unit. It is well worth reading for a side of the fighting usually sanitized out of reports.]

by Michael Massing, New York Review of Books, December 20, 2007

As the Marines fall back, some are clearly exhilarated at this first exposure to battle; others express remorse. “Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs,” says Antonio Espera, a thirty-year-old sergeant from California. “I don’t know why…. But as soon as we got here, it’s just gone. I just feel sorry for them. I miss my little girl. Dog, I don’t want to kill nobody’s children.” Coming under heavy fire for the first time, Wright is surprised to find himself calm, but he is astonished at the fierceness of the barrage being directed at Nasiriyah. It includes high-explosive rounds that can blast through steel and concrete as well as DPICMs (Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions), cluster shells that burst overhead, dispersing dozens of bomblets designed to shred people. Continue reading Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs →