Iraq Egress

Am I the only one who thinks that the corporate media coverage of certain US forces leaving Iraq under cover of darkness long since passed the point at which the gag reflex was triggered?

In reviewing my least favorite parts of it, the worst has to be this exchange on the NBC Nightly News on Wednesday [18 Aug] evening:

(anchor) Brian Williams: Richard, I understand your reporting of this, at this hour tonight, constitutes the official Pentagon announcement.

(reporter riding in the back of army truck) Richard Engel: Yes, it is....

[emphasis mine]

This clip from last night's Colbert Report is worth watching.

Given the gleeful cooperation of the MainStream Media with the process of lying the US into this war, I suppose it is only fitting that they would be holding hands with the military during the presentation to the sheep of the meme that the war is now over.

I suppose we should admire the restraint the MSM displayed in not setting a team of CGI wizards to the task of depicting those soldiers riding into Kuwait from Iraq astride unicorns.

An indicator of the worthlessness of The News On TV That We Are Supposed To Believe™ is that the most honest reporting on this comes from The Onion.

Addressing troops at Andrews Air Force Base Tuesday, President Barack Obama claimed victory in Iraq, saying that formal combat operations in the region would end Aug. 31, and that the United States had emerged from the seven-year war triumphant, kind of.

"For nearly a decade, our mission in Iraq has been to root out those who would choose violence over peace, to create a stable Iraqi government, and to transfer power to an incorruptible civilian police force," Obama said. "And, in a manner of speaking, we sort of did some of that, right? More or less?"

"Granted, this is not the definitive, World War II–like victory most of us expected," Obama continued. "But there's a military triumph in there somewhere, I swear. You just have to look at it from the right angles."

[. . . .]

"By the end of this month, victory, to a certain extent, will be ours, and we can finally welcome our troops back home," Obama concluded. "That is unless they are one of the 50,000 U.S. soldiers who will have to stay in the region for the foreseeable future."

Following the president's address, a car bomb ripped through an outdoor market in Baghdad killing eight Iraqis and wounding 32.

Pentagon officials also declared the mission, in a sense, kind of sort of accomplished Tuesday, citing the handful of Iraqi hearts and minds that may have been won over by the U.S. occupancy, and the fact that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki had not yet been assassinated.

"In cases where we were unable to rebuild infrastructure or quell violent civil unrest, it wasn't for lack of trying," Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said during last Sunday's taping of ABC's This Week. "And trying your best, one could argue, is technically a triumph in and of itself."

[. . . .]

Pentagon and White House sources said the American people should expect more wince-inducing victory-if-you-can-call-it-that celebrations 10 or 15 years from now when we kind of, but not really, win in Afghanistan.

Paul Craig Roberts is Back!

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Reagan, said "Good Bye" on March 24 of this year.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

He seems to have been shaken from his reverie and shoved out of his retirement by "the Israeli commando attack on the unarmed ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza." On May 31 he wrote these words:

No one in the world will believe that Israel attacked ships in international waters carrying Israeli citizens, a Nobel Laureate, elected politicians, and noted humanitarians bringing medicines and building materials to Palestinians in Gaza, who have been living in the rubble of their homes without repairs or medicines since January 2009, without first clearing the crime with its American protector. Without America’s protection, Israel, a totally artificial state, could not exist. No one in the world will believe that America’s spy apparatus did not detect the movement of the Israeli attack force toward the aid ships in international waters in an act of piracy, killing 20, wounding 50, and kidnapping the rest. Obama’s pretense at ignorance confirms his complicity.

Once again the US government has permitted the Israeli state to murder good people known for their moral conscience. The Israeli state has declared that anyone with a moral conscience is an enemy of Israel, and every American president except Eisenhower and Carter has agreed.

Obama’s 12-hour silence in the face of extreme barbarity is his signal to the controlled corporate media to remain on the sidelines until Israeli propaganda sets the story.

[. . . .]

The criminal Israeli state does not deny its act of piracy. Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, confirmed that the attack took place in international waters: “This happened in waters outside of Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves.” Americans, and their Western European puppet states and the puppet state in Canada, will be persuaded by the servile media to buy the story fabricated by Israeli propaganda that the humanitarian aid ships were manned by terrorists bringing weapons to the Palestinians in Gaza, and that the terrorists posing as humanitarians attacked the force of Israeli commandos with two pistols, clubs, and knives. Many Americans will swallow this story without a hiccup.

It seems that he is once again finding his stride. Today is only Wednesday and Roberts has already published his second essay of the week. It's a good one: "US Treasury is Running on Fumes."

The Obama regime has made war the business of America. Escalation in Afghanistan has gone hand in hand with drone attacks on Pakistan and the use of proxy forces to conduct wars in Pakistan and North Africa. Currently, the US is conducting provocative naval exercises off the coasts of China and North Korea and instigating war between Columbia and Venezuela in South America. Former CIA director Michael Hayden declared on July 25 that an attack on Iran seems unavoidable.

With the print and TV media captive, why doesn’t Washington simply tell us that the country is at war without going to the trouble of war? That way the munitions industry can lay off its workers and put the military appropriations directly into profits. We could avoid the war crimes and wasted lives of our soldiers.

The US economy and the well-being of Americans are being sacrificed to the regime’s wars. The states are broke and laying off teachers. Even “rich” California, formerly touted as “the seventh largest economy in the world,” is reduced to issuing script and cutting its state workers’ pay to the minimum wage.

Supplemental war appropriations have become routine affairs, but the budget deficit is invoked to block any aid to Americans--but not to Israel. On July 25 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that the US and Israel had signed a multi-billion dollar deal for Boeing to provide Israel with a missile system.

Americans can get no help out of Washington, but the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, declared that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security is “not negotiable.” Washington’s commitment to California and to the security of the rest of us is negotiable. War spending has run up the budget deficit, and the deficit precludes any help for Americans.

With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”

Please read the entire piecehere.

Greenwald on the Leak

If not the most important news today, then certainly the most talked-about, is the story of the collection of 90-some thousand pages of documents providing details about the US war in Afghanistan that were released by WikiLeaks.

There are other stories that have held my attention during the past couple of days, but this seemed to be getting so much attention everywhere, it seemed a natural choice for returning to writing here. It seemed like I good idea until I read Glenn Greenwald's piece at Salon from Sunday. After reading that, any thoughts that I had something more that needed to said on the matter vanished. Glenn Greenwald writes good. Real good.

So, here's some wholesale copying-and-pasting.

Those documents provide what The New York Times calls "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." The Guardian describes the documents as "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency."

[. . . .]

The White House has swiftly vowed to continue the war and predictably condemned WikiLeaks rather harshly. It will be most interesting to see how many Democrats -- who claim to find Daniel Ellsberg heroic and the Pentagon Papers leak to be unambiguously justified -- follow the White House's lead in that regard. Ellsberg's leak -- though primarily exposing the amoral duplicity of a Democratic administration -- occurred when there was a Republican in the White House. This latest leak, by contrast, indicts a war which a Democratic President has embraced as his own, and documents similar manipulation of public opinion and suppression of the truth well into 2009. It's not difficult to foresee, as Atrios predicted, that media "coverage of [the] latest [leak] will be about whether or not it should have been published," rather than about what these documents reveal about the war effort and the government and military leaders prosecuting it. What position Democratic officials and administration supporters take in the inevitable debate over WikiLeaks remains to be seen (by shrewdly leaking these materials to 3 major newspapers, which themselves then published many of the most incriminating documents, WikiLeaks provided itself with some cover).

Note how obviously lame is the White House's prime tactic thus far for dismissing the importance of the leak: that the documents only go through December, 2009, the month when Obama ordered his "surge," as though that timeline leaves these documents without any current relevance. The Pentagon Papers only went up through 1968 and were not released until 3 years later (in 1971), yet having the public behold the dishonesty about the war had a significant effect on public opinion, as well as the willingness of Americans to trust future government pronouncements. At the very least, it's difficult to imagine this leak not having the same effect. Then again, since -- unlike Vietnam -- only a tiny portion of war supporters actually bears any direct burden from the war (themselves or close family members fighting it), it's possible that the public will remain largely apathetic even knowing what they will now know. It's relatively easy to support and/or acquiesce to a war when neither you nor your loved ones are risking their lives to fight it.

It's hardly a shock that the war in Afghanistan is going far worse than political officials have been publicly claiming. Aside from the fact that lying about war is what war leaders do almost intrinsically -- that's part of what makes war so degrading to democratic values -- there have been numerous official documents that have recently emerged or leaked out that explicitly state that the war is going worse than ever and is all but unwinnable. A French General was formally punished earlier this month for revealing that the NATO war situation "has never been worse," while French officials now openly plot how to set new "intermediate" benchmarks to ensure -- in their words -- that "public opinion doesn't get the impression of a useless effort." Anyone paying even mild attention knows that our war effort there has entailed countless incidents of civilian slaughter followed by official lies about it, "hit lists" compiled with no due process, and feel-good pronouncements from the Government that have little relationship to the realities in that country (other leak highlights are here). This leak is not unlike the Washington Post series from the last week: the broad strokes were already well-known, but the sheer magnitude of the disclosures may force more public attention on these matters than had occurred previously.

[. . . .]

Greenwald suggests this supplemental reading:

Professor Jay Rosen has some extremely insightful observations about WikiLeaks and why it frightens so many officials and their media spokespeople.

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson has a very perceptive analysis explaining the significance of these documents, along with how and why they reveal clear official deception about the war.

In terms of what we're "accomplishing" there, compare this recently released study documenting that our killing of civilians is what causes Afghans to take up arms against the U.S. with this morning's report that a NATO airstrike in Southern Afghanistan last week killed 45 innocent civilians, many of them women and children.