Colonizing Iraq

By Michael Schwartz

[...]

In 2007, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that "taking Saddam out was essential" -- a point he made in his book The Age of Turbulence -- because the United States could not afford to be "beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas" in Iraq. It's exactly that sort of thinking that's still operating in U.S. policy circles: the 2008 National Defense Strategy, for example, calls for the use of American military power to maintain "access to and flow of energy resources vital to the world economy."

After only five months in office, the Obama administration has already provided significant evidence that, like its predecessor, it remains committed to maintaining that "access to and flow of energy resources" in Iraq, even as it places its major military bet on winning the expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There can be no question that Washington is now engaged in an effort to significantly reduce its military footprint in Iraq, but without, if all goes well for Washington, reducing its influence.

[...]

War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket Books), which explains how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war.

The obsessiveness of some about Iraq puzzles me, but the obituary below might put that war into context.  This, er, gentleman was an "old school" warrior — he wasn't too concerned about mass civilian casualties.  Ask any SE Asian.  (One who survived years of B-52 strikes, I mean.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701408081309143.html

So...is the Iraq war something new, perhaps part of Bush's "war on Islam"...?  (The earlier Iraq war was, then, part of Bush Senior's "prequel to the war on Islam"...?)  Or is it of a piece: America's war on assorted swarthy Third World types?  Too bad we can't ask McNamara.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to googling "pelosi" and "liar" (alternatively "obama" and "fiscal potlatch")....

Wars are less deadly than they've been for 12,000 years.

http://www.slate.com/id/2224275/

Another eye opener for a linguist, perfect for the silly season (called cucumber season in Polish) on the beach: http://tomdispatch.com/post/175103/john_feffer_their_martyrs_and_our_heroes

Our Suicide Bombers: Thoughts on Western Jihad

As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.

The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.

If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers -- and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns -- how different can these attitudes really be?

[...]

I picked up The Guardian Weekly at the train station and was thrilled to discover on the train that this is one of those respectable papers that carry (almost) no advertising. It's a pleasure to pay for publications like that, while knowing that they will be shortly extinct, replaced by electronic gizmos.

Anyway, here is an excerpt:

"Four years later, as a resurgent Taliban mounts daring operations in Kabul itself, the western mission in Afghanistan looks more doomed than ever. Desk-bound columnists, such as John Lloyd in the Financial Times this week, may continue to speak of western "honour" and warn that defeat in Helmand will embolden jihadists in Bradford. But no Taliban has been implicated in any terrorist conspiracy in Britain, and perhaps even Lloyd, a staunch supporter of Tony Blair's wars, doesn't assume that killing many more Muslims of southern Afghanistan would impress the Muslims of West Yorkshire.

When ill-conceived military adventures look doomed, their advocates tend to grow more strident about honor, especially if it can be upheld to the last drop of other people's blood. Richard Nixon's "peace with honor" primarily consisted of devastating Cambodia in addition to Vietnam; for some years now, maintaining honor in Afghanistan has amounted to little more than the Talibanisation of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Finally, the endgame in Afghanistan is in sight. Endorsed by the US state department, Britain's Foreign Office now speaks openly of talks with the Taliban. But thousands of British soldiers continue to fight, and the war, certain now to peter out in some face-saving compromise, has only just entered the most terrible phase for those still in the thick of battle. As Senator John Kerry, speaking in 1971 of his army service in Vietnam, put it, "Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands off Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a mistake."

"How do you ask," Kerry challenged the US Senate foreign relations committee, "a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" But of course governments can't ask this even if they awaken in time to the utter folly of their wars. Hence, our clear sympathy for objectors like Kerry, who refuse to serve as cannon fodder for the hubristic geopolitical experiments of politicians and journalists. Hence, too, our profound unease with uniformed men and women on active duty: they provoke our admiration for risking much more than we ever would, even if we suspect that they do so only to prolong other people's mistakes."

An excerpt from

Deadlier than the male

Eta was once a man’s world. Industrial workers, middle-class Marxists and Basque-speaking farmers from tiny villages high up in the green, steep-valleyed hills of Goerri came together in an anger initially stirred by dictator General Francisco Franco - and largely left their women at home. For years, the public role of women was mainly as tough, grieving mothers at the gravesides of male activists. “They were seen as the keepers of the flame,” says Jesus Casquete. Eta’s founders wanted “peaceful women dedicated to cultural and humanitarian work; violent men who await only a little more strength and an order”. Only a handful broke the mould. ...

In 2002, only 12% of Eta-affiliated prisoners were women. By 2009 that figure has risen close to a quarter. If the latest arrests are an indicator, the proportion among recent recruits is nearer a half. Not everyone is surprised. “You must remember that when Eta called a ceasefire in 2006, it was a woman who read out the communique,” says Beñat Zarrabeitia, of Etxerat, a group representing prisoners’ families. “And in the previous ceasefire, in 1999, they named Belen González Peñalba, a woman, as one of their negotiators.” Women have, in fact, been present in Eta’s history since the beginning, though almost always in background roles. They ran safe houses, hid activists, trailed targets or stashed arms. They tracked politicians or police officers to mass, sitting demurely in the back rows of the church. The front-line stuff, of planting bombs and shooting people, was largely a man’s thing.

The first women to join comandos found their gender an obstacle. One anonymous Eta gunwoman recalled the first time she and a female friend were sent out with pistols. “We said: ‘Well, depending on how we do it tomorrow, they will accept us or not.’ And that was because we were women. You have a lot more to prove when you are a woman,” she told the anthropologist Miren Alcedo. Indeed, early gunwomen gained a reputation within Eta as more bloodthirsty than the men. ...

During one attack in Madrid she was detailed to cover another comando member as he opened fire on a car full of army officers. She could not, however, resist spraying it with bullets first. She is now serving a 30-year jail sentence for 23 murders. “She used to complain that women had to prove themselves twice as much as men,” a former companion-in-arms said.

Over the past decade, however, a new trend has emerged. The first symbol of change was Olaia Castresana, a 22-year-old infant-school teacher from San Sebastian. On weekdays Castresana looked after children under six; at weekends and during the holidays she blew up things, and people, for Eta. ...

The Guardian Wekly

Originally written by Bernie Bierman on June 17, 2009 7:55 AM Perhaps she is  too young to recall the phrase "Hey, I have nothing against Negroes.  Some of my best friends are Negroes".

I guess that "Negroes" has a suptle connotation which I don't understand, but I wonder why it is considered as correct when more or less coloured people call each other "Niggers"?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/29/military_marketing/index.html?source=newsletter

For the general public, the objective is sedation. New polls show the country strongly opposes the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — but military officials want to preserve the possibility of an escalation in Afghanistan and a permanent deployment in Iraq. So along with persuading President Obama to withhold photos documenting fog-of-war brutalities at Afghanistan and Iraq prisons, the Pentagon is seeking an opiate to placate the war-averse populace. What better anodyne than a marketing campaign implying wars are fun video games? ...