PittsburghThoughts

From a demonstrably better blog than mine Tony White: Graffiti:

Secret, killer micro-drones are released across Iraq. These designer weapons can be programmed to adapt and morph as the situation requires targeting any form of  Islam or insurgent that can be quantified. They have the option of leaving everything in Iraq, except oil, radioactive for the next one million years.  

Powerful laxatives are introduced into the water system rendering the terrorists indispose.

This has been tried in various forms before and is akin to throwing money at the problem, but, never has it been employed to this extreme. One hundred dollar bills are dumped from cargo planes smothering insurgent strongholds in up to 15 feet of greenbacks. Daily terrorist operations will grind to a halt as money must be cleared from streets, buildings and houses. As soon as the money has been cleared we repeat until the terrorists give up in frustration.

Loud, lugubrious music will play night and day throughout Iraq. Everyone will be too depressed to fight.

Shiites and Sunnis will be rounded up and compressed, at a one to one ratio, into one person, rendering differing theocracies irrelevant. This idea is so stupid I can't believe that I wrote it, but, we could still sell it to the public, they bought the surge didn't they?  Gene

Here are a two powerful videos that explore the complexities of what we have done to Iraq and what we have yet to face there.

The first, is a de facto argument for the U.S. to just get out but also to somehow try to make reparations for the complete, overwhelming chaos that we've created there. The very least we could try to do, if we really cared about the "Iraq people" is to bring back clean water, sanitation and electricity. As Ali Fadhil says in the Video, "We have a whole nation called Iraq and now it's wiped out."



The Second is an interview with Juan Cole and looks at the dynamics between the factions there.



And, finally, here is an example of the depth of understanding of the man who may soon shape our countries future policies in Iraq. I don't hate John McCain but I hate his simplistic, one size fits all, neocon spin and always with an anti-Iranian subtext.



We have committed a grave error and cannot bluff or bluster our way our. There is no choice now, but to rely on people that understand more about Iraq than we do. Our lack of understanding has bred our indifference, callousness and finally a systematic cruelty towards the Iraqis.

We've never thought it necessary to understand their culture, religions or their customs. Our military never saw a need to grasp basic language skills. Our whole premise, from the start, has been, that we are superior in every way to the Iraqis and they owe us eternal gratitude for "freeing" them. We opened their cages and pushed them out onto the freeway saying, "Have a nice day."

I'm not implying that Hillary or Obama have superior understanding towards Iraq, frankly, I don't know what their plans are and I don't think they do either, but we now need someone that is willing to listen to new voices and will stop lying to us and sugar coating the truth. Gene

If you haven't seen it but planned on watching, you can, here: FRONTLINE: bush's war | PBS at your convenience. I'm sure it will be watched and studied for a long time as well it should be. Gene

In concurrence with last night's Frontline report, Bush's War Part 1, I found the following interesting. First, the NYT's article about a buried Rand, 2005 report:

Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning - New York Times

And then, the video on the buried report, released, February 18th, 2008 for YouTube by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and delivered by Phyllis Bennis, a Senior Analyst:



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Last night's Frontline, Part 1 of Bush's War, explains more clearly than anything that I've seen to date, primarily through 1st hand accounts, how reason and doubt were steam rolled, how people were betrayed, how intelligence was manufactured and ironically how one of the prime justifications for war with Iraq, the missing link between Iraq and al-Qeada, was based on information extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi after he had been captured in Afghanistan and shipped to Cairo to be tortured. After the Iraq invasion al-Libi was sent to Guantanamo where he recanted his Cairo confession and maintained that it was obtained through torture.

If I were asked to pick the one person most responsible for our unjustified invasion of Iraq it would be Dick Cheney. His distrust of the CIA, based on his earlier experiences while Secretary of Defense under the first Bush, had so blinded him that he felt forced to become his own intelligence agency, manufacturing the intelligence that he needed and disregarding the rest.

It was a major triumph in perversion, a small group of alpha males had successfully conspired to destabilize the Middle East, the United States and the world in one fell swoop. Colin Powell and Condaleezza Rice could almost be considered tragic figures if only they would have done their jobs or resigned in protest, but neither did.

One of the most shocking lessons of Bush's War is that good and decent individuals, trying to do the right thing in a critical situation, will not or can not resist the flux of a system that's been commandeered by arrogant bullies, even when the system is wrong and even when the consequences are fatal to millions.

Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell or George Tennant and others, at some point, could have made a significant effort to stop the madness that was sweeping us to war but they didn't. They fretted and complained but in the end, none of them were willing put everything on the line to do the right thing.

A recent poll shows that only 28% of Americans know that the Iraq death toll for American soldiers has reached 4000. Without a draft, a war tax or televised flag draped caskets, our shroud of ignorance is impenetrable. Once the world is set straight, history is recorded as precisely and correctly as it can be, how will we be able to look at ourselves and not feel shame? Gene

GOD DAMN AMERICA – ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA
By Greg Palast

[Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard:  the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.   
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window.  The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction.  Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.  

But why?  It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.  

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.  

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn.  But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous. 

That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq.  The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead.  But Someone must be counting them.  (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

“This is a land full of power and glory,
        Beauty that words cannot recall.
    But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
        Her glory shall rest on us all.”

Whatever.     It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath.  It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There’s one consolation.  He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.  

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks.  Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.”  She’s a,  “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony?  Brandon?) slouched to her left.   The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”

(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it."

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.”  And we should be glad for him, I suppose.   

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”  

So, why hasn’t He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President:  Why hasn’t He?

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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com and sign up for the audio podcasts RSS here.

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