"Stop-Loss": an important and disturbing film

The U.S invasion and occupation of Iraq is now 5 years and counting.

More than 4,000 members of the U.S. armed forces have been killed and 29,451 have been wounded.

We are spending more than $10 billion a month on the war.

A new movie, "Stop-Loss" by Kimberly Peirce, whose brother served in Iraq, is a powerful indictment of the continuing U.S. occupation, our treatment of returning vets and the widespread use of "Stop-loss" to supply troops for the occupation and surge.

Over 81,000 Iraqi war veterans have been forced to return to combat under the military's Stop-loss policy, the involuntary extension of a service member's enlistment contract in order to retain them beyond the normal term of service.

Put simply, a veteran's discharge is unilaterally canceled and he or she is sent back to Iraq. Stop-loss is the military's way of continuing to throw troops into the Iraq quagmire even as recruitment declines.

So much for the "volunteer" army!

The irony that an administration that accused opponents of the war of being disloyal to the troops is using these very young men and women, against their will, as cannon fodder is not lost on the film makers or the actors who play the returning combat veterans.

While the Journal Sentinel's movie critic criticized the film as leaving "...something to be desired as art."

The New York Times movie critic, A.O. Scott gave it a very positive review:

..there is a grim, accidental timeliness in the release of “Stop-Loss,” which focuses on the ordeal of American soldiers in and out of combat...Ms. Peirce’s movie...is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions....

...its messy, chaotic welter of feeling has a tang of authenticity. Instead of high-minded indignation or sorrow, it runs on earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage.

“Stop-Loss” makes no argument beyond the recognition of that fact. It is an imperfect movie — marred, if anything, by its sincere affection and undisciplined compassion — about the imperfect young men who keep returning to a war the rest of us would prefer not to think about.

This is an important and disturbing movie.

Iraq war veteran responds to Limbaugh's "phony soldier" slur

Milwaukee Journal: perscribes wrong deficit reduction medicine

A Milwaukee Journal editorial recently opined that "A Republican Congress abandoned its principles and left the country ill-prepared to meet long-term obligations." "Fiscal discipline is needed" it concluded.

The piece criticised the $190 billion 2002 Farm Bill, 70% of which went to the richest 10% of farmers. It also targeted the new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Both could charitably be described as socialism for the rich-U.S. agribusiness, insurance and pharmaceuticals companies!

While they are poorly designed public policy, neither is at the heart of the deficit problem.

By failing to identify how the Bush administration has squandered a projected $5.2 trillion surplus, the Journal is fueling the erroneous perception that out of control social spending and entitlements are to blame.

Nothing could be further from the truth

The two main causes of the Bush era deficits are its high end tax cuts and the War in Iraq.

Congressional Budget Office data show that Bush's tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits. Legislation enacted since 2001 has added almost $2.3 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2006, with half of the deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and only a sixth to increases in domestic spending).

56.5% of these tax cuts went to the richest 10% of wage earners, those averaging $256,000. Only 14.7% went to the bottom 60% who average $44,000.

Unlike in previous wars, the United States has cut taxes at the same time it has increased military spending."It's fair to say all of the money spent on the war has been borrowed," says Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank in Washington. "But eventually everything has to be paid for."

And the bill is growing!

Just last week President Bush requested an additional $42.3 billion in “emergency” funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. If passed, the 2008 war bill will be almost $190 billion, the same as the 10 year Farm Bill increase the Journal singled out for criticism and the largest single-year total for these wars. It is an increase of 15 percent from 2007.

It will bring the year end total for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since Sept. 11, 2001 to $800 billion, still less than half the $2 trillion total projected cost.

As Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen once said about the Defense budget, "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money"-money that could buy a lot of healthcare, infrastructure, early childhood education or deficit reduction!

What it hasn't bought is protective equipment for our soldiers and their vehicles, the capture of Osama Bin Laden or adequate medical care for our vets!

And remember this $42 billion military increase is off-the-books, "emergency" funding, an addition to the original 2008 spending request, made before the President announced his so-called “new strategy” of partial withdrawal.

Iraq alone has cost the United States more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the Gulf War and the Korean War and will soon pass the Vietnam War.

This for a war that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised would cost under $50 billion while his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, predicted Iraqi oil revenues would largely pay for Iraq’s reconstruction.

The $42 billion emergency funding increase is more than the bipartisan, fully funded $35 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that President Bush has promised to veto.

Since Iraq costs the country $333 million a day, we can't afford to expand SCHIP which costs $19 million a day!

The $42 billion is also almost twice as much as the $23 billion in improvements for waterways and water systems in every state that Bush is threatening to veto as too costly.

Mr Bush took office in 2001, the last time the Government produced a budget surplus. Every year after that the Government has been in the red. In 2004 the deficit swelled to a record $US413 billion ($494 billion).

The Journal is right when it suggests that Mr Bush is mortgaging the country's future. But it is wrong to suggest that entitlements and social spending are to blame.

High end tax cuts and Mr Bush's war of choice in Iraq are the real culprits!

Olbermann Responds to Republican Minority Leader Boehner

Keith Olberman and Senator Joe Biden respond to Republican (Ohio) Minority Leader John Boehner's cavalier comment that "the Iraq War is a small price to pay...."

Anti-war soldiers die in Iraq

In late August I reprinted an article, "The War as We Saw It," written by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

They wrote:

To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched...Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence....

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

It concluded: "We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."

Now, two of the seven soldier authors, Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray are dead.

How many more young lives will be sacrificed to President Bush's vanity and willful ignorance?

For details read:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091307O.shtml

Olbermann: Iraq and 9/11 finally really are connected - by President Bush

To this day, millions of Americans believe we invaded Iraq because of 9/11.

33 percent still believe there was some interconnection between Saddam Hussein and the nightmares here and in Washington and in Pennsylvania.

Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with 9/11. Then. Six years later, that has changed.

Iraq has distracted us from punishing those responsible for 9/11.

If another 9/11 comes, our focus on Iraq will surely have been central to that nightmare.

How did we get here? What consequences have been paid by those who brought us here?

Keith Olbermann answers these questions and more:

Keith Olbermann: President Bush is playing with the troops!

Yesterday, Keith Olbermann exposed President Bush's trip to Iraq as nothing more than a photo op. Olbermann's entire special comment is posted below as well as his concluding comments.

Just over 500 days remain in this Presidency.

Consider the dead who have piled up on the battlefield.... in these last 500 days.

Consider the singular fraudulence of this President's trip to Iraq yesterday, and the singular fraudulence of the selling of The Petraeus Report... in these last 500 days.

Consider how this President has torn away at the fabric of this nation in a manner of which terrorists can only dream... in these last 500 days.

And consider again how this President has spoken to that biographer: that he is "playing for October-November"… the goal in Iraq is "To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence"… and consider how this revelation contradicts every other rationale he has offered... in these last 500 days.

In the context of all that… now, consider… these next 500 days.

Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end.

Even if it means your resignation.

Even if it means your impeachment.

Even if it means a different Republican to serve out your term.

Even if it means a Democratic Congress - and those true Patriots among the Republicans - standing up and denying you another **penny** for Iraq, other than for the safety and the safe conduct home of our troops.

This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country... in the next 500 days…

Not while you, Sir... are playing.

Good night, and good luck.

Libby commuted because he knew too much! NY Times call for withdrawal!

More than four years after The New York Times published a series of news stories that justified a US invasion of Iraq that has left 3,649 American soldiers dead and 29,950 wounded, the newspaper's editorial board has called for an end to the Iraq war.

The editorial says, "President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans' demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened - the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war. It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit."

In a related article Frank Rich writes that President Bush commuted Scotter Libby's prison sentence because Libby knew too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq and that "... cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris."

Mafia wife says people should focus on DC mob!

In his column last Sunday Frank Rich wrote:

"...the widow of the ...Mafia don John Gotti visited his tomb in Queens to observe the fifth anniversary of his death. Victoria Gotti was not pleased to find reporters lying in wait.

"It's disgusting that people are still obsessed with Gotti and the mob," she told The Daily News. "They should be obsessed with that mob in Washington. They have 3,000 deaths on their hands." She demanded to know if the president and vice president have relatives on the front lines. "Every time I watch the news and I hear of another death," she said, "it sickens me."

Far be it from me to cross any member of the Gotti family, but there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with both mobs. Now that the approval rating for the entire Washington franchise, the president and Congress alike, has plummeted into the 20s, we need any distraction we can get; the Mafia is a welcome nostalgic escape from a gridlocked government at home and epic violence abroad.

But unlikely moral arbiter that Mrs. Gotti may be, she does have a point. As the Iraq war careens toward a denouement as black, unresolved and terrifying as David Chase's inspired "Sopranos" finale, the mob in the capital deserves at least equal attention. John Gotti, the last don, is dead. Mr. Chase's series is over. But the deaths on the nightly news are coming as fast as ever.

Here's the entire column.

Iraq: Freedom and Slavery

Shortly after Al Qaeda’s brutal attack on the twin towers President Bush addressed a Joint Session of Congress and the American People and asked:” Why do they hate us?"

He answered: “They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Six months later at a Connecticut Republican Committee meeting the President developed this theme and began laying the ground work for the invasion of Iraq arguing:” … the best way to secure the homeland is to find the enemy wherever they try to hide and bring them to justice… (Applause.) You should not be confused about the nature of the people we're dealing with. They hate us, because we're free. They hate the thought that Americans welcome all religions. They can't stand that thought. They hate the thought that we educate everybody. They hate our freedoms. They hate the fact that we hold each individual -- we dignify each individual. We believe in the dignity of every person. They can't stand that.”

It’s now six years since President Bush’s speech and four years since the invasion. Despite the recent increase in US troops, violence has increased and the President has said U. S. casualities will spike over the summer.

Iraq is ravaged by a violent civil war. Basic human necessities such as clean water, electricity, education and health care are beyond the reach of average citizens. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Iraq is now experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis in the Middle East since 1948.

Millions of Iraqis whom the president claimed to be emancipating are voting with their feet and fleeing the country. Frank Rich reports that:

"Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) The Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s… Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”

President Bush and the United States have refused to accept the very refugees this preemptive war has created. So, Iraqi refugees are voting with their feet, fleeing to those countries that will take them like Sweden and Syria. According to the United Nations about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

Rather than experiencing democracy and freedom, many of Iraq’s female refugees, including girls as young as 13 years old, have become sex slaves in order to survive.

The New York Times reports:

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.

By day the road that leads from Damascus to the historic convent at Saidnaya is often choked with Christian and Muslim pilgrims hoping for one of the miracles attributed to a portrait of the Virgin Mary at the convent. But as any Damascene taxi driver can tell you, the Maraba section of this fabled pilgrim road is fast becoming better known for its brisk trade in Iraqi prostitutes. For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months…

Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.

Aid workers say thousands of Iraqi women work as prostitutes in Syria, and point out that as violence in Iraq has increased, the refugee population has come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women.

So many of the Iraqi women arriving now are living on their own with their children because the men in their families were killed or kidnapped,” said Sister Marie-Claude Naddaf, a Syrian nun at the Good Shepherd convent in Damascus, which helps Iraqi refugees…Some of the women, seeking work outside the home for the first time and living in a country with high unemployment, find that their only marketable asset is their bodies.

I met three sisters-in-law recently who were living together and all prostituting themselves,” Sister Marie-Claude said. “They would go out on alternate nights — each woman took her turn — and then divide the money to feed all the children.

Sometimes you see whole families living this way, the girls pimped by the mother or aunt,” reported Mouna Asaad, a Syrian women’s rights lawyer.

From what I’ve seen, 70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damascus today are Iraqis,” she said. “The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they’ll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.

Rather than bringing freedom to the oppressed, the US invasion of Iraq has led to civil war and sexual slavery for thousands. The war has created a class of refugees stripped of their humanity. This has been done in our name.

Do they hate us for our freedoms?

There is no evidence that the Iraqi people hated us at all. Sixteen of the nineteen Al Qeada operatives were from Saudi Arabia, our oil rich ally. None were from Iraq whose secular government was barbaric, but had no ties to those who attacked the World Trade Center.

But the Bush administration choose to invade Iraq, devatating the country, unleashing a civil war and driving Iraqi women into prostitution. If these were your wives or daughters how would you feel? What would you feel?

And we have done it all in the name of freedom!

The damage is done. We have destroyed a country and sullied the very idea of freedom! The least we can do now is set a timetable to get the hell out!

Bush Administration Turns its Back on Iraqis

In his Times' column (read the entire article) today, Frank Rich points out the Bush administration has deserted Iraqis just as it deserted the citizens of New Orleans.

"...the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East...."

"Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.)... Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5...."

"To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals...."

"The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do...."

"Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters."

"... 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who...have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years."

"...the real forerunner to American treatment of Iraqi refugees is...World War II. That’s when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941...."

"The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything that’s coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the compliment. Whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American demands for timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting its own timeline for American withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation schedule, Iraq’s nominal government is saying it’s fed up. The American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage from hell."


" That we are slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the war’s godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved."

Cost of the Iraq War-Bill Moyers

Iraq Chaos Causes Bush to Revise War Projections

On Saturday the NY Times reported that President Bush is "scaling back expectations for the Iraqi government" and won't report on the "surge" until at least September.

The President is delaying because he refuses to acknowledge that his "surge", the latest attempt to salvage the Iraq quagmire, is failing just like the U.S “reconstruction” of Iraq, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

The $30 billion reconstruction effort was designed to complement the military effort to stabilize Iraq. Its official goals were to allow the government to function, revitalize the economy, including the oil industry whose revenues would finance the war, and promote good will toward the United States.

But inspectors for a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, have found that in a sampling of eight projects across the country that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

These new findings come after years of insistence by the President, Vice President, American officials in Baghdad and pro-war activists that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and not enough to the successes. You’ve surely seen the emails of smiling Iraqi children and rebuilt communities! This new report undermines that pro- war hype and recalls Bob Dylan's refrain "...there's no success like failure. And that failure's no success at all."

Bush is also "scaling back expectations for the Iraqi government" because he surely knows, as Frank Rich reports, that there is none: "... the Maliki “government” can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about “progress” in Iraq."

In Saudi Arabia, 172 Al Qeada suspects were arrested for planning to blow up oil installations, and kill politicians- additional proof, as if it were needed, that the US venture in Iraq is in shambles. Buried in the Times report on these developments was an admission that the US occupation of Iraqi was generating more terrorist recruits: “The chaos in Iraq has fueled radical ideology among the region’s youth, while providing an environment for militants to train…Officials said that the suspects had trained abroad, in Somalia, Afghanistan and especially Iraq.'It is the beginning of jihadi operations leaking out of Iraq,' said Abdul Aziz al-Qassim, a retired Saudi judge and moderate Islamic activist. 'It is clear that this is some of the effects of what is happening in Iraq, in terms of training and in terms of learning from the Iraqi experience.'”

So the War continues, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, longer now than US military operations in WWII, reconstruction has failed, and the world is less safe than it was before 9/11 as the US occupation of Iraq generates more and more terrorists! This is the world that the neo-cons and their ideological president have created!

Ex-C.I.A. Chief Assails Cheney on Iraq!

George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, "At the Center of the Storm.”

He writes that top Bush administration officials pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes.

Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics, such as former Clinton and Bush terrorism Czar, Ricard Clarke, that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counter terrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.

Tenet's views echo those of Richard Clarke who wrote in his 2004 book, "Against All Enemies": "By late June (2001) Tenet and I were convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come. 'It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one,' Tenet told me. No one could have been more concerned about the al Qaeda threat than George, but he had been unable to find a way to go after the heart of al Qaeda...."

Clarke reports that he and Tenet tried to persuade the administration that al Qaeda posed a real threat at a September 4, 2001 meeting, seven days before the attack on the twin towers. "Rumsfeld, who looked distracted through the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq..."

Clarke recounts briefing Condi Rice about al Qaeda" "...her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before..." noting that"... Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm...."

Clarke presciently concludes his book by saying:" The nation needed thoughtful leadership to deal with the underlying problems September 11 reflected...Instead America got unthinking reactions, ham held responses and a rejection of analysis in favor of perceived wisdom. It has left us left secure. We will pay a price for a long time." Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, George Tenet, apparently agrees.