Afghan War Plagued by "Mendacity" and "Lies"

With the Trump/Pence regimes relying on lies to try to take America to war with Iran, it is perhaps timely that the truth about the Afghan War is finally coming out and that truth is ugly: Americans have been repeatedly and deliberately lied to both senior members of the military and by politicians. Meanwhile, Americans died and were grievously wounded, some bearing the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives.  Afghanistan has been called the "graveyard of empires" and with good reason to anyone with a knowledge of history.  It turns out that America, despite its hubris and misguided (and false) sense of exceptionalism has done no better that would be conquerors of the past. Belatedly recognizing this will not bring back the dead, heal the forever wounded or restore the squanders taxpayer dollars. It should, however, educate the American public to refuse to be played for fools again by the military and/or hawkish politicians.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the trail of lies and wasted taxpayer money.  The takeaway, in my view, is that if Afghanistan was unwinnable, Iran would be an even larger disaster.  Here are excerpts:

The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction told Congress Wednesday that U.S. officials have routinely lied to the public during the 18-year war by exaggerating progress reports and inflating statistics to create a false appearance of success.

“There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris,” John F. Sopko said in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.”

As an example, Sopko said U.S. officials have lied in the past about the number of Afghan children enrolled in schools — a key marker of progress touted by the Obama administration — even though they “knew the data was bad.” He also said U.S. officials falsely claimed major gains in Afghan life expectancy that were statistically impossible to achieve.

In addition, Sopko criticized the Trump administration for classifying information that shows the war is going badly, including data on Afghan troop casualties and assessments of the Taliban’s strength. . . . . “It turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.”

Since 2001, the United States has spent more than $132 billion to modernize the country — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to rebuild Europe after World War II.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee summoned Sopko to testify in response to a series of articles published last month in The Washington Post that revealed how senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the conflict had become unwinnable.

The inspector general had drawn on the interviews to publish seven reports — called “Lessons Learned” — about policy failures in Afghanistan. But the reports left out the harshest and most frank criticisms and omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project.

The Post obtained about 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from the interviews under the Freedom of Information Act, but had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to force it to release the records.

Several lawmakers said they were shocked by revelations in The Afghanistan Papers, including blunt admissions from generals, ambassadors and White House officials that they didn’t know what they were doing in Afghanistan and that the war strategy was fundamentally flawed.

Sopko defended his agency’s attempts to withhold the documents, saying he had an obligation to protect the identities of people who criticized the war and wanted to remain anonymous.

“These people who spoke to us risked a lot,” he said. “You know what this town is like, you know what it’s like if somebody bad-mouths their old boss or ­whatever.”

Everyone seeking to cover their own asses and keeping their own jobs while Americans needlessly died and billions of dollars might just have well been set on fire and burned.   We must not be tricked by lies again when it comes to the Middle East.

How the Arab World Came Apart

As noted several times on this blog, the roots of the disaster now engulfing the Middle East truly began after World War I when western powers divided up what had been the Ottoman Empire.  In parceling out territories to themselves, France and Great Britain created artificial nations that combined disparate tribes and religious groups with no thought of creating future stable nations.  The result has been that without a strong monarch or dictator, the countries were destined to blow apart, starting with Iraq.  The trigger for much of the death and mayhem that has followed was the American invasion of Iraq - an invasion sold to the American people based on deliberate lies and untruths.   The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy, five part piece that looks at the disaster which while not totally avoidable,could have played out so very differently but for the insane megalomania of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their henchmen.  Here are excerpts from the forward of the piece:

Why did it turn out this way? Why did a movement begun with such high promise go so terribly awry?

The scattershot nature of the Arab Spring makes it hard to provide a single answer. Some nations were radically transformed, even as others right next door were barely touched. Some of the nations in crisis were relatively wealthy (Libya), others crushingly poor (Yemen). Some countries with comparatively benign dictatorships (Tunisia) blew up along with some of the region’s most brutal (Syria). The same range of political and economic disparity is seen in the nations that remained stable.

Yet one pattern does emerge, and it is striking. While most of the 22 nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, the six most profoundly affected — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — are all republics, rather than monarchies. And of these six, the three that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states — Iraq, Syria and Libya — are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two factors operating in concert — the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society — left Iraq, Syria and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.

In fact, all but one of the six people profiled ahead are from these “artificial states,” and their individual stories are rooted in the larger story of how those nations came to be. The process began at the end of World War I, when two of the victorious allies, Britain and France, carved up the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire between themselves as spoils of war. In Mesopotamia, the British joined together three largely autonomous Ottoman provinces and named it Iraq. The southernmost of these provinces was dominated by Shiite Arabs, the central by Sunni Arabs and the northernmost by non-Arab Kurds. To the west of Iraq, the European powers took the opposite approach, carving the vast lands of “greater Syria” into smaller, more manageable parcels. Falling under French rule was the smaller rump state of Syria — essentially the nation that exists today — and the coastal enclave of Lebanon, while the British took Palestine and Transjordan, a swath of southern Syria that would eventually become Israel and Jordan. Coming a bit later to the game, in 1934, Italy joined the three ancient North African regions that it had wrested from the Ottomans in 1912 to form the colony of Libya.

To maintain dominion over these fractious territories, the European powers adopted the same divide-and-conquer approach that served them so well in the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa. This consisted of empowering a local ethnic or religious minority to serve as their local administrators, confident that this minority would never rebel against their foreign overseers lest they be engulfed by the disenfranchised majority.

This was only the most overt level of the Europeans’ divide-and-conquer strategy, however, for just beneath the sectarian and regional divisions in these “nations” there lay extraordinarily complex tapestries of tribes and subtribes and clans, ancient social orders that remained the populations’ principal source of identification and allegiance. Much as the United States Army and white settlers did with Indian tribes in the conquest of the American West, so the British and French and Italians proved adept at pitting these groups against one another, bestowing favors — weapons or food or sinecures — to one faction in return for fighting another. The great difference, of course, is that in the American West, the settlers stayed and the tribal system was essentially destroyed. In the Arab world, the Europeans eventually left, but the sectarian and tribal schisms they fueled remained.

At least one man saw this quite clearly. For much of 2002, the Bush administration had laid the groundwork for the Iraq invasion by accusing Saddam Hussein of pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction program and obliquely linking him to the Sept. 11 attacks. In October 2002, six months before Firdos Square, I had a long interview with Muammar el-Qaddafi, and I asked him who would benefit if the Iraq invasion actually occurred. The Libyan dictator had a habit of theatrically pondering before answering my questions, but his reply to that one was instantaneous. “Bin Laden,” he said. “There is no doubt about that. And Iraq could end up becoming the staging ground for Al Qaeda, because if the Saddam government collapses, it will be anarchy in Iraq. If that happens, actions against Americans will be considered jihad.”

Part 1 focuses on three historical factors that are crucial to understanding the current crisis: the inherent instability of the Middle East’s artificial states; the precarious position in which U.S.-allied Arab governments have found themselves when compelled to pursue policies bitterly opposed by their own people; and American involvement in the de facto partitioning of Iraq 25 years ago, an event little remarked upon at the time — and barely more so since — that helped call into question the very legitimacy of the modern Arab nation-state. Part 2 is primarily devoted to the American invasion of Iraq, and to how it laid the groundwork for the Arab Spring revolts. In Part 3, the narrative quickens, as we follow the explosive outcome of those revolts as they occurred in Egypt, Libya and Syria. By Part 4, which chronicles the rise of ISIS, and Part 5, which tracks the resulting exodus from the region, we are squarely in the present, at the heart of the world’s gravest concern.

But what follows, ultimately, is a dark warning. Today the tragedy and violence of the Middle East have spilled from its banks, with nearly a million Syrians and Iraqis flooding into Europe to escape the wars in their homelands, and terrorist attacks in Dhaka, Paris and beyond. With the ISIS cause being invoked by mass murderers in San Bernardino and Orlando, the issues of immigration and terrorism have now become conjoined in many Americans’ minds, forming a key political flash point in the coming presidential election. In some sense, it is fitting that the crisis of the Arab world has its roots in the First World War, for like that war, it is a regional crisis that has come quickly and widely — with little seeming reason or logic — to influence events at every corner of the globe. 

Is America Headed for Another Iraq Disaster

The calls for the United States to send ground troops back to Iraq are growing - especially among the Republican Party.  All to combat ISIS.  As if America's last foray into Iraq ended well.  In fact, it's America's past failed policies that created the stage for ISIS' rise in the first place - something seemingly utterly lost on GOP demagogues.  What is frightening is that these war mongers in the GOP seem to be slowly getting their wish as America slides toward another Middle East disaster.  Here are highlights from a piece in Salon:

The last time the United States of America launched a ground war in Iraq, it did so only after engaging in a public debate. The debate was far from the democratic ideal; in retrospect, it was more of an ersatz form of public deliberation. But even though the lead-up to the war was truncated and riddled with scaremongering, falsehoods and conscious misrepresentation, it still happened.

Considering how most of us remember those blinkered and bloodthirsty months, it feels bizarre to write these words, but those are beginning to look like the good old days. Because what’s happening right now, out in the open and yet barely under the surface, is even worse. The signs that the United States is headed for its third invasion of Iraq in 30 years are growing. But because this new war, in marked contrast to the last one, is gestating during the tenure of a president who’d rather not fight, the public hasn’t subjected it to nearly the same degree of scrutiny.

The U.S. is slowly but surely moving closer to doing what so many of its citizens recently said it never should. It is drifting toward making yet another major military commitment to the Middle East; and it is moving toward doing so by hoping that, this time, its guns, bombs and soldiers can do what they heretofore never could.
America is sleepwalking back into a quagmire. And too many of its citizens have yet to notice.

If you listen to the rhetoric of the GOP’s presidential aspirants, you can almost hear the taboo against promoting a new war in Iraq begin to crumble. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, for example, has left the door to invasion noticeably open. He won’t rule out invading Syria, either. Walker’s chief opponent, former Gov. Jeb Bush, also won’t make any promises about putting “boots on the ground” in Syria or Iraq.

More disturbingly, the appetite for war is not only growing among always-hawkish Republicans, but also in the public at large. According to a CBS News poll released last week, a shocking 57 percent of survey respondents — which, to underline the point, is nearly six out of 10 — support sending American troops to Iraq and Syria.

[T]he error here isn’t so much the fault of the American people as it is the fault of their media and political leadership. Because the president is not advocating for a greater escalation, thus providing the political press with a recognizable pro-war figure to put in conflict with anti-war arguments; and because the media seemingly cannot resist trumpeting the latest act of barbarism from ISIS with a lurid and barely concealed excitement, the American people are unaware of the many reasons to see ISIS more realistically. 

More and more, it seems as if the country’s best hope for avoiding further entanglement is for ISIS to collapse under its own fanatical cruelty — before President Walker or President Clinton gets a chance to do it first.

American Sniper: Revisionist History and Hypermasculinity

With the Oscars on Sunday, there continues to be nauseating talk of "American Sniper" winning the Best Picture award.  Should that happen, it will underscore the fact that America - especially red state America - learned absolutely nothing from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan by the evil duo of George "I'm a cretin" Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Thankfully, a number of veterans have condemned the movie and even its false hero, Chris Kyle, but for the most part average Americans, notably those in a heavy military area like Hampton Roads, continue to drink the Kool-Aid and close their eyes to fact that America should never have invade Iraq.  Indeed, much of the disaster unfolding with ISIS stems directly from the mess unleashed by Bush/Cheney's fools errand.  A piece in Salon is yet another that looks at the falsehoods put forth by this foul movie.  Here are highlights:

In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Bradley Cooper described how he and screenwriter Jason Hall initially envisioned “American Sniper” as a revisionist western. “The idea was to have a construct of a western, but play with it a bit in the way that ‘Unforgiven’ did, you know?…I like that idea of playing with these archetypes.” 

Like so many westerns, “American Sniper” revolves around the tensions between a hypermasculine hero, who only feels at home on the frontier of “civilization and savagery,” and a heroine who embodies domesticity.  Like so many westerns, it has been defended and attacked on the basis of the authenticity (or lack thereof) of its representations of a distant “frontier.”

From Taya Kyle’s repeated testimony at the film’s promotional events proclaiming that the film is like “seeing Chris again,” to former SEALs criticizing the film’s failure to represent Kyle using a rifle scope cover, there is a remarkable consensus around the idea that what the film should be is a documentary account.

The aspects of “American Sniper” that conform to western archetypes are easily recognizable. As a young man, Kyle is portrayed as adrift, an ersatz cowboy whose exploits on the rodeo circuit fail to secure the fidelity of a girlfriend who cheats on him while he is on the road. Having failed to realize his dreams of frontier masculinity as a rodeo cowboy, Kyle turns to the military. He is trained and deployed to “the new wild West in the old Middle East,” where he is able to realize his true calling as a latter-day western lawman, serving as the lone wolf representative of the civilization whose sovereign violence he embodies. 

Kyle’s frontier masculinity is threatened not only by the violence of the “savage,” but also by the feminine domesticity of his wife, whom he marries on the same day that he gets his orders to deploy. In his trips home between tours, Taya, who needs Kyle at home to raise their children, pleads for his return.  Kyle defies his wife and returns to Iraq for a fourth tour, during which he kills Mustafa in a long-range, “High-Noon”-style shootout. It is only then that, by his own choice, he returns home to begin the process of reintegrating himself into the “civilized” life he had been working to protect.

If “American Sniper” was a film with “no nuance, no context and no subtlety,” as Sophia McClennen described it recently in Salon, that would be the end of the story. But Hall’s script, Eastwood’s direction and Cooper’s masterful performance give us a film that accomplishes much more than the failed biopic so many critics have described.

Cooper’s visceral physical performance portrays Kyle as wracked by the emotional responses that those of us who have never been on the front lines can identify with, even as he delivers lines so racist that we recoil against them. In its deliberate collision of liberal humanism with frontier violence, “American Sniper” is reminiscent of one of the most brilliant revisionist westerns ever made – John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

In the climactic shootout in Ford’s film, lawyer Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), the film’s representative of liberalism, reluctantly, and only after legal avenues had failed, kills the vaguely ethnic outlaw “Liberty Valance” (Lee Marvin).

In the film’s famous conclusion, Stoddard (at this point in the film’s chronology, a U.S. senator and Hallie’s husband) confesses the truth in a report to the Shinbone paper. The paper editor refuses to publish the story, declaring as he is tearing up his notes that “this is the West sir. When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend.”

In metaphorically refusing to “print the legend,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” forces us to grapple with the secret complicity between American liberalism and the racist violence of the frontiersman. In a representation of “The Legend” Chris Kyle that draws liberal viewers closer to his worldview than they feel comfortable being, “American Sniper” does the same thing.

The tragedies perpetrated and experienced by men like Kyle are not a conservative problem; they are an American problem. In one of the more insightful criticisms of “American Sniper,” Lakota/Dakota scholar James Fenelon argues that Kyle’s invocation savagery to describe his enemies cannot be understood as an invention of neoconservatism. The imagination of a category of human beyond the limits of reason, “the unreconstructed Other that needs to be obliterated,” enabled the violence that facilitated the settlement of the territorial United States long before it enabled American militarism abroad.

In condemning westerns like “American Sniper” rather than the ongoing political realities that drive their appeal, critics mistake a symptom for a cause.

Jeb Bush Won't Talk About His Brother's Misguided Wars

Much like was the case with Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush's quest for the White House has a strong sense of entitlement to it.  He's a Bush, and therefore, he should have what he wants.  Never mind the disasters his idiot brother and his evil Vice President brought down on the country.  Or the financial meltdown that the anything goes policies of the GOP helped rain down on America and much of the world.  Yet, like a petulant child, Jeb pouts and says  "I won't talk about the past."  If he will not talk about the past, how do we know he won't make the same mistakes as were made in the past?  A piece in Huffington Post looks at Jeb Bush's refusal to talk about the fool's errands that were launched by his brother.  Here are highlights:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has no interest in "re-litigating" the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which began under his brother's administration.

"I won't talk about the past," Bush said at a Friday press conference when asked how he would have handled the conflicts differently, according to The Washington Post. "I'll talk about the future. If I'm in the process of considering the possibility of running, it's not about re-litigating anything in the past. It's about trying to create a set of ideas and principles that will help us move forward."

The governor, who is almost certain to jump into the 2016 race, said that instead he would focus on a positive vision for the country that revolved around the future. He will elaborate on that vision when he delivers what his aides are describing as a major foreign policy address in Chicago next week.

It's unlikely Bush will be able to avoid the subject for long. Democrats are already pointing to his brother's legacy, which has left U.S. forces in the Middle East more than a decade after their initial deployment. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars remain unpopular -- with a 2013 poll finding majorities that said the campaigns were not worth the tremendous sacrifice. Some Republicans, too, are likely to criticize Bush over the matter. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), another would-be presidential candidate with libertarian leanings, has spoken out against false pretenses used to justify the war.

In my view, Jeb is a spoiled, arrogant ass.

Veterans Begin to See that Friends Died in a Fool's Errand

I for one always opposed the Iraq War.  First and foremost because the U.S. went to war on  the basis of deliberate lies formulated and disseminated by the evil Bush/Cheney regime, lies that a diligent press could have and should have totally exposed had it not for the most part acted as a lap dog to Bush/Cheney.  My second reason for opposing the war was because no one seemed willing to face the question of what would happen once the Hussein regime was overthrown.  Short of a permanent U.S. occupation, nothing was going to keep the country from ultimately blowing apart - something we are seeing take place before our eyes currently.  With a son-in-law who did three tours in the Middle East and who suffered sever wounds on his last tour, I can understand the feeling of veterans who are saddened if not distraught to see  Iraq spiraling out of control.  They lost friends and loved ones and often spilled some of their own blood in a war that should never have been waged.  I can only hope that if they feel anger that the anger will be directed at the right target: Bush/Cheney and the rubber stamp GOP controlled Congress that set this disaster in play.  More importantly, they need to realize that the failed GOP policies continue and that if they want justice, they need to throw Republicans out of office everywhere.  Better yet, they could start demanding that Bush, Cheney and others be put on trial for war crimes.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing disaster and the frayed emotions of many veterans:

A few weeks before their battalion was to get new mine-resistant vehicles, Capt. Adam P. Snyder, Pvt. Dewayne L. White and Sgt. Eric J. Hernandez were speeding toward a mission in Baiji, Iraq, when a roadside bomb engulfed their Humvee in flames, killing the two enlisted men. Captain Snyder, 26, died the next day, Dec. 5, 2007.

Matthew Adkins, then a self-described “butterbar” lieutenant, regarded the captain as a mentor, and his death leveled him. Hearing this week that Baiji was on the brink of being overrun by Sunni militants, he immediately thought of Captain Snyder, phoned his girlfriend, and cried.

“You think about those costs that can never be recouped,” Mr. Adkins said in an interview from Talkeetna, Alaska, where he works as a field manager for pipeline surveys. “I remember driving those Humvees to Balad Air Base to get our new MRAPs, and thinking if we had these things two weeks ago, they’d still be alive.”

About 800 American troops lost their lives, and many more were wounded, in those territories, the homeland of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist loyalists. For the comrades of those fallen troops, the grim news this week has left them struggling to reconcile the sacrifices that were made with the speed and magnitude with which northern Iraq is falling to insurgents.

For these soldiers, it brought the same wrenching dismay to the Army that Marines felt when Falluja fell to insurgents in January. But there is also a clear sense among many that this is different, and worse: Iraq could still be a functioning state after rebels seized parts of Anbar Province, but the capture of so many northern cities has imperiled everything the military once thought it might have accomplished.

Phillips McWilliams, a platoon leader now studying for the bar in Columbia, S.C.,  . . . . had predicted the eventual implosion of Iraq, his parents reminded him recently. And he always had doubts about whether the Iraqi forces they were training could ever secure the country after American forces left. But he is still struggling to reconcile the developments of the past few days.

“Part of me wants to say that everything we did or attempted to do is being torn asunder, that it is all for naught,” he said. “But I’m certainly very proud of what we did; I just don’t know how I feel yet. I’m very conflicted. I just don’t know what is going to happen, but it doesn’t look good.”

Mr. Sykes is now several years out of alcohol addiction and PTSD treatments he entered after a breakdown following a 2010 trip to Fort Pierce, Fla., where Captain Snyder is buried beneath a marble obelisk. “I drank myself into oblivion, and basically lost it” after the visit, Mr. Sykes said.

He is better now, married, and working as a policy aide on Capitol Hill. It was a hard road back, especially because he now considers the occupation of Iraq “one giant boondoggle.”

“Some guys just let it become all-consuming and they can never get past it, and their lives become one big rehashing of the same things,” said Mr. Sykes, who talks to Captain Snyder’s mother regularly. “You have to acknowledge it and not fill up with hate, or your anger will consume you.”

Sitting at his office in Alaska after a long day visiting crews, Mr. Adkins said he hoped the Iraqi government could claw back some of what it lost this week, otherwise “all that human capital spent on it was possibly for nothing.”

“That’s what I’m holding onto right now,” he said.

We need to NEVER forget that every American who died was as good as murdered by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.  If we forget this reality and fail to hold these foul men accountable for what they did, America is one step closer to another Iraq like disaster.

 

Far Right Demagoguery: The Dangers of Not Knowing History

One of the incessant agenda items of the far right is to dumb down Americans' knowledge of history because those who do not know history are much more easily duped.  A prime example, of course, is the Christofascist created myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation" even though the writings of the Founding Fathers underscore the lie to the claim.  They get away with it because increasingly, fewer and fewer Americans are being taught the nation's true history.  The reasons are many and include the current emphasis on math and science to the detriment of government and history courses.  Also relevant is the dire situation in our training of teachers that puts little emphasis on content knowledge.  Here in Virginia, a History PhD could not teach high school history given the many bull shit education courses that are required for licensing.  A column in the New York Times looks at the frightening ignorance of far too many Americans when it comes to history and the dangers this poses for demagogues.  Here are excerpts:

Ask a high school senior what the Great War was all about and you’re likely to get a shrug or a stab based on a recent episode of “Game of Thrones.” Hint: its 100th anniversary is this year. Hint: globe-straddling old empires collapsed and new horrors, from genocide to slaughter by poisonous gas, were ushered in. Hint: its repercussions are with us still, from Syria to Russia to the American role as international cop.

If you said “First World War,” you’re at the top of the class. The perception that we’re raising a nation of doofi about the past was generated, in part, by a 2010 report that only 12 percent of students in their last year of high school had a firm grasp of our nation’s history. Add to that a 2011 Pew study showing that nearly half of Americans think the main cause of the Civil War was a dispute over federal authority — not slavery — and you’ve got a serious national memory hole.

But before blaming the victims, look at the top. Opinion leaders, corporate titans, politicians, media personalities and educators — dunce caps for all. Even the History Channel now does very little history, with a menu heavy on swamp people, big rigs and pawn stars.

Of late, you had the venture capitalist Tom Perkins compare the call for higher taxes in the United States to Kristallnacht, the state-sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots in Nazi Germany of 1938. Anyone who is literate about history would never liken a rampage that burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized 7,500 businesses and killed at least 91 Jewish people to progressive taxation.

This was followed by a claim from Ken Langone, the Home Depot co-founder and big-time Republican Party donor, comparing the plight of our country’s very rich to the objects of Hitler’s wrath.

Nazis and slavery are the two big topics that consistently draw out the woefully ignorant, and prompt the most facile analogies. But more recent events can also produce conclusions based on a limited understanding of the past.

On the media-celebrity side, we can only hope nobody is getting their history from Sarah Palin, who famously had to be schooled on the origin of the Korean War, among other things, after being picked as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. She recently declared that torture is as American as Sunday school. “If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists,” she said, to great applause at a convention of gun fanatics.

One doesn’t expect Palin to know that the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” or that torture is banned by international treaties signed by the United States. But is it too much to ask for her to realize that Imperial Japan, our enemy in World War II, was prosecuted for waterboarding?

Educators, not just those in thrall to teaching to “the test,” share plenty of the blame for “raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” as David McCullough called the problem. For educational malfeasance this year, look to the assignment given eighth graders in the Rialto, Calif., school district. Students were asked to consider whether the Holocaust was created for political gain or didn’t happen at all — a bit of homework the Simon Wiesenthal Center called “grotesque.”

[M]any schools no longer stress “civics,” or some variation of it. Why? Students complain that it’s boring, or the standards are too demanding. Civics, said [Ken] Burns, is “the operating system” for citizenry; if you know how government is constructed, it’s no longer a complicated muddle, but a beautiful design.

[H]istory may hurt, but without proper understanding of it, you can’t understand contemporary American life and politics.

He also mentioned how immigrants may know more about history than fifth-generation natives. To pass a citizenship test, they are required to learn things about the glory and infamy, the power and abuses — the operating system — of this democracy. It’s not too onerous to ask the same thing of 18-year-olds across the land. You can’t fix stupid, as the comic line goes; but you don’t have to teach it.

As I said, if one doesn't know history, one cannot make informed decisions on issue of government or foreign policy, the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes being recent examples of what ignorance of history can set into motion and how a ignorant public can be easily duped with deliberate lies.

 

Telling the Truth: Will the GOP Admit That The Iraq War Was Wrong From the Start?

Photo: The remains of three US servicemen, their equipment, and a Humvee lay scattered on a dirt road after a massive IED vaporized their vehicle on August 4, 2007 in Hawr Rajab, Iraq. By Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images

CAUTION: The image above is graphic.  

Regardless of what happens to Chris Christie as Bridgegate continues to spiral out of control, a larger issue facing the GOP in the context of the 2016 presidential election is whether or not the presidential candidates and the party as a whole will concede that the Iraq War was a disaster and that the rush to war was an unmitigated mistake.  To a lesser extent, the question will also haunt Democrat candidate(s) who voted for the war.  Why is the issue important?  Because (i) if the error cannot be recognized, the danger is greater that a similar fool's errand may happen in the future, and (ii) because more and more Americans, including veterans who fought and/or were grievously wounded in Iraq, are coming to the conclusion that they fought and friends died for nothing.  Andrew Sullivan has two posts that look at the two pieces of the issue.  Here are highlights from the first:

Jeremy Lott hopes GOP presidential hopefuls will face reality:

Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake.  It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11. (The war, incidentally, helped pave the way for a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and a Barack Obama-controlled White House, as well.)

Larison sees this as improbable:

There are some obstacles to what Lott proposes. Chief among them is the difficulty that many hawks in the party still truly don’t accept that the Iraq war was a mistake. Despite the fact that by virtually any measurable standard the Iraq war was a senseless waste of lives and resources, they don’t consider this to be the truth, so they won’t greet it with relief. At best, many hawks will agree that the there were flaws in the execution, but they remain convinced that the original idea was sound.

Readers know how terrible a mistake this was and is, in my judgment. Listening to what passes for “debate” about the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq – which never ended, and was never resolved by the surge, and is the core reason why Iraq as a country remains a democratic impossibility – has been a sobering moment. Men like John McCain have obviously not internalized for a millisecond the awful error they made. Their response has been either utter denialism or silence – which was roughly their position throughout the entire, horrifying experience.

And here are highlights from the second post:

William McNulty blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:

No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair — from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.

Joe Klein seconds McNulty:

McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things–and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.

 We owe it to those who died or returned maimed for life to make sure that such a disastrous debale never, ever happens again.  As noted before, one way to insure this is to put George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others on trial for war crimes.  So far, no one has been held accountable.

DISCLOSURE: One of my daughters' husband was badly wounded by an IED.  Fortunately, he has largely recovered and is posed to leave the military in a few months.  A number of his friends were not so lucky.  We do not discuss the event and aftermath, but it was grueling for both him and my daughter.  Yet, ultimately, they were the lucky ones.  Thousands of young Americans were not so lucky.  A true patriot cannot silently let those responsible get away with no accounting for their misdeeds in sending America to war, not to mention authorizing the commission of war crimes as well.

The Bush/Cheney Betrayal - Falluja’s Fall Stuns Marines Who Fought There

I have a son-in-law who did two deployments to Iraq and one deployment to Afghanistan (where he was severely wounded) and in this area of military installations I know many members of the military who served in Iraq.  Many are stunned to see what they and friends fought for (and that many died for) so quickly unraveling and being for naught.  I suspect that many feel betrayed.  And they were.  By George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and by every member of Congress who voted to invade Iraq.  It was a fool's errand from the start premised on deliberate lies by Bush/Cheney and their sycophants.  Anyone familiar with the history of the region and the religious disputes between the two branches of Islam could have predicted disaster.  As I have said before, "supporting the troops" entails more that voting for defense spending and being rah, rah for the military.  It means not sending the into harms way on a fools errand.  The New York Times looks at the reactions of some who served in Iraq:

Adam Banotai was a 21-year-old sergeant and squad leader in the Marine Corps during the 2004 invasion of Falluja, a restive insurgent-held city in Iraq. His unit — which had seven of 17 men wounded by shrapnel or bullets in the first days of the invasion — seized control of the government center early in the campaign.

So when Sunni insurgents, some with allegiances to Al Qaeda, retook the city this month and raised their black insurgent flag over buildings where he and his men fought, he was transfixed, disbelieving and appalled.

“I texted a couple of friends,” said Mr. Banotai, now a firefighter and registered nurse in Pennsylvania. “Everyone was in disbelief.”

“I don’t think anyone had the grand illusion that Falluja or Ramadi was going to turn into Disneyland, but none of us thought it was going to fall back to a jihadist insurgency,” he said. “It made me sick to my stomach to have that thrown in our face, everything we fought for so blatantly taken away.”

The bloody mission to wrest Falluja from insurgents in November 2004 meant more to the Marines than almost any other battle in the 12 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many consider it the corps’ biggest and most iconic fight since Vietnam, with nearly 100 Marines and soldiers killed in action and hundreds more wounded.

Some now blame President Obama for not pushing harder to keep some troops in Iraq to maintain the stability. Others express anger at George W. Bush for getting them into a war that they now view as dubious in purpose and even more doubtful in its accomplishments. But either way, the fall of the city to insurgents has set off within the tight-knit community of active and former Marines a wrenching reassessment of a battle that in many ways defined their role in the war.

“This has been a gut punch to the morale of the Marine Corps and painful for a lot of families who are saying, ‘I thought my son died for a reason.’ ”

Ryan Sparks was a platoon commander during a seven-month Falluja deployment in which three men were killed and 57 wounded in his 90-man unit. Now about to take a job in Manhattan after recently leaving the Marines, Mr. Sparks, 39, said many of the younger Falluja veterans are angry “because we lost so many Marines, and it feels like they were sacrificed for nothing.”

He said that the fall of Falluja might finally bring home to the public what he says he and many comrades had long believed about the war. “Lives were wasted, and now everyone back home sees that,” he said. “It was irresponsible to send us over there with no plan, and now to just give it all away.”

Thousands died because of George Bush's hubris and Dick Cheney's megalomania.  Bush and Cheney need to be tried for war crimes and punished severely.  Unless this happens, this kind of fiasco will happen again.  My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones or who were maimed basically for nothing.  When members of the military hear Republicans giving lip service to "supporting the troops," they need to remember this huge betrayal.

Thousands of US Bridges Could Be On Verge of Collapse

 

We hear over and over again from Republicans that they seek to starve and shrink government and relentlessly lower taxes.   The result, of course, is that many critical needs and services go without proper funding.  In addition to throwing the poor and needy to the curb, this policy of spending less is taking a severe tool on the nation's infrastructure some of which could be a minor collision away from collapse.  American bridges are among the ticking time bombs that this failed GOP policy has set in motion.  George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney and their GOP accomplices in Congress cause the USA to squander billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Meanwhile our infrastructure at home is crumbling.  Talk about misplaced priorities.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at some of the dangers that could have deadly consequences with little or no notice.  Here are excerpts:

Thousands of bridges around the U.S. may be one freak accident or mistake away from collapse, even if the spans are deemed structurally sound.

The crossings are kept standing by engineering design, not supported with brute strength or redundant protections like their more modern counterparts. Bridge regulators call the more risky spans "fracture critical," meaning that if a single, vital component of the bridge is compromised, it can crumple.

Those vulnerable crossing carry millions of drivers every day. In Boston, a six-lane highway 1A near Logan airport includes a "fracture critical" bridge over Bennington Street. In northern Chicago, an I-90 pass that goes over Ashland Avenue is in the same category. An I-880 bridge over 5th Avenue in Oakland, Calif., is also on the list.

Also in that category is the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River north of Seattle, which collapsed into the water days ago after officials say an oversized truck load clipped the steel truss.

Public officials have focused in recent years on the desperate need for money to repair thousands of bridges deemed structurally deficient, which typically means a major portion of the bridge is in poor condition or worse. But the bridge that collapsed Thursday is not in that deficient category, highlighting another major problem with the nation's infrastructure. . . .

The most famous failure of a fracture critical bridge was the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis during rush hour on Aug. 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring more than 100 others. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the cause of the collapse was an error by the bridge's designers - a gusset plate, a key component of the bridge, was too thin. The plate was only half of the required one-inch thickness.

Because the bridge's key structures lacked redundancy, where if one piece fails, there is another piece to prevent the bridge from falling, when the gusset plate broke, much of the bridge collapsed.

Fracture critical bridges, like the I-5 span in Washington, are the result of Congress trying to cut corners to save money rather than a lack of engineering know-how, said Barry B. LePatner, a New York real estate attorney and author of "Too Big to Fall: America's Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward."

About 18,000 fracture critical bridges were built from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s in an effort to complete the nation's interstate highway system, which was launched under President Dwight Eisenhower, LePatner said in an interview. The fracture critical bridge designs were cheaper than bridges designed with redundancy, he said.

Thousands of those bridges remain in use, according to an AP analysis.   "They have been left hanging with little maintenance for four decades now," he said. "There is little political will and less political leadership to commit the tens of billions of dollars needed" to fix them.

There are 66,749 structurally deficient bridges and 84,748 functionally obsolete bridges in the U.S., including Puerto Rico, according to the Federal Highway Administration. That's about a quarter of the 607,000 total bridges nationally. States and cities have been whittling down that backlog, but slowly. In 2002, about 30 percent of bridges fell into one of those two categories.

There is wide recognition at all levels of government that the failure to address aging infrastructure will likely undermine safety and hinder economic growth. But there is no consensus on how to pay for improvements. The federal Highway Trust Fund, which provides construction aid to states, is forecast to go broke next year. The fund gets its revenue primarily from federal gas and diesel taxes. But revenues aren't keeping up because people are driving less and there are more fuel-efficient cars on the road.

The GOP's "starve government"policy - triggered by Tea Party and the 1% greed -  is creating life threatening dangers yet morons in the GOP base just keep eating up the anti-tax demagoguery. 

Is Iraq Descending into Chaos - Did Bush/Cheney Make Us Less Safe?

I have never supported the war in Iraq and I can still see my former living room where I watched the televised address of George W. Bush announcing that he had sent America to war.  We now know that his entire premise for the war was based on deliberate lies - lies which a lazy media never bothered to expose.  As of the lies of Bush and Dick Cheney, thousands of American died needlessly, billions of dollars better spent on America's infrastructure were squandered, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis died.   Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the war was ultimately all for nothing.  Current circumstances in Iraq show a county spiraling towards chaos and an internal religious war that must have extremists in Iran salivating.  And Bush and Cheney set it all in motion.  And committed war crimes along the way.   Yet many American still can't understand why some Muslims came to hate America even if they had not done so before.   American actions have been the best terrorist recruiting program Islamic extremists could have asked for.  A piece in Foreign Policy Magazine looks at what Bush/Cheney and American hubris has likely wrought.  Here are excerpts:

Iraq is spiraling out of control. Following the arrests in December of the bodyguards of Finance Minister Rafi Issawi, Sunnis took to the streets, revealing their widespread sense of alienation in the new Iraq and demanding the end of what they consider a government policy to marginalize them. As with other protests in the Arab world, they were initially driven by legitimate grievances. But against the backdrop of provincial elections, little was done to address the concerns of the protesters -- despite calls to do so from the top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Sistani. Politicians instead exploited the demonstrations for electoral gains. President Maliki took the opportunity to distract attention away from the lack of services and rampant corruption, presenting himself as the defender of the Shia, in the face of Sunni regional powers intent on overthrowing Shia regimes -- Syria first, then Iraq. Sunni politicians, for their part, sought to benefit from the demonstrations to rail against government oppression to gain support for their own electoral campaigns.

Last week, the Iraqi Army entered Hawija, near Kirkuk, to arrest people accused of attacking Iraqi Security Forces. In the ensuing violence, 200 people were killed. There are reports of desertions from the Iraqi Army. Kurds have moved peshmerga into positions in the disputed territories. Tribes are forming militias to protect themselves from the Iraqi Army. Five Iraqi soldiers were killed in Anbar -- and the province has been put under curfew. Ten satellite channels, including al-Jazeera, have been banned, accused of spreading sectarianism. Bombs exploded in Shia towns. The speaker of parliament called for the government to resign and for early elections.

By seeking to eliminate his Sunni rivals, Maliki has removed the wedge that the U.S. military drove between Sunni extremists and the Sunni mainstream during the Surge, at such great cost. There is a growing sense that the conflicts in Syria and Iraq are merging into one, with Shia regimes, backed by Iran, battling against Sunnis, including al Qaeda elements. We may be witnessing the breakdown of the post-WW I settlement and the nation-states established under the Sykes-Picot agreement. 

Will our legacy from the Iraq war be a regional power struggle ignited by the resurgence of Iran, the contagion of sectarianism into Syria, the horrific violence of jihadist groups? Is this in our national interest? Can we not do more to make Iraq a more positive influence in its neighborhood? 

There were those who saw the likelihood of this disaster even before the fools and power made in the Bush/Cheney regime took America to war on a campaign of lies.  Sadly, their voices were drowned out by jingoism and the willingness of too many Americans to fall into the dangerous "America, love it or live it" mindset which always seems to bring disaster.  Remember Vietnam?  America learned nothing.  I continue to believe that sometimes the most patriotic thing one can do is challenge the conventional thinking, especially if it is sourced in ultra conservative factions.  Time and time again, America has been the loser when patriotic critics of adventurism in foreign policy over rides logic, reason and hard objective facts.  For what they did, I remained convinced that Bush and Cheney are war criminals who deserve to be tried and severely punished.

Afghanistan - The Fool's Errand Continues

My oldest daughter and her husband - who is still recovering from wounds he received in Afghanistan the week prior to last Thanksgiving - visited last week.   While he was here, my son-in-law drove to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C., to see a friend and former roommate who had lost both legs to an IED explosion.  Words cannot express my support and concern for our men and women in uniform.  Likewise, words cannot properly describe my contempt for those who sent America nation to war in a fools errand in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Would that these hubris filled bastard could suffer the same grievous wounds that they have brought upon others.  And unfortunately, the needless deaths and injuries continue.  America needs to leave Afghanistan NOW.  The Seattle Times reports on the latest needless American deaths.  Here are highlights:

Militants killed six Americans, including a female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor Saturday in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.
The violence — hours after the U.S. military’s top officer arrived for consultations with Afghan and U.S.-led coalition officials — illustrates the instability plaguing the nation as foreign forces work to pull nearly all their combat troops out of the country by the end of 2014.

The attacks came just days after insurgents stormed a courthouse, killing more than 46 people in one of the deadliest attacks of the war, now in its 12th year.

The three U.S. service members, two U.S. civilians and the doctor were killed when the group was struck by an explosion while traveling south to donate books to students in a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul province, officials and the State Department said.

Officials said the explosion occurred just as a coalition convoy drove past a caravan of vehicles carrying the governor of Zabul province to the same school event. It is unclear whether the attack was aimed at the coalition forces or the governor.

Another U.S. civilian was killed in a separate insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said in a statement.

It was the deadliest day for Americans since Aug. 16, when seven U.S. service members were killed in two attacks in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban insurgency. Six were killed when their helicopter was shot down by insurgents and one soldier died in a roadside bomb explosion.
Violence in Afghanistan is expected to pick up in the coming weeks and months, as the warm weather spreads. Further, as the NATO troops who have secured the country for the past decade pack up and leave at the end of 2014, the Taliban are expected to intensify efforts to destabilize the Afghan security forces, who are taking over the battle.

The next time you hear some bombastic politician claiming to "support our troops," ask him or her whether they supported the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.  If they say "yes," they need to be called out as liars in so far as they claim to support our troops.  You do not send out young men and women out on an unwinnable fool's errand and get off claiming that you support the.

The Betrayl of Our Troops Continues - Another Death in America's Longest and Needless War

While politicians in Washington fight over spending, the squandering of money and American lives continues unabated in Afghanistan.  One recent squandered life was that of 25 year old David J.Chambers of Hampton, Virginia (pictured at right).  Chambers was killed by an IED similar to that which severely injured my son-in-law two months ago also in Afghanistan.  Here's what the Virginia Pilot reported:

A soldier from Hampton has been killed while serving in Afghanistan.  Sgt. David J. Chambers, 25, died Wednesday in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province, the Department of Defense said. He sustained injuries in a mortar attack while on dismounted patrol.

Chambers was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. That is under control of the 7th Infantry Division at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the state of Washington.

Like my son-in-law, Chambers was based out of Fort Lewis and was a member of the Stryker Brigade.   And like so many others who have been sacrificed for nothing meaningful in Afghanistan, Chambers was ultimately sacrificed on the altar of American military and political hubris. Rather than call the Afghanistan War for what it is, namely a fool's errand from the start, the military brass continues to lie and pretend that we are "making progress" and asks for more time, soldiers and, of course money.  A piece in American Prospect looks at the disaster known as the Afghanistan War.  Here are highlights:

In October 2001, George W. Bush told the country he was sending the American military to Afghanistan in order to "bring justice to our enemies." It's safe to say support for the war would not have been as nearly unanimous as it was had he said, "Oh, and by the way, our troops are going to be fighting there for the next 13 years."

Last spring, Afghanistan passed Vietnam (measured by the time between the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the departure of the last Americans from Saigon in 1975) to become America's longest war.

To date, we've spent over half a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, a figure that includes only the direct yearly costs for both military expenditures and civilian aid. It doesn't include the cost of replacing materiel and weapons used in Afghanistan, nor the long-term costs of caring for the thousands of servicemembers who were wounded there. Those factors will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the tally in the years to come. And today, keeping a single servicemember in Afghanistan costs upward of a million dollars per year.

Last August, the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan passed 2,000.

If politicians really believed in "supporting the troops" we would have left Afghanistan years ago.  They give lip service to the concept for political sound bite purposes, yet in fact they betray our troops every single day.

Afghanistan: The Fools Errand Continues As Does the Betrayal of Our Troops

Click image to enlarge

The United States has expended billions of dollars and squandered thousands of young American lives in the doomed from the outset fiasco in Afghanistan.  Anyone other than the cretinous George W. Bush and the war mad Emperor Palpatine Cheney could have predicted the outcome of America's fool's errand given the last 2,000+ years of Afghan history.  But, no, the Chimperator and his malevolent Vice President were more concerned in fighting a religious crusade and enriching defense contractors like Halliburton than look out for America's true interests.  And what do we have to show for the wasted billions and lives?  One of the most corrupt and incompetent nations on earth.  At least that is the finding of Transparency International which has just released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.  How bad are things in Afghanistan?  It is tied with Somalia and North Korea as the most corrupt nation in the world.  Here's a sampling of some of the findings via the Washington Post:

Afghanistan ranks as one of the most corrupt countries, and it seems bribes and fraud permeate nearly every level of life there. One Afghan in seven paid a bribe in 2010, and the average bribe is equal to one third of the average Afghan salary. A recent report found that high-level political interference and institutional failures thwarted efforts to probe the 2010 collapse of Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank, recover hundreds of millions of dollars from fraudulent loans and prosecute the people who profited, the Washington Post’s Pamela Constable reported. The Transparency International authors concluded last year, ”Corruption, weak institutions and a lack of economic development pose a fatal threat to the viability of Afghanistan,” and it seems the situation this year is sadly no different.

As for the "progress" that senior military leaders claim to be making, UPI has this:

KHOST, Afghanistan, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Taliban militants in Afghanistan's Khost province ambushed a convoy of NATO-led coalition security forces and claimed to have killed nine NATO troops.

Local authorities confirmed that the incident took place, but have denied that there were any casualties, Khaama Press reported Saturday.  No other information on the incident was released.

Based on the experience of how information was kept under wraps when my son-in-law was badly wounded in Afghanistan last month, I am sure no account of the incident will be released until the military brass decides how to best spin yet another failure in security.  Meanwhile two more Americans have lost their lives for nothing:
  

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. 

They died Dec. 3, in Lashkar Gah City, Helmand province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device. They were assigned to the 818th Engineer Company, 164th Engineer Battalion, Williston, N.D. 

Killed were:Sgt. 1st Class. Darren M. Linde, 41, of Sidney, Mont., andSpc. Tyler J. Orgaard, 20, of Bismarck, N.D.

Americans and politicians who really support our troops should be demanding that we withdraw completely from Afghanistan NOW.

Great News From Texas

The photo above tells so much - my son-in-law is on the mend and we are all overjoyed.  He still has a long way to go to full recovery. He/we were very lucky.  Sadly, so many have not be as lucky.

Afghanistan: The Continued Betrayal of Our Troops

On the good news front, my son-in-law continues to improve after being severely injured in Afghanistan.  On the bad news side of things, that area remains a nightmare and any claims to the contrary by senior military leaders is pretty much nothing less than a huge lie.  I noted recently that France had admitted reality and was withdrawing all of its troops.  Now Australia has begun its own withdrawal.  And the USA?  Still in denial and a refusal on the part of senior military commanders and politicians that once Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney bungled the response to the World Trade Center attack, we should have left immediately.  But, due to all too typical American hubris we remained and have thrown away billions of dollars and thousands of lives.  And for nothing in the long view of things.  Absolutely nothing.  The Brisbane Times looks at Australia's moves toward total withdrawal.  Here are highlights:

AUSTRALIAN troops have withdrawn from all forward operating bases and patrol bases in Oruzgan, and handed over control of security in the province to Afghan forces.  And after 13 years keeping the peace in East Timor, the last remaining Australian troops will begin pulling out on Thursday. . . . .

Forward operating and patrol bases in Afghanistan have been progressively handed over to Afghan control since October, and Australian troops will now operate only out of the multinational base in Tarin Kowt, Oruzgan's capital.

And as for the unfolding fiasco in Afghanistan that belies the claims that progress is being made, Google News has this:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A Taliban suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives Friday in eastern Afghanistan, killing three Afghan civilians and wounding more than 90 people, including several Afghan and NATO troops, officials said.

The early morning explosion in Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak province, also destroyed or damaged several government offices and a local prison, said provincial spokesman Shahidullah Shahid.

The blast occurred in an area that is home to government offices, the provincial governor's office, police headquarters, a prison and a coordination center used by international and Afghan security forces.

Shahid said two men and a woman were killed and 90 people — 75 men, 11 women and four children — were wounded.

U.S. Army Maj. Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the international military coalition, said a half-dozen NATO soldiers also received minor injuries in the explosion.

The New "Greatest Generation"

My oldest daughter and her husband (pictured above on their wedding day) will spend their first Thanksgiving as a married couple in a hospital in Texas where doctors are working to repair my son-in-law's badly injured body from the wounds he suffered in America's latest fools errand - the ongoing war in Afghanistan.  It's not what any of us anticipated, but we are grateful because my son-in-law is alive and mentally intact (he has even joked by phone with my younger daughter who is due to deliver her baby literally any time now)t.  Far too many young men and women are not so lucky and have either lost their lives or have suffered horrible injuries that will leave them scared physically and mentally for the rest of their lives.  What makes the entire situation even more disturbing is that most Americans do not even take a momentary thought to think about our men and women in uniform.  Oh yes, we hear the slogans about supporting our troops, but they in fact do not, because if they truly supported them, we would not be throwing away lives in Afghanistan and sabre rattling Republicans would not be seeking to launch a war with Iran (apparently the GOP supporters in the defense industry feel they need more sales and, therefore, war is always a good thing).  And the news media is just as much at fault.  Instead of focusing on the Afghanistan disaster, they prefer to follow "celebrities" who are often one stop from trailer park trash.  It is all most disturbing.   A column in the Washington Post looks at our military and their sacrifice.  Here are some excerpts:

For nearly a decade I have had the privilege of teaching veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though they have taught me more.  .  .  .  .  Not one of these men and women complained about what we asked of them.

They have, however, occasionally objected to the shameful fact that after the first few years of hostilities, these became largely invisible conflicts. In the final stages of the Iraq war and for a long time now in Afghanistan, there has been something close to media silence even as our fellow Americans continue to fight and die.

The ongoing war barely impinges on our daily discussions, and we don’t bother to argue much about our Afghanistan policy. Mostly, we hope that President Obama can keep his promise to bring our troops home.

My Thanksgiving thoughts have often turned toward my military students at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and to the thousands like them who have done very hard duty with little notice.

But this year, the gratitude that they inspire has been heightened, perhaps paradoxically, by the news about David Petraeus, his affair and the mess left behind.  .  .  .  . What has troubled me is how writing on all sides has aggravated the understandable but disturbing tendency to lay so much stress on the role of famous generals that we forget both the centrality of midlevel military leadership and the daily sacrifices and bravery of those in the enlisted ranks who carry out orders from on high. 

We can show our gratitude toward these officers and their troops in at least two ways. 

First, as my MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow keeps reminding us, we need to cut through what the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America calls the Department of Veterans Affairs’ “egregious failure to process the claims of our veterans” in a timely and effective way.

And we need to recognize the contribution that this new generation of veterans can make to our nation. The character of the “Greatest Generation” that fought World War II was established not by the generals or the admirals but by the officers in the lower ranks and the millions of enlisted men and women who carried into civilian life both the skills and the sense of service and community they learned in the war years.

[W]e don’t need to be nostalgic about the Greatest Generation. It’s right here among us.

And I would add that there is a third way to honor and show gratitude: get our troops out of Afghanistan and never again throw away their lives in futile and non-winnable wars such as those conducted in the Middle East for the last 12 years.  We should have learned form Vietnam, by cretins like George W. Bush and war mongers like Dick Cheney (whose Haliburton compatriots have made billions) were are too stupid to learn or too focused on enriching themselves and their friends to give a damn about our troops.   We also really need to reevaluate our senior ranks of the military and fire peacocks like Patraeus, et al.