I am now 100% convinced that we will attack Iran before the fall elections. I’d suspected for quite a while that the Administration wanted this, but I think we now have concrete evidence that it will happen. You may have heard, Admiral Fallon “resigned” yesterday. Galrahn points out some interesting facts at Information Dissemination.
Four star flag officers, particularly Joint Combatant Commanders, do not resign in the middle of war because of a media report. I read the Esquire article from front to back 5 times, I cannot find a single negative quote from Adm. Fallon about President Bush. I see plenty of criticism from Barnett. The implication is Bush can’t read, which is bullshit, or Fallon is being pushed out, which sounds more believable.
I might be mistaken, but I believe we are witness to Bush fire his first General/Admiral of the war. Think long and hard as you contemplate what that means.
He goes on to explain some of the background of the current political state of the military, including the split between “moderates” who desire a “cooperative” approach, and hardliners who want unilateral military action. His conclusion:
If you didn’t read the Esquire piece, or didn’t read my earlier response, you may of just missed what could in fact be a signal of war to Iran. I know one thing, if I was Iran, that is the only way to read this. There was a message for Iran in the Barnett article:
“Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys [Iran] have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.”
Are we assuming the Bush administration can’t read, Barnett is saying that, Barnett makes all the cuts at the Bush administration in the article, not Fallon. Barnett appears to have been dead right though. Reasonable people who do nothing wrong don’t quit because a reporter writes an article bad about a politician, but unreasonable people can make that person quit. I really am stunned, I have never really believed the US was going to strike Iran until today.
It’ll happen. We’ve been beating that drum for quite a while now, and Fallon has only been at his post for a year. Galrahn is right – Fallon was forced out by someone upset about the politics. That’s the only way this makes sense. And it’s a strong signal that the Administration wishes to push forward plans for war with Iran.
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Sigh.
It’s a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can’t.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was greeted with lavish ceremony yesterday as he became the first Iranian President to visit Baghdad, a trip some said reflected Iran’s great and growing power in Iraq and how severely the U.S. effort to remake Iraq into a Western-friendly democracy has gone awry.
Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the war began in 2003, but Iraq’s U.S.-backed government warmly welcomed Washington’s No. 1 enemy with flowers and a band.
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Supporters of the Iraq War often state that the war has “proven” that we are willing to attack if necessary, and thus was a successful bit of foreign policy. (Funny – Iran doesn’t seem to be acting any better now than they were before.) This odd “peace thru belligerence” approach nearly came to a head on October 27, 1969, when Richard Nixon loaded up 18 B-52 bombers with nuclear weapons and launched them towards Moscow with the intent of terrifying the USSR into pressuring Hanoi into making concessions at the peace negotiations in Paris.
Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it’s clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the “madman theory”: Nixon’s notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.
So what did the bombers do? [click to continue…]
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Late last year I talked briefly about how government innovation in the market can often be a very good thing. I also plugged Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Thankfully, I’ve now had an opportunity to read a good chunk of the book, and it lays out a convincing argument that the current neo-liberal “free trade” view of economic development is in fact not at all how America developed into an economic power – or how any developed country actually industrialized. In reality, it was government protectionism via tariffs, R&D investments, restrictions on foreign trade, subsidies, and the like that allowed countries to develop into economic powers, and free trade policies that act to suppress growth in industrializing countries. After all, how can a developing country compete in a free market against someone with a technological edge?
Consequently, many developed countries advocate free-trade policies for the developing world – sometimes earnestly believing the propaganda that we developed under free-trade policies – in effect “kicking away the ladder” for the developing world, and protecting their technological edge.
After the jump, I’ve included a few lengthy excerpts from the book that underline Chang’s point. It’s an interesting and informative read, and I highly recommend it. [click to continue…]
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Holy shit.
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.
“It felt like prison,” says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming “20/20″ investigation. “I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened.”
Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.
“I said, ‘Dad, I’ve been raped. I don’t know what to do. I’m in this container, and I’m not able to leave,’” she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.
“We contacted the State Department first,” Poe told ABCNews.com, “and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen” — from her American employer.
Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones’ camp, where they rescued her from the container.
Legal experts say Jones’ alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.
More at the link – I’ve condensed the main gist here (emphasis mine). Three cheers for Rep. Ted Poe, who seems to be the only person in the gov’t fighting for this girl.
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CNN – known as the “Clinton News Network” to wingnuts, because they are so “liberal” – has dropped a “speculative documentary” that was set to air next week because of the new NIE that pointed out that Iran stopped their nuclear weapons program 4 years ago.
The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary “We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear.”
The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the “CNN Presents” banner, was “set partially in the future,” featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials — playing fictional cabinet members — debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.
So, the “liberal media” was preparing to air a bit of speculative fiction about a bellicose nuclear Iran? On a news network? That hardly seems “liberal” to me. Of course, wingnuts will undoubtedly claim that the fact that the program was scrapped (a week before air) is evidence that the media is liberal, ignoring the fact that (a) they were going to air it in the first place, and (b) that the NIE made it completely silly to do so.
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Since those of us who say a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem is necessary and a moral mandate are often accused of being anti-Semites by the far right, I wonder how wingnuts reconcile this statement by Ehud Olmert into their worldview.
Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said failure to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians would spell the end of the State of Israel.
He warned of a “South African-style struggle” which Israel would lose if a Palestinian state was not established.
They’ll probably just say that Mr. Olmert is living in the same bubble I’m allegedly living in.
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George Bush, after meeting Vladimir Putin in 2001:
I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.
But this weekend…
The OSCE’s election monitoring unit announced earlier this month that it would not attend Russia’s election, saying Moscow had refused to provide visas to its staff.
Mr Putin said the boycott decision “was taken on the recommendation of the American state department”.
“The aim is to discredit the elections, but they won’t achieve their goal,” he said.
“We will certainly take this into account with our bilateral ties with this state,” he added, referring to the US.
Awesome.
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Despite the claims of our right-wing friends here in Ohio that there are terrorists or pro-terrorist Muslims around every corner, a recent study shows that most terrorism arrests never actually result in terrorism prosecutions.
Six years of investigations and prosecutions have turned up little evidence of Islamic jihadists at work in the United States, according to a study released Monday.
The study, conducted by New York University’s Center on Law and Security, tracked 510 cases billed as terrorism-related when arrests were made.
But it found only 158 of those people arrested since al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks were prosecuted for terrorism.
In the past 6 years, there have been an average of just 85 terrorism arrests annually, and less than 31% of those cases end up in terrorism prosecutions. In other words, nearly 70% of the terrorism arrests don’t result in prosecutions for terrorism. In fact, just 4 people have been convicted of plotting terror attacks in the United States, and an overwhelming 58 have been convicted of plotting overseas terror attacks.
Now, don’t get me wrong – every terror attack we stop is a “win”. It’s a good thing. But the dearth of valid charges really undermines the flimsy claims that there are oh-so-many pro-terrorism Muslims in public roles here in Ohio. I need a heck of a lot more (and better) evidence than someone holding opinions counter to right-wingers to be convinced.
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from Newsweek (ht Jeff Hess):
The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. ArmyHumvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV.
It’s past time for Congress to shut this shit down. Jeff notes the lack of MSM coverage on this. The drive-by media accountability bloggers are notably silent.
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In what might be the least surprising development ever (after all, we already knew Bush wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11), it appears Qwest was approached by the government to spy on Americans several months before that big event that allegedly “changed everything”, and has been used to justify virtually everything this Administration has attempted.
A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.
Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.
Terrific.
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