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.
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.
You have got to be kidding me. Congress voting on an AUMF forced the White House’s hand? Really? The joint resolution had 98% support from legislative GOPers, was introduced by the GOP, and was directed by the White House (read the notes section). In fact, here’s the original AUMF as drafted by the White House, in a press release from the day it was introduced.
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.
Maybe he was all hopped up on hillbilly heroin again, who knows. Maybe he was a Starfleet Commander once in a Star Trek club so he thinks that he “served” and has any credibility on the subject. It’s hard tellin’. It’s funny watching him spin ’round though! Now he lumps Murtha in. LOL. Good show, Rush. Good show!
Rush Limbaugh called soldiers who oppose the war – like the two young men who wrote the NY Times editorial and then ended up KIA – “phony soldiers“. This is, without a doubt, objectively worse than calling Petraeus “Betray Us”. Of course, Rush called Sen. Hagel “Senator Betray Us” back in January.
Nearly 4 in 10 soldiers feel we never should have gone to Iraq. Are those people “phony soldiers”, Rush?
How anybody can stomach listening to that trash I’ll never know. Then again, somehow Bush still has about a 30% approval rating, so…
This article by Rick Perlstein perfectly underlines what a bunch of sissies we’ve been over the entire Ahmadinejad visit. I’ve made this comparison elsewhere – why can’t be behave like we did when Nikita “We will bury you” Khrushchev visited during the height of the Cold War in 1959?
Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers’ family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department’s 12,000 acre research station (“If you didn’t give a turkey a passport you couldn’t tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey”), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin’s crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K’s words, “capitalist lackeys”), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It’s not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, “must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm.” Reporters asked him what he’d been doing during Stalin’s blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them.
But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
…
But—they sputter—Ahmadinejad has has promised to wipe Israel off the map!
Well, Khrushchev had promised to wipe the U.S. off the map. (“We will bury you.”) And, unlike Mr. A, who has but some possible stores of fissile material, Mr. K very much had the means, motive, and opportunity to do it—thousands of nuclear-tipped rockets aimed at every city in the land.
In 2004 I thought this country was full of neocon idiots. Now I realize that we are a bunch of weak-willed sissies. We are collectively terrified of Lite-Brites and tin-pot dictators on the other side of the world who can’t even control their own countries. And we’ve been made that way by the conservative scare-mongering (Perlstein points out that the John Birch Society was doing the same stuff neocons are now back then). I’m actually to the point of revulsion with all this cowardice. Cowardice hidden behind blustery bravado.
Afraid of terrorists. Afraid of people who say bad things. Afraid of homosexuals. Afraid of criminals. Afraid of atheists. Afraid of black people. Afraid of hispanics. Is this what we’ve become? A nation of people who carry concealed weapons out of fear? Who attack other nations because of fear? Who freak out because some kid has a home-made LED display on her chest out of fear it might be a bomb? Who preach hate towards homosexuals or immigrants because of an irrational fear that granting equal rights to others will somehow invalidate the rights of the privileged? Who react in terror when the bigoted President of another country requests to visit Ground Zero?
If this is what we’ve become, I’m disgusted at our national character. We used to be great.
What a friggin’ waste of time. Senate Republicans (and possibly House Republicans as well, if Mr. Boehner gets his way) would rather waste everyone’s time passing resolutions condemning MoveOn rather than discussing stuff that’s, you know, important.
The US Senate has voted to condemn an advertisement attacking the country’s top commander in Iraq as he gave key testimony on military progress there.
In the House of Representatives, Republican leader John Boehner recommended a similar move.
But a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The Associated Press news agency that the priorities of Americans lay elsewhere.
“The House is going to devote its full attention to providing healthcare to children… reducing global warming and responsibly redeploying US forces now in Iraq,” Nadeam Elshami said.
In her sickening tirade against anti-war actress Sally Field, Michelle Malkin indicates that she believes that there are sheep moms and lion moms. I have to admit that to a certain point, I agree with her. Some moms are more passive and docile in their child rearing. Others are more aggressive and outspoken. But only a moron would suggest that there are mothers who are protective of their children, and mother’s who are not. Do some research, Ms. Malkin. Sheep protect their offspring as fiercely as lions, or any other mother on the planet. Being against the war in Iraq doesn’t make anyone less of a mother.
The suggestion that those mothers who oppose the war in Iraq are sheepish and unwilling to stand up for their children is not only vile, it is wrong. Personally, I am diametrically opposed to the war in Iraq. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I won’t come after you with fury if you hurt my children. I will challenge anyone trying to bring harm to my kids.
Have you not been paying attention over the last 6 years? The war in Iraq has very little to do with terrorism, or human rights. It doesn’t have to do with standing up to the bully on the playground. It has to do with several very little men getting very big payoffs. America is the bully on the playground.
So, if we use your own analogy, that kind of makes you like the mom whose kid is the school bully, doesn’t it? You’re the mom that supports your child’s right to sucker punch other kids because they wear glasses. You’re the mom who wonders what your child’s classmate did to deserve the terrifying wrath of your son or daughter. You’re the mom who believes her child can do no wrong despite the black eye and bloody nose exhibited by the little girl next door. In short, you are the mom handing your child the dirt to throw in the face of people in his way.
When I first read your post, I was convinced that you must not have children. My husband informed me that, in fact, you have two. I cannot tell you how sad that makes me. I can’t imagine being raised by a mother who wants to ship me off to war as soon as I turn 18. All because she’s afraid to agree with something a liberal, left-leaning actress once said. I would suggest that you reconsider your stance on this whole war thing. It’s really OK to be against the war AND right-wing. Don’t sacrifice your children because you’re afraid to stand up for what you know is right.
To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Synopsis: American business Hunt Oil Company, headed by a man who is a close Bush ally and member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He is presumably well-informed on the situation in Iraq. And Hunt Oil has expressly gone against the wishes of our government by entering into an oil deal with the Kurds, rather than with the central Iraqi government. They are essentially betting on the central government failing. And as right-wingers always say, the market is never wrong, right?
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America’s hands.
The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time — “breathing space,” the president says — for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?
Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America’s military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.
Even with the talk about how violence may have taken a dip during the summer (especially in certain areas), we are no closer to a political solution. Without a political solution, there is no solution. You can’t deliver democracy by the barrel of a gun. That’s not “hating the troops”, or being “invested in defeat”, or any other bullshit wingnut propaganda line. That’s being a realist. And that’s what many of us on the left have been saying for years.
A Nation of Bedwetters
by Brian on September 26, 2007 · Comments
This article by Rick Perlstein perfectly underlines what a bunch of sissies we’ve been over the entire Ahmadinejad visit. I’ve made this comparison elsewhere – why can’t be behave like we did when Nikita “We will bury you” Khrushchev visited during the height of the Cold War in 1959?
In 2004 I thought this country was full of neocon idiots. Now I realize that we are a bunch of weak-willed sissies. We are collectively terrified of Lite-Brites and tin-pot dictators on the other side of the world who can’t even control their own countries. And we’ve been made that way by the conservative scare-mongering (Perlstein points out that the John Birch Society was doing the same stuff neocons are now back then). I’m actually to the point of revulsion with all this cowardice. Cowardice hidden behind blustery bravado.
Afraid of terrorists. Afraid of people who say bad things. Afraid of homosexuals. Afraid of criminals. Afraid of atheists. Afraid of black people. Afraid of hispanics. Is this what we’ve become? A nation of people who carry concealed weapons out of fear? Who attack other nations because of fear? Who freak out because some kid has a home-made LED display on her chest out of fear it might be a bomb? Who preach hate towards homosexuals or immigrants because of an irrational fear that granting equal rights to others will somehow invalidate the rights of the privileged? Who react in terror when the bigoted President of another country requests to visit Ground Zero?
If this is what we’ve become, I’m disgusted at our national character. We used to be great.
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