Iraq
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2008If you're like most sentient humans, you don't care whom the NY Times editorial board decided to endorse for president. But the 'logic' behind the endorsement of Clinton is revealing. The Mandarin Class still doesn't get it. About Clinton's foreign policy experience, the Times editors write:
It is unfair, especially after seven years of Mr. Bush's inept leadership, but any Democrat will face tougher questioning about his or her fitness to be commander in chief. Mrs. Clinton has more than cleared that bar, using her years in the Senate well to immerse herself in national security issues,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2008I don't want "hope", I want good policies, politics, and results. Obama demonstrates exactly how not to argue against Republican militarism. From Ezra Klein:
I'm sympathetic to what I think Obama was trying to say, but the point is better put more simply -- to have the best shot at winning national security arguments with John McCain, the Democrats need a candidate who didn't support the invasion of Iraq. After all, McCain won't be tarred with the specific acts of "incompetence" that are frequently (and misleadingly) alleged to have been responsible for disaster in Iraq. The Democratic…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2008According to Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time magazine, Time will run with a story claiming that twenty percent of Iraq War veterans have suffered brain trauma--that's 250,000 people:
When we got into the Iraq war we didn't know how long it would last. When we got into the Iraq war we didn't know how much it would cost. It's lasted longer, it's cost more than we ever expected. The real toll is coming out now. The Pentagon is releasing a report saying, one in five American serviceman and women who have been in Iraq are coming back with brain injuries. Mild, traumatic brain injuries…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2008Here's one example, unintentionally brought to you by NY Times columnist Frank Rich, of how writing political narratives instead of discussing data leads to unsupported conclusions (italics mine):
The continued political import of Iraq could be found in three different polls in the past six weeks -- Pew, ABC News-Washington Post and Wall Street Journal-NBC News. They all showed the same phenomenon: the percentage of Americans who believe that the war is going well has risen strikingly in tandem with the diminution of violence -- from 30 percent in February to 48 percent in November, for…
revere | January 4, 2008With the turn of the calendar there is always both hope and anxiety about the year ahead. This is nice because it gives pundits and bloggers something to write about. Just before Christmas The Times of London published\ a "leading article" (unsigned), Black Swans and Bird Flu, which was about the anxiety part, assessing the threats, and planning for them in advance:
Living at risk, it has been said, is akin to jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. Not everyone would be content with such a strategy. Some would not venture close to the edge, even if that meant missing a…
revere | December 12, 2007The dramatic infectious agents like MRSA, Ebola and bird flu get the headlines but there are a lot of others out there, some of them capable of being just as nasty. Consider the new variant of adenovirus serotype 14, for example:
Infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert was making rounds at the Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon in April when he realized that an unusual number of patients, including young, vigorous adults, were being hit by a frightening pneumonia.
"What was so striking was to see patients who were otherwise healthy be just devastated," Gilbert said. Within a day…
revere | November 23, 2007Rabia Balkhi Hospital (RBH) is an obstetrical hospital in Afghanistan that is one of the jewels in the crown of the US aid effort after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002. Here's the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website boast:
HHS activities have had an enormous impact on the quality of care at RBH, have saved the lives of hundreds of women and newborns, and have improved significantly the skills and knowledge of the doctors, nurses and midwives at the hospital. We are continually adding new improvements that dramatically expand the hospital's life-saving capacity, such as…
revere | November 12, 2007Here's a thought for "Veterans" Day: one out of nine people in the US is a veteran but one out of four homeless persons is a veteran. That's something for Americans to be proud of for sure. Support Our Troops is either just a slogan or they stop being worthy of support when they stop being cannon fodder:
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2007...doesn't invalidate the person making the prediction. Nouriel Roubini, who correctly predicted that the housing market would crater in 2007 has decided to make his critics eat crow (yes, there's some dense economics here, but wait until the end--there's a point to this madness):
Indeed a year ago when this scholar - and a few other experts such as Bob Shiller and others - argued that the biggest housing bubble in US history would end up in the worst housing bust and recession in 50 years and that home prices would fall by 20% those views were considered as coming from the moon. When…
neurophilosophy | October 27, 2007The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Defence has just started a major study into traumatic brain injury (TBI) in British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an accompanying article, the behavioural, cognitive, emotional and physical symptoms of this "silent injury" are described by the father of an American soldier who sustained TBI during a 24-month tour of duty in Iraq.
The official figures on TBI in American troops are based only on cases involving a penetrative head wound, and evidence published earlier this year in the Journal of Neurosurgery suggests that the high…
mikethemadbiologist | October 21, 2007Get ready for some more conservative cognitive dissonance: man finds Jesus and comes to believe that the occupation of Iraq is immoral:
A U.S. soldier who said his Christian beliefs compelled him to love his enemies, not kill them, has been granted conscientious objector status and honorably discharged, a civil liberties group said on Tuesday.
Capt. Peter Brown -- who served in Iraq for more than a year and was a graduate of the elite U.S. military academy West Point -- said in a statement issued by the New York Civil Liberties Union that he was relieved the Army had recognized his beliefs…
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2007Twelve Army captains who served in Iraq conclude the following:
Iraqi security forces would not be able to salvage the situation. Even if all the Iraqi military and police were properly trained, equipped and truly committed, their 346,000 personnel would be too few. As it is, Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we're gone.
This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we…
tqa | October 16, 2007
I am certainly no fan of the Iraq war, but I found it difficult to read the media reports about retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's recent comments on the war without getting angry. Reading the full text of his remarks took me from anger to outrage. As good as it is to hear an unvarnished, blunt assessment of the situation from someone who, as a former commander of the forces in Iraq, is very familiar with what happens there, I'm left wondering where the hell he was before he gave his little talk.
Let's look at some of what the little pissant had to say:
Since 2003, the politics…
mikethemadbiologist | October 9, 2007What's one more criminal in the mix, anyway? So what if a government contractor supplied weapons to Liberia's Charles Taylor and the Taliban (italics mine):
Viktor Bout, was paid tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars while illegally flying transport missions for the United States in Iraq. Bout is the notorious Russian weapons merchant whose fleet of aging Soviet aircraft rivals that of some NATO countries in its size and capacity. By marrying his access to Soviet bloc weapons with his airlift capacity, Bout established himself as the world's premiere purveyor of illicit weapons to the…
tqa | October 8, 2007
According to the LA Times, the family of an Iraqi guard killed by a Blackwater employee on Christmas Eve has not yet received any compensation for the man's death. The reason? The office of Iraq's Vice President, which employed the dead guard, doesn't think that Blackwater is offering enough compensation. They're right.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the incident, here's a quick review: off-duty and apparently intoxicated Blackwater employee gets into "confrontation" with on-duty security guard for Iraq's vice president. Blackwater employee shoots guard 3 times, killing him.…
mikethemadbiologist | September 25, 2007If "Gathering of Eagles" needs a new emblem, this one is currently available
At the recent anti-war protest in Washington D.C., a pro-war group known as "Gathering of Eagles" assaulted Carlos Arredondo, a father of a Marine killed in Iraq:
Carlos Arredondo, 47 year old father of two sons, arrived in the nation's capitol on Monday, 09/10/07 to share a memorial he has made to honor for his eldest son, Alex. Carlos has visited thirty of the United States with the traveling memorial to his son Alexander. Lcpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, USMC was killed on 08/25/04. He was 20 years and 20 days old.…
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2007Because it's never too late to have lots of surgetastic goodness. From Rising Hegemon:
NPR actually does its job:
Sometime around February 2004, a top military official in Iraq estimated that there were about 15,000 total insurgents. About a year later, U.S. military leaders in Iraq announced that 15,000 insurgents had been killed or captured in the previous year.
In private, a skeptical military adviser pointed out to commanders that the numbers didn't make sense. "If all the insurgents were killed," he asked, "why are they fighting harder than ever?"
Well, obviously they are either lying…
neurophilosophy | September 22, 2007That's the cost of war in Iraq, according to a new analysis by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Public Policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.
The money spent on one day of war in Iraq ($720 million) could provide healthcare for more than 420,000 American children or buy homes for 6,500 families.
And let's not forget the cost of war for Iraq itself: up to 1.2 million civilians killed, and the destruction of the country's priceless heritage.
tqa | September 19, 2007
Every time I read articles (like this one, this one, this one or this one) that talk about how the Democrats are having problems getting the 60 votes in the Senate that they need to move Iraq legislation forward, or how they won't be able to get the 2/3rds of both houses that they need to beat a veto, I get angrier. And not with the Republicans who are standing in the way.
The Democrats don't need more than a majority. The President can't spend money unless Congress lets him spend money. If Congress passes a spending bill and he vetoes it, he can't spend money. If Congress fails to pass a…
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007More on the cultural destruction of Iraq, or, as Robert Fisk calls it in this article from The Independent, the death of history.