Iraq
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2007I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, but meetings and work blew up on me. But just because the story is old, that doesn't mean the crazy has gone away. Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Boyda of Kansas recounted a conversation she had with a rightwing talk show host:
And finally, I would just like to share a story. When I was speaking back at home with one of a very right wing conservative talk show hosts and after, thank God, after we were off the air, I said something that I assumed he would agree with and I just said 'you know, I'm really worried about these guys and gals, but mainly…
mikethemadbiologist | August 6, 2007Former Iraq War supporter Michael Ignatieff wrote a mea culpa of sorts in the NY Times magazine this Sunday. Since that's more than most former war supporters have done, he should get some credit for that. But two things were really troubling about the article.
First, Ignatieff viewed Iraq as another policy debate:
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can't afford the luxury of…
tlambert | August 5, 2007
Surely Baghdad's electricity supply couldn't get worse than shown in the graph on the right?
Alas, it seems it can:
Iraq's power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday.
Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country are the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after…
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2007Robert Farley takes on two of the major proponents of the Unified Theory of the Surge, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack:
O'Hanlon and Pollack insist that this is "a war that we just might win" without pausing to indicate what "victory" means in this context; at best, it seems, we could hope for some temporary stability. They seem to define stability as a reduction of civilian casualty rates by "roughly a third since the surge began". I've written before about the nonsensical efforts of surge advocates to claim success by pointing to Iraqi government casualty figures; no one believes that…
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2007I've called those movement conservatives who think that successful policy execution--in peace or war--is about "will", as opposed to, let's say, execution, Peter Pan conservatives. Atrios has a very good explanation of why they believe so strongly in will--their own personal experience:
I've been thinking about about certain Bushies - Bush himself, obviously, and Condi Rice - who seem to honestly believe that "will" and "resolve" are the way one gets things done instead of, you know, actually getting stuff done. I've finally decided that they're basically people have always gotten where they…
tlambert | July 28, 2007
The good electricity news from Iraq has been lots of announcements of plans to improve things. Unfortunately, electricity production has not improved. To the left you can see how the electricity supply in Baghdad has gotten worse and worse. The graph ends in May. Why?:
As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad…
mikethemadbiologist | July 18, 2007First, driftglass points out an obvious--although previously unnoticed--problem with the neocon claims that there's is no civil war in Iraq:
So if there is a Civil War, then we should leave, because there is no way for us to referee such a thing.
But if there is no Civil War, and therefore no looming threat of massive, pitched and Civil-War-like bloodshed if we leave, then the Iraqis have obviously "Stood up".
And it is time for us to stand down and go h
ome.
Read the whole thing. Then John Aravosis reminds us that the failures of this war are not Democratic ones, but Republican, when he…
zooillogix | July 12, 2007The BBC is reporting that the British military is being blamed for a plague of ferocious badgers in and around the city of Basra. Apparently word has spread quickly among local residents that "man-eating, bear-like beasts" were released in order to sow panic.
A vicious honey badger hungry for jihadi blood, Mellivora capensis Although several of the creatures caught and killed by farmers have been identified as honey badgers, an indigenous local species, that has not stopped widespread speculation that the British military was involved.
According to UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer, "…
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2007It's sad that the only way oversight can occur in our Excellent Iraqi Adventure is when one sleazebag contractor rats out another sleazebag contractor (italics mine):
A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards' base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti…
mikethemadbiologist | June 28, 2007Jonathan Hari of TNR bravely went undercover and joined a cruise hosted by the National Review. That is a heroic sacrifice on behalf of the Coalition of the Sane, and no amount of satire could do that lunacy justice. But Norman "the blood of GIs is better than Viagra" Podhoretz brought up that tired canard of the Delusional Right (italics mine):
"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies…
mikethemadbiologist | June 18, 2007If I were trying to convince people to stay in Iraq, I might refer to Japan or Germany as models of occupation. But General Petraeus picked a different place:
Claiming steady, albeit slow, military and political progress, Petraeus said the "many, many challenges" would not be resolved "in a year or even two years." Similar counterinsurgency operations, he said, citing Britain's experience in Northern Ireland, "have gone at least nine or 10 years."
Petraeus is supposed to be smart. He does realize that the British have been in Ireland for over 700 years, doesn't he? They showed up in 1169…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2007I used to think that Democratic politicians were trying to be too clever by half, and consequently screwed things up. Then I started to think that many are actually quite conservative, so they're just reverting to form--most of them don't have a tiny liberal inside of them, struggling to be free. After reading this exchange with a Democratic canvasser (something I used to do), I think the party has been taken over (or at least seriously infiltrated) by fucking morons (italics mine):
When I explained my stance and rationale [for not donating to the national party] to the woman on the phone,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2007I've said before that when you watch ignoramuses and authoritarians trash your country, anger is the appropriate response. driftglass explains why:
The Real Problem is that, in the name of Holy Balance, journalists treat the patently and dangerously delusional adherents of Cult of Dubya as if their opinions were worthy of discussion.
Except what Mr. Ites still dogmatically believes in this Year of Our Lord 2007 -- that we are in Iraq because "What they did on 9/11 is a travesty" -- is not a matter of opinion, any more than a fanatical insistence on the flatness of the Earth, the falseness of…
mikethemadbiologist | May 28, 2007Let's contrast Thomas Friedman with Mark Twain this Memorial Day. Thomas Friedman on the Charlie Rose Show, May 30, 2003:
I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie....
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it....
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"
You don't think, you know, we care about our…
mikethemadbiologist | May 26, 2007I go away for a meeting, and Congress goes and holds a vote about the Iraq War. Like some, I'm disgusted by the outcome, but I think many are blaming the wrong people. To paraphrase Pogo, the enemy is us. Or least part of us.
I'm not referring to the Mouth Breathing wing of the Republican Party (which is currently ascendant). One does not negotiate or convince authoritarians: empathy and abstraction are not their strong suit. The mindless Uruk-Hai will always oppose any thing deemed as 'surrender'--until their leaders point their lizard brains at something else.
No, the group I'm…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2007I've made this point before: when you use the National Guard as a backdoor draft, instead of civil defense and disaster relief, people suffer. From Kansas:
The rebuilding effort in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas, likely will be hampered because some much-needed equipment is in Iraq, said that state's governor.
Governor Kathleen Sebelius said much of the National Guard equipment usually positioned around the state to respond to emergencies is gone. She said not having immediate access to things like tents, trucks and semitrailers will really handicap the rebuilding effort.
The Greensburg…
mikethemadbiologist | April 14, 2007After reading Mike Dunford's letter to his representatives about the occupation of Iraq, I decided to write my own. Hopefully, it will have more influence than the other letters I've written...
I recently read the following written by the husband of an Army officer currently deployed in Iraq, Michael Dunford, who supports the emergency war funding legislation that included a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and is requesting of his senators and representative that they take an additional step and require that any additional funding for the current conflict be paid for through a tax increase…
mikethemadbiologist | April 12, 2007According to CNN, a bomb blast has killed at least two people in the Iraqi Parliament. This building is located in the Green Zone.
I hope Bush, McCain, and the other members of the Coalition of the Sane have the decency to wait until the bodies cool a few hours before they claim that this proves that the surge is 'working.' This might even challenge the Unified Theory of The Surge, which states that no matter what happens, any and every event proves that the surge is working.
If terrorists attack, it's because the surge has frustrated them. If terrorists don't attack, it's because the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2007By way of Seeing the Forest, I came across this Zogby poll from Sept. 2006 about the Iraq War. The stoopid is really painful.
Half of American voters (50%) say there is no link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks, while 46% believe there is a connection. However, just 37% of respondents in the poll agreed that Saddam was connected to the attacks and that the Iraq War was justified as retribution for his involvement, while 48% believed that there is no connection between Saddam and 9/11 and the Iraq War has diverted America's attention from the War on Terror.
That 46% still…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2007I ask this seriously. Among rank and file Democrats, there is a common belief that Democratic politicians are being dragged to right by the need for compromise. But I don't think that's the case with Clinton: she is a conservative Southern Democrat without the regional accent. And the southern blue dogs have been pretty weak on the Iraq Occupation. From Matt Stoller (italics mine):
There is just no way that she can say that she will end the war and that she will continue a military mission in Iraq to contain extremists and ward off Iran. Those are mutually exclusive. As Matthew…