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Joe Lieberman – gee thanks, Connecticut

Joe Lieberman – gee thanks, Connecticut

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There are some Senators who drive me nuts, but nobody more so than Joe Lieberman. Some years ago, I used to have a modicum of respect for the guy as a moderate. Now he’s a snake. At least my more-red-than-red Senators here in Georgia, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, are predicable in their unthinking Bush loyalist stance. They can always be relied upon to vote exactly the way I don’t want them to vote.

Oh sure, Joe, let’s go into Iran now. And to think that you ran on a platform for bipartisan cooperation to end the war. You’ve lost all credibility with me. That’s it.

I can see why people in Connecticut are finally waking up and regreting re-electing Holy Joe.

David Sirota has a great blog post on Lieberman’s strategery…

During the campaign, we did all that we could to point out how Lieberman was lying about his position on the war through as many venues as possible – blogs, candidate speeches, and television advertising making the point that “a vote for Lieberman means a vote for more war” (an ad that Lieberman actually held a special press conference to attack for supposedly being not true). But in the general election’s stretch run, the independent validators in the race – the local and national media – refused to report on Lieberman’s actual positions and votes continuing to support Bush and the war, and this key slice of Democratic and Independent voters remained confused. They voted for Lieberman because they believed that he perhaps had been pro-war before, but had changed – when in fact the only thing that had changed temporarily was his language, but not his actions.

…

Had Connecticut voters had more information about exactly how Lieberman’s campaign to reinvent himself as an antiwar leader was a complete sham, that key segment of the Democratic and Independent voters might not have been confused, and the election – as the poll now confirms – would have gone the other way.

Meanwhile, some important voices within Lieberman’s own ingroup are calling for him to resign or to be “recalled”.

The chairman of Joseph Lieberman’s minor political party has asked state officials to determine whether the U.S. senator founded it last year under false pretenses and broke election laws.

“I think he took unfair advantage of his many years of incumbency,” said John Orman, a Fairfield University political science professor who took over the party Lieberman formed after losing last year’s Democratic primary to Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont. “He decided to run as a minor party candidate without actually joining that party, knowing there would be protection from the various officials in Hartford he’s been friends with for 30 years or so.”

… More recently, Connecticut for Lieberman asked the senator to resign from office for advocating a military strike against Iran. Orman said Connecticut for Lieberman was the only political party willing to hold the senator accountable.

Iraq Numbers

Iraq Numbers

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Iraq causalities may be more than a million.

…a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million. … nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war- related violence, and 22% of households nationwide had suffered at least one death. It said 48% of the victims were shot to death and 20% died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.

Here are some more startling stats – via Tom Engelhardt’s excellent article Here Are the Real Numbers That Tally Iraq’s ‘Progress’:

Number of U.S. criminal investigations underway for contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan: 73.

Cost to Pentagon of shipping two 19-cent metal washers to a key military installation abroad, probably in Iraq or Afghanistan: $998,798.00.

Amount paid by the U.S. military to two British private security firms, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, to protect U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reconstruction teams in Iraq: $548 million ($18 million a month, with a private army of 2000 – about three military battalions).

Percentage of Iraqi national police force which is Shiite: 85%.

Number of Iraqis in American prisons in Iraq: 24,500.

Number of juveniles (11-17), held in those prisons: Approximately 800 (85% Sunni).

Number of foreign suspected jihadis held in those prisons: 280.

Estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters: 850 (2-5% of the Sunni insurgency).

Number of times President Bush mentioned al-Qaeda in a speech on the Iraqi situation on July 24, 2007: 95.

Number of Iraqi civilian deaths in August: 1,809 (the highest figure of the surge year so far).

Number of Iraqi “bus people” now in exile in neighboring lands: 2.5 million.

Amount spent by the average household in Baghdad for a few hours of electricity a day: $171 a month ($400 is a reasonable monthly wage).

Number of U.S. Army suicides: 17.3 per thousand, the highest rate in 26 years – not including unconfirmed reports or those who served and then committed suicide at home. In 2006, 99. Since 2003, 118 U.S. military personnel have committed suicide in Iraq itself.

Percentage of people across the globe who “think U.S. forces should leave Iraq within a year”: 67%, according to a just-released BBC World Service poll of 23,000 people in 22 countries. Only 23% think foreign troops should remain “until security improves.”

Percentage of citizens of U.S.-led “coalition” members in Iraq who want forces out within a year: 65% of Britons, 63% of South Koreans, and 63% of Australians. Even a majority of Israelis want either an immediate American withdrawal (24%), or withdrawal within a year (28%); only 40% opt for “remain until security improves.

Percentage of Americans who think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq within a year: 61% (24% favor immediate withdrawal, 37% prefer a one-year timetable).

Percentage of people across the globe who think the United States plans to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: 49%.

Percentage of Americans who believe, that the U.S. mission in Iraq will be seen as a failure in the long run: 57%, (only 29% disagree).

These from “The General Lies” by Robert Scheer:

Percent of Iraqis who believe security has deteriorated since the surge began: 70%.

Percent of Iraqis who believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified: 60%.

Percent of Sunnis (whom the general and ambassador claim are joining our side) that want to see us dead: 93%.

Recommended reading:

America’s Deadly Shock Doctrine in Iraq by Naomi Klein explains how the U.S. set about to destroy the Iraqi national psyche and then push through a disastrous privatization of its economy. The link will lead to an excerpt from the new book.

U.S. Secret Air War Pulverizes Afghanistan and Iraq by Conn Hallinan reports on the U.S. military’s increasingly reliance on deadly air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan as the ground occupations fall apart, killing untold numbers of civilians.

Faced with defeat or bloody stalemate on the ground, the allies have turned to air power, much as the U.S. did in Vietnam. But, as in Vietnam, the terrible toll bombing inflicts on civilians all but guarantees long-term failure.

“Far from bringing about the intended softening up of the opposition,” Phillip Gordon, a Brookings Institute Fellow, told the Asia Times, “bombing tends to rally people behind their leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.””


Six Years After 9/11, Why We’re Losing the War on Terror by David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the Bush administration and its extralegal policies have taken the U.S. from being the object of the world’s sympathy to the object of their scorn.

The proposition that judicial processes and international accountability — the very essence of the rule of law — are to be dismissed as a strategy of the weak, aligned with terrorism itself, makes clear that the Administration has come to view the rule of law as an obstacle, not an asset, in its effort to protect us from terrorist attack.

Our long-term security turns not on “going on offense” by locking up thousands of “suspected terrorists” who turn out to have no connection to terrorism; nor on forcing suspects to bark like dogs, urinate and defecate on themselves, and endure sexual humiliation; nor on attacking countries that have not threatened to attack us. Security rests not on exceptionalism and double standards but on a commitment to fairness, justice and the rule of law. … The preventive paradigm has compromised our spirit, strengthened our enemies and left us less free and less safe.

Conservative Psychological Manipulations

Conservative Psychological Manipulations

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These videos by Roy Eidelson examine several ways that American conservatives manipulate public opinion – and how this psychological warfare can be countered and resisted. Not flashy at all – he should probably have someone else do the voiceover – but nicely argued.

“Dangerous Ideas: How Conservatives Exploit Our Five Core Concerns” (above) describes how today’s conservatives have used appeals to our core concerns about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness in order to further a narrow ideological agenda that actually benefits very few while leaving most of us worse off.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=844699642769511518[/googlevideo]

Here he examines these same psychological framings as they apply to war-mongering (special emphasis on Iraq).

“Resisting the Drums of War” describes how the misguided and destructive war in Iraq was promoted by targeting our concerns about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. The continued occupation of Iraq–or an attack on Iran–will likely be sold to us in much the same way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttcV6NIvkqE[/youtube]

Petraeus – What Goes Unsaid

Petraeus – What Goes Unsaid

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What Crocker and Petraeus Didn’t Say – CommonDreams.org

The Iraq Study Group Implementation Act of 2007

Pentagon Slides Shows 50,000 US troops still in Iraq in 2011


Mission Accomplished? Nope

CNN Poll: September Iraq Report Irrelevant To Views of War

An overwhelming majority of Iraqis believe that security has deteriorated across the country, despite the US military surge, according to an opinion poll carried out in all 18 provinces.

Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

Do you still remember that General Petraeus was the one who said that Saddam had mobile weapons labs when he knew those vehicles were weather balloon stations?

No End in Sight

No End in Sight

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No End in Sight, looks like it deserved the special jury documentary prize it received at Sundance. I’m looking forward to seeing the film, if it shows in Atlanta.

Here’s the trailer (or see it on the home page of the movie site)
:



From the director:

“But I had no idea how incompetently the occupation was being planned, and with what degree of ideological rigidity and arrogance and callousness and stupidity,” he said. “I just had no idea.”

NPR summary:

Charles Ferguson made his fortune as a software developer, then made an unlikely move to filmmaking. His documentary on the Iraq war, No End In Sight, tracks the process in Washington that led to the current situation in Iraq, and it breaks some new ground: Key decision-makers talk for the first time about the war and its aftermath.

Ferguson, a Silicon Valley millionaire, overcame some major obstacles to tell the story. He hired his own 20-man security team with four pickups mounted with machine guns and drove down to Baghdad from Kurdistan, filming in high definition.

… He does so with a quick summary of 2006 news reports about chaos and death on the ground in Iraq, then goes back to the origins of America’s Iraq policy in the 1980s. Interviewing figures from inside a number of different administrations, most of whom talk about escalating miscalculations, he paints a portrait of unprofessionalism, incompetence, and devastating errors in judgment. His most damning witnesses served on the Bush team, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage.

See clips from NOW interviews.

(Tip ‘o the hat to Worldwide Sawdust)