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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)

On the Gospel of War

On the Gospel of War

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I stumbled across a great post at live. laugh. love.

As a person trying to do things to make this world a better place, it makes me very angry to read the glorification of violence and death in violence as something done out of love and endorsed by God. Loving your neighbor as yourself does not include trying to kill them in the first place. In a global sense, aren’t we all neighbors? Aren’t we all brothers and sisters? Seems to me that if you are going to love your neighbor as yourself, it is a prerequisite to try to not kill your neighbor. It makes the loving a little easier.

So, please (gently, non-violently, and in love) take your red, white, and blue wrapped bible and stick it.

Major Religion Memes in 90 Seconds

Major Religion Memes in 90 Seconds

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Maps of War has a really interesting mapping of religion memes – spread and warfare:

How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world’s most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds?

See full size

Nuclear Plans, Libby’s Friend, Scope of War, SOTU

Nuclear Plans, Libby’s Friend, Scope of War, SOTU

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Some recommended reading – do your homework.

Saving the World By Stopping the Pentagon’s Programs
By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet

All that work against nuclear proliferation – gone, gone, gone. Another way we make the world a more dangerous place.

Then there is “Complex 2030,” a proposal to consolidate and update the entire nuclear complex, including the opening of a new plutonium “pit” facility capable of producing 125 new bombs a year. Estimated price tag: $150 billion over 25 years. The Bush administration and the Department of Energy argue that the overhaul is necessary to maintain the country’s deterrence and close aged plants, but arms control experts who have read the fine print say otherwise.

“The current nuclear stockpile is not in need of replacement, all of the existing nuclear weapons sites would still be in operation under the new plan, and the fundamental environmental problems of weapons production would not be solved,” states a joint report issued by more than a dozen nuclear watchdog groups, including Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Furthermore, the increased design, production and testing capabilities of Complex 2030 could spark a new nuclear arms race.”

…The major nuclear powers cannot continue to simultaneously refine their arsenals while keeping the rest of the world in 1944 by threat of force; only a madman thinks threats and preemptive strikes constitute a coherent or sustainable nonproliferation strategy. Nor can we continue to allow the production of fissile material and expect it to remain forever out of dangerous hands. We cannot have our yellow cake and eat it, too.

If we don’t come to grips with the dead-end of the nuclear double-standard, and begin soon the brave and historic grapple with the nuclear genie, we race toward a climax as awful as it is certain.

Take a look at Payson’s blog entry (Think Progress)on Chuck Hagel’s claim that the White House originally wanted the 2002 Iraq War Resolution to cover the entire Middle East. No-one else picked this up from the men style column at GQ? It ought to be on the front page.

Scooter Libby and Me
By Nick Bromell, The American Scholar, posted at AlterNet

Childhood friend of Scooter Libby’s shares questions he wants to ask him, and comments on the differences between liberalism and fundamentalism as they affect current US policy. This is worth a read just for the clear explanation of the difference between truth and the Truth (How did I miss Lynne Cheney’s article “The Roots of Today’s Lying Epidemic: The English Department Virus”? ). Oh, on lying?

Keep an eye out for fact checking updates on the State of the Union Address. The discussion on Charlie Rose was pretty good, and ABC has collected some citizen comments. To my ears, all Bush is saying…. is give war a chance.