Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Iraq is like South Korea?!?

Talking Points Memo

WASHINGTON, May 30 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday. The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress have been pressing Bush to agree to a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq, an idea firmly opposed by the president. White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea.

"The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you've had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and, therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability," Snow told reporters.



It is hard not to take this as another example that the White House is seriously out of touch with both history and reality when it comes to Iraq.

Let's run through a few differences. First, Korea is an ethnically and culturally homogenous state. Iraq, not a culturally or ethnically homogenous state. And needless to say, that has been a point of some real difficulty. Second, Korea a democracy? Well, yes, for about fifteen years. Without going into all the details, South Korea was a military dictatorship for most of the Civil War.

A deeper acquaintance with the last half century of Korean history would suggest that a) a fifty year occupation, b) lack of democracy and c) a hostile neighbor were deeply intertwined. Remove B or C and you probably don't have A, certainly no A if you lose both B and C.

The more telling dissimilarity is the distinction between frontline troops and troops for stability. At least nationally (and largely this was true) US troops have been in South Korea to ward off an invasion from the North. US troops aren't in Iraq to ward off any invasion. Invasion from who? Saudi Arabia? Syria?

No, US troops are in Iraq for domestic security, in so many words, to protect it from itself, or to ensure the continued existence of an elected, pro-US government. That tells you that the US military presence in Iraq will never be as relatively bloodless as the US military presence in Korea since it has no external threat it's couterbalancing against. In a sense that the US deployment in Korea has never quite been, it is a sustained foreign military occupation.

--Josh Marshall
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The administration has continuously stretched reality for 4 years, attempting to compare the Iraq Occupation to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI & WWII. I wonder why they've never made the obvious comparison between Iraq and Vietnam...

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Cost of War


I don't care how tough you are, if you don't feel like breaking down and crying after watching this, you aren't human. Bill Moyers knows how to put the cost of this war into context perfectly.

Watch it @ PBS: Bill Moyers Journal

It's too easy to go about your day to day life and never think about this if it doesn't directly affect you. That's the problem. Hardly anybody I know my age seems to give a rats ass about what goes on in the world they live in, outside of their own personal bubble. (Because there's no draft)

I have a cousin in Iraq and I worry about him everyday. It's hard to imagine how difficult this is for him, and his family and friends.

I just want every single one of our brave men and women back home safe and sound, that's all. We've given them a 'democratic' government, we've taken down Saddam's regime, what else does Bush want? What are we still doing there? The Iraqi parliament that we helped establish wants us to begin withdrawing, the American people want us to begin withdrawing, the WHOLE WORLD wants us to begin withdrawing. What's the hold up? I think it's two things: irrational fear and pride. The president doesn't want foreign policy 'failure' to be his lasting legacy. Too bad it was a failure to begin with. It's going to be a nearly impossible task to regain our legitimacy around the globe after this 8 year major screw up.

There would be at least a million more young men and women willing to serve this country in the military if we all had a little more confidence in the decision making skills, and cost-benefit analysis of the supposedly 'wise' and 'experienced' leaders who run our government. The survival of a volunteer military in a democracy is dependent on it's own perception of competence and effectiveness among it's citizenry. Recruitment levels are lower and lower every year. Maybe that's why our national guard is half way across the world fighting in the desert of some other nation.

America voted for George Bush twice (not really, but hey... look who's somehow still in the white house)... we didn't vote for #($&-ups like George Tenet or Paul Wolfowitz or Donald Rumsfeld or 'Brownie' or Rice or Gonzalez. These are the people who blundered on the lead up to 9/11. They're the ones who tainted the evidence on wmd's, and outed a deep undercover spy in Iran, and left Iraq's cities and facilities in chaos after the invasion. They continue to give us fresh headlines everyday about their corruption and mismanagement of nearly every agency within the federal government. Maybe Bush isn't an idiot... maybe he's just a horrible judge of character. I still think he's both.

It's different, reading about the war in newspapers and blogs. Actually seeing and hearing the reality of it in a video clip forces you to confront it on a deeper level. Anyways, it's better than me just rambling on and on, ranting about the war, and bush, and the religious right and 'spirituality'.

Here's the clip again (<--- for the computer illiterate, click on that)

Friday, May 11, 2007

Boston Legal on Torture

This is a great show for one reason: Alan Shore's closing arguments. Almost every week, the main character, lawyer Alan Shore delivers a harsh, glaring critique of the state of our nation in defense of his clients. From issues involving the death penalty, terrorism, human rights violations, religion, and so on. This week was Guantanamo and torture. I saw the show a couple nights ago and I've been looking all over for the clip to post. Leave it to CrooksandLiars to do the work for me:

Boston Legal often tackles the incompetence of this administration and whole bunch of issues that are smart and funny…"Guantanamo by the Bay": Alan Shore sues the United States on behalf of a client who was tortured for two years at a detention camp.

Shore: Your honor, I believe a lawyer should put his country before his client and for that reason I'm going to take the unusual step of asking you to dismiss my client's lawsuit.

Lawyer: Objection, it's a trick…

Shore: I agree, nobody knows how to fight this war, we should never the less defer to the Executive branch—who have indeed demonstrated a particular expertise. I for one just can't wait to see what they do next… My client is a whiner…a little duck tape, sexually violated,…He wants the government to show evidence. We're in a war! We need to make sacrifices!… and we should start with the little things like human rights... calling the prisoners enemy combatants instead of prisoners so we can get around the Geneva Convention and torture them? Brilliant! Basing the camp in Cuba so the Constitution won't get in our way? Brilliant!

Watch it HERE

And watch Boston Legal on Wednesday nights at 10/9C on ABC

Once Again...

Liberal Media?

Iraq veteran General John Batiste was fired from CBS yesterday for his 30 second VoteVets ad criticizing the President's unshakable stance on the war.

From Raw Story:

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown, Batiste, former First Infantry Division commander, tells host Keith Olbermann in the video clip below, "I'm no longer wearing the uniform of our country; I have no ties to the defense industry; I can speak honestly, I have a duty to do so. And I know there [are] other generals both active duty and retired that are doing all they can within their means. In my case, I'll continue to speak out."

After Olbermann asks Batiste about the war itself, the retired general says, "We went to war with a fatally flawed strategy ... This is all about a president who's relying almost solely on the military component of strategy to accomplish the mission in Iraq."

"Sadly," he continues, "we're missing the diplomatic, the political, and the economic components that are fundamental and required to be successful."

Once again... liberal media my ass.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

How Much Evidence Do You Need?!

I'm so sick of this. No words can describe how pissed off I am about it. I can't believe people aren't taking this seriously.

President Bush and hard-line, tax hating conservatives and libertarians will have you believe that the American economy is more important than Planet Earth. I'll repeat that again: the American economy is more important than PLANET EARTH (read that one more time, just for good measure). Let's ponder this thought for a moment.... human survival depends on the conditions and resources that our climate provides us. uhduh... any reasonable person who actually cares about the world that their children will be living in, who looks at ALL of the evidence, and doesn't have a brain with a left hemisphere committed to denial, and a right hemisphere committed to stupid, will recognize the need for swift action, however "inconvenient" and "hurtful" to the economy it may be perceived to be.

The only people who will actually be really negatively affected by changes in government policy will be the oil and coal industry. If we continue burning millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere everyday, the economy will be just fine.... until the arctic is gone and sea levels rise over 40 feet, displacing millions of people, and until the seasons change so dramatically that thousands of species of animals with ecological niches will be unable to adapt. Today, species extinction is happening at a rate 1000 times higher than is observed to be normal.

Everybody remembers the economic tragedy that occured when the horse and buggy industry went under, right?.... anyone? Anyone at all?

Prices will go up on products at walmart as carbon taxes and caps on emissions are implemented and signed into law. The economic impact will be insigficant. Americans are innovative, hard working people, we can take care of ourselves. In effect, the "carbon market" will have to be regulated by the state, as we transfer our dependence on oil to renewable resources. Last monday, the Supreme court, in a vote of 5-4 ruled that the United States government had the authority, under the Clean Air Act to enforce caps on carbon dioxide emissions. But President Bush is much too loyal to the industry that made generations of his family rich, to take action and do the right thing. Loyalty over morality... thats what I always say.

Here's more evidence that he will inevitably ignore. Yet another catastrophe, coming sooner than you think to a reality near you:
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said on Tuesday.

This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050. No ice on the Arctic Ocean during summer would be a major spur to global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado.

"Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Scambos said in a telephone interview. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster."


That is because the ice reflects light and heat; when it is gone, the much darker land or sea will absorb more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter, he said. Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions, a far different picture than that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the intergovernmental panel.


"The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Scambos said in a telephone interview.


------------- Read all of it here



This is crazy! Conservative talking heads and politicians call the IPCC (made up of over 2,500 of the world's leading climate scientists) "alarmist" for their predictions. Now it turns out that arctic melting is occuring faster than any of the so called "chicken-little's" had previoiusly predicted. When are we going to start respecting science again in this country?


Shame on us. Oh, well... the world is going to shit. Let's all just sit back, pick our butts, and enjoy the apocalypse.