Not Just Iraq: U.S. Also Marks Deadliest Year In Afghanistan

Not only does the Bush-led campaign in Iraq result in more U.S. and coalition deaths than ever in 2007 despite all the happy horseshit about the "grand success" of the "surge" to kill the insurgency; no, Bush has something else to boast about (and he's enough of an ass to do so, too): this is our deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan (remember them?) since we invaded in early October 2001.

And this distinction was earned BEFORE Pakistan fell apart to prop up Musharraf's ego; with the chaos there now, one must assume that Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and friends have more room to manuever than ever. And each day, the Bushies push harder and harder for war with Iran, a country where we can't even begin to claim it will be a "cakewalk" to wage war.

The Bush Administration: fucking the world over since January 2001.

Obscene: Bush "Leans" On Dead Soldiers' Families For Support

Grrrrrrrr.....

While Bush and Cheney and Petraeus keep insisting "the surge" has been an unprecedented success, and given that the "surged" numbers were there just about all year, then how is it that 2007 became the deadliest year on record for American and coalition forces in Iraq?

And that doesn't even address how deadly it's been for Iraqis.

At the same time, this story by Stolberg in The Times about how Bush and the families of dead soldiers are "leaning on each other for great support" just makes me sick. Bush, who wouldn't attend one damned service funeral, who certainly won't meet with the families of ALL fallen soldiers because he wants a guarantee the grieving loved ones won't ask him any pesky questions. I find this to be the height of obscenity.

"The Dying Continues... While We Bury Our Heads In The Sand"

Very powerful words from Joseph Galloway (author of "They Were Soldiers Once") on Iraq and our complicity through our ignorance and blinders:

The war in Iraq grinds on without much regard for an American president's pipedreams of victory, a congressional majority's impotent attempts to stop it and most of the American people's wish that it would just go away.

We're now well into the fifth year of this war. All 30,000 of President Bush's surge reinforcements are on the ground, and we have more than 150,000 American soldiers and Marines in the cauldron. The only surge in sight is an inevitable surge in the numbers of those troops being killed and wounded.

More than 3,500 Americans have now been killed in action and more than 29,000 wounded, along with an additional 25,000-plus injured in accidents. That's close to 60,000 American casualties to date, and God alone knows how many Iraqis have been killed and wounded in the war and the civil war - certainly hundreds of thousands.

The central focus of George W. Bush's escalation was to make Baghdad more secure so that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could take control of its own capital. In truth, Baghdad seems no more secure now than it was - only a more target-rich environment - and even the president and his generals predict that things will get worse before they get better. If they get better.

A beleaguered president must travel to Albania, of all places, to find a little love. Will he now, as Richard Nixon before him, become an inveterate lame-duck globetrotter in search of a crowd that will cheer him? What's next? Kazakhstan? Tierra del Fuego? How about Baghdad?

The Army and Marines scrape and scratch and scheme and pay big bucks and beguile high school dropouts, even those with criminal records, in their efforts to recruit enough young men and women to replace the casualties and those who are leaving the service.

The administration doesn't want you to worry about any of this. It's summertime, shopping time, surf's up. Head for the beach and bury your heads in the sand.

The planes loaded with flag-draped coffins soar over the Atlantic coast sunbathers to land at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the site of the military mortuary, unseen as they come home to a nation that barely noticed when they left so full of hope and dreams. Your government, your president, has banned cameras from Dover so those images won't intrude on your good times and good life.

The planes loaded with the scores of wounded - some of them double and triple amputees with bodies and brains shattered by the roadside bombs and mines that are responsible for two-thirds of our casualties - fly over the beachfront bars and restaurants and land at Andrews Air Force Base outside the nation's capital in the dark of night. The administration doesn't want too many people noticing them, either.

The rest is here.

Iraq: Our War For Oil Proven By U.S. Army's Visit

Granted, President Bush has in several speeches made it clear that we waged war in Iraq for "cheap" oil (like those cheap prices now? - heh) and before we launched the war in mid-March 2003, then Assistant Secretary of Defense (and now a man who had to leave the World Bank for serious fraud) Paul Wolfowitz said the Iraq war would pay for itself in cheap gas. But a report in yesterday's New York Times made it abundantly clear that we went to Iraq to hand their oil fields over to oil and energy companies (many of them American) for unheard of profits. Why else would the U.S. military be demanding the so-called democratically elected representatives of Iraq to sign an oil deal (the real reason for the surge) "or else."

BAGHDAD, June 11 — The top American military commander for the Middle East has warned Iraq’s prime minister in a closed-door conversation that the Iraqi government needs to make tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress.

In a Sunday afternoon discussion that mixed gentle coaxing with a sober appraisal of politics in Baghdad and Washington, the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, told Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that the Iraqi government should aim to complete a law on the division of oil proceeds by next month.

Be clear: there is NO good reason for anyone in the U.S. military to be telling the democratically elected rep of ANY country what to do re: oil. That this happened gives us the conclusive proof that this is why we went to Iraq.

Iraq's Curse (Besides George W. Bush Who Is Also Our Curse)

Offered without comment (since I'm not sure about a few of the items mentioned) is this bit from Edward Wong's piece, similarly entitled, in The New York Times:

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.

“Other Arabs say, ‘You are the country of sahel,’ ” Razzaq said. “It has always been that way in Iraq.”

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.

President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord. Certainly there are Iraqis who have grown weary. But they are not the ones at the country’s helm; many are among some two million who have fled, helping leave the way open for extremists to take control of their homeland.

“We’ve changed nothing,” said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist turned hard-line politician who has three bullets lodged in his torso from a recent assassination attempt. “It’s dark. There will be more blood.”

The rest is here.

Estimate of Iraq Surge "Success" As Easy As Nailing Jelly To a Tree

Just since Sunday night, I've noticed that the message regarding Iraq and Bush's surge/escalation varies with more frequency than President Bush butchers the word nuclear into nukular.

First, it was abundantly clear that Bush refused to heed any of the warnings of military experts who insisted it was foolhardy to go into Iraq with anything less than 400,000 troops which is why we rolled into Baghdad with substantially less than half that number. But that's OK, Bush insisted, because he was listening to his men on the ground (defined as talking to people who talk to people who talk to other people who then talk to neocons in Washington) and if they said they needed more warm bodies in Iraq, he'd provide them. Except he didn't.

Second, when he planned this surge, he said it was for a very limited time period and would require, at most, about 15,000 American soldiers. Except that he started it before he had authorization and, rather than the slight "bump" in numbers, Bush will have more than 200,000 troops in Iraq before Christmas when we've had far less than half that number operating there for sometime.

Third, he's added the warm bodies, but these troops can't get the equipment they need -and the Republican Pentagon is responsible for that; they get the money, use it on everything but the soldiers, and then point to the Democrats as to blame for "bankrupting" our fighting men and women. These troops also don't have any better orders than they've had for a long time. Troops without a concrete mission aren't all that useful to anyone concerned.

Fourth, tied to the previous two, commanders are saying we don't have sufficient numbers of troops on the ground even without the surge. Shall we assume Bush isn't listening now that he's told us all the military has to do is ask and they shall receive?

Fifth, CentCom has doubled its air attacks on Iraq which isn't good for land-based soldiers OR civilians. "Friendly fire" deaths are up dramatically. Also, security on the ground AND air is so bad, concludes Great Britain information sources, that all British and American troops should be removed immediately. [Sadly, the Iraqis have no choice but to stay there.]

Sixth, the deadline date established to determine when a full and accurate analysis of whether Bush's "surge" is working keeps getting pushed back. John McCain, for example, said a couple of months would in NO WAY be enough to tell whether the Bush plan is working and then, practically in the same breath, when asked how long was needed to evaluate the surge's success, kept a straight face as Manic Depressive McCain replied, "A couple of months." Some estimates insist we won't know until around the beginning of 2009 whether the surge worked, which just happens to coincide with the time Bush will leave the White House (unless we can indict him first).

Turns Out Bush Does Have A Timeline For Pulling Out of Iraq

It just happens to be about 40 or 50 or 60 years from now, while our soldiers play Halliburton cops for big oil.

What Bush Calls Progress in Iraq, Others Call Non-Stop Funeral Dirges; Tortured Lives of Interrogators

While last week already seemed to shape up into a terrific nightmare in Iraq, this weekend saw at least 14 U.S. soldiers die in bombs and insurgency and other carnage in Baghdad and elsewhere.

But look at this as well:

Interrogators must constantly straddle the border between coercion and torture during questioning.

Cindy Sheehan: "Good Riddance, Attention Whore"

If you haven't yet heard, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a son named Casey who went to Iraq for Bush and became one of fast-rising statistics of U.S. soldiers dead, is stepping down as the "face" and voice of the anti-war movement. While she's tired after years of fighting to stop our fighting, however, Cindy isn't just tired, she's angry.

Buzzflash offers the guest contribution she made for Memorial Day; I encourage you to read it. I think it raised some questions for me. If you have the same reaction, please share in comments here.

Meanwhile, I want to thank Cindy for all she did. This woman had already gone through hell when she decided to stand up and it only got tougher the more she was willing to exercise courage and standards our elected officials rarely do. Remember too that there are many other mothers (and friends and other family members) speaking up and out.

More Dirty Tricks on Iraq?

David Sirota writes that Dick Cheney may have been onhand to help "hide" who really voted today to give Bush's latest dark fantasy a blank check re: Iraq War funding.

Of Hitler, Chamberlain, Iraq War I Revisited

[The reference to the "Neville Chamberlain Moment" was made in Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from Wednesday's Countdown on MSNBC available by transcript and video link here. Also, I strongly recommend - if you have the chance - to catch HBO's reshowing of the entry into the first war a Bush (Dubya's dribbling dad)... it's a POWERFUL retrospective compared against this Bush's war. And if you don't know who Neville Chamberlain is, shame on you and get thee to a Wikipedia immediately!] I happened to catch Keith and then flipped the channel to HBO-West which was just starting to show "Live From Baghdad", an HBO film of high quality that recounts CNN's days in Baghdad and Kuwait just as George Bush (the 41st) declared war with Iraq (from a book by Robert Weiner, part of the CNN production team on the ground and getting bombed in Baghdad). I also wrote about Olbermann's piece here and here.]

The degree of retrospective comparisons between THEN and Bush 43rd horrific NOW is astonishing, including:

• how quickly the American public was sold on lies of "dumped incubators" killing babies in Kuwait (disproven as any substantial event)
• how hard the press was bashed for everything from interviews with Saddam Hussein and high Iraqi officers (and we repeated this in March 2003, Dan Rather was hated for interviewing Saddam again and CNN's main war reporter in the Bush 1 Iraq War was hated then and during Bush 2's great adventure, fired from MSNBC for suggesting there might be two sides to the story)
• Bush 41's comparison of Saddam to "Hitler Revisited" (a powerful comparison, given that Bush 43, 41's son, may now be responsible for more deaths of Iraqi civilians than Saddam ever was) when I think a case can be made for seeing Bush 43 as a perpetrator of racial hatred (substituting Muslims for Jews in the terrible old saying, "When all else fails, gather up the Jews") against what Keith said about the Dems' Neville Chamberlain moment
• Just see the difference in the city then as opposed to now, after all those years of sanctions (estimated to have claimed the lives of UP TO one million Iraq children, primarily through incredible restriction on medical care and food that turned one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East into a shell of its former self)
• As Weiner wrote, "When the talking stops, that's when people die. So let's keep talking until we're old men."

Surge in Violence? "Iraq On Verge of Collapse"

Sadly, just seeing this Reuters headline made me ask, "You mean it hasn't been on the verge of collapse almost every single day since Bush forced troops into Iraq to force a war built on lies in March 2003?"

But yes, the situation there is worsening every second it seems. Perhaps "the surge" Bush referred to was the response Iraqis would show in face of his stepped up military response (while at the same time even Bush said the solution is not military... (what?)). From the piece:

Iraq's government has lost control of vast areas to powerful local factions and the country is on the verge of collapse and fragmentation, a leading British think-tank said on Thursday.

Chatham House also said there was not one civil war in Iraq, but "several civil wars" between rival communities, and accused Iraq's main neighbors -- Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- of having reasons "for seeing the instability there continue."

"It can be argued that Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation," it said in a report.

Doing a heluva job there, George!

Bush and Benchmarks: More Lies and Games At Expense of U.S. Troops' and Civilians' Lives

Why is everyone applauding President Bush for his statement yesterday that he thought "benchmarks" might be a good idea re: Iraq?
First, Bush should NEVER have been given a blank check to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, no matter what cost (financial, logistical, and human lives) in Iraq (and for this, I hold every single member of Congress as responsible as I do Cowboy Clown Dubya). I was one of a large but often none too vocal group who saw quite clearly that Bush and Cheney and the Neocon Express were taking us into Iraq on a case made of lies and greed. To this day, more than four years after the first American forces landed in Iraq, Bush and Cheney continue to promote the idea that Iraq somehow had some large part in planning and executing the September 11th, 2001 (9-11) attacks on the U.S. when it seemed clearly untrue back in 2003 and disproven countless times since then.

Second, Bush won't allow ANY compromise on his part whatsoever. He may say that benchmarks may be a good idea, but he certainly won't allow any checks and balances applied to what he wants to do in Iraq. He says this only to fool Americans into thinking he'll play ball; he doesn't even care that now a majority of Republican voters want troops out of Iraq in the next six months.

Third, don't fool yourself. Bush will be out of office before the U.S. is out of Iraq.

The Bushies Breed Greed

Now the 20,000 or so extra soldiers they called up for Bush's felonious, futile, and foolhardy are not enough for Bush's surge/excalation. They want at least 35,000 MORE troops in beautiful, beaucolic, bright downtown Baghdad.

Hat tip to Buzzflash for the link.

Bush's Wars: Strangely, They Can Only One In Three Direction: Worse, Worser (eh?), And Worst

While Afghanistan's Taliban (the same people Bush and Cheney claim to have annihilated six years ago) adopts President Bush's rule to only allow journalists and the rest of what calls itself media to report lies, the violence in Afghanistan and its neighbor, Iraq, only continues to defy all laws of basic statistics by worsening each and every day (even a lame coin toss should give you the occasional "win" but Bush makes us lose each and every damned time).

Here's what I noted at All Things Democrat:

April was the nation’s bloodiest overall month (we set terrible new records there all the time) since we arrived and May is off to a tragically busy start; many U.S. soldiers along with more than 100 Iraqi civilians were killed in operations just this past weekend.

It’s not a case that this escalating violence is completely about Bush’s so-called surge or escalation of military actions in Iraq. First, we already sent many of the “surge” troops in already and second, many forces are already working on new “surge” orders on the ground. So it’s a fabrication to claim that the heightened violence is only because “insurgents are scared and doing what they can now because they know that Bush means business THIS time.”

Hugely nasty attacks occurred yesterday (Sunday) in Iraq, with bodies found all over Baghdad, including those of at least eight American GIs. [Afghanistan worses every day as well.] At the same time, a major general, in a piece in the Boston Globe, says Iraq will get FAR deadlier still (quite the effortless slam dunk promised):

BAGHDAD — A US Army general yesterday forecast a rise in deaths among American forces in the coming months, a prediction underscored by the announcement that a roadside bomb had killed six US soldiers and a foreign journalist north of Baghdad. Five other American troops died elsewhere over the weekend.

Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, said casualties will climb as American troops dig into enemy territory as part of a stepped-up military operation ordered by President Bush in January. Lynch, who oversees a swath of territory to the south and east of Baghdad, gave his bleak prediction on the heels of the deadliest month this year for American forces in Iraq.

In April, 104 troops were killed, the fourth time since the beginning of 2005 that US deaths exceeded 100 in a single month. At least 25 troops have been killed in May, a grim start to a month in which Democrats are expected to keep up pressure on the White House to plan a withdrawal from Iraq.

Good Night, Chris Degiovine

Most if not all readers here will not recognize the name of this 25-year-old former Honors student from Essex High School here in Vermont.

But last Thursday, he became a very nasty - and ever growing - statistic: dead in Iraq, one of the more than 100 U.S. soldiers and more than a thousand Iraqi civilians killed there in April thanks to Bush's war and his surge.

Bush's daughters can't serve, of course; after all, there are no big booze parties in Iraq. But Chris did, and his family will get back a flag-draped coffin none of us are allowed to see.

Bush lied. Chris Degiovine died. And Vermont, which has opposed this war from the start, retains its nasty honor of being the state with the highest per capita loss rate of troops in Bush's war; that is, in the United States. The Iraqi civilians have paid orders of magnitude more dearly and without a vote.

So April's Become The Deadliest Month For U.S. Troops (Not to Mention Iraqi Civilians) This Year?

Glad to see that Bush surge is working!

And Bush never loses a chance to tell us of his "hard work", this from a man who averages being "on vacation" two of every five business weekdays of his nearly six-and-a-half-years in office.

Funny, troops in Iraq and Afghanistan often have to work multiple weeks without a day off, and standardly work no less than 12 hour days. But Bush is the one "workin' hard"... yup.

Paul Krugman: "A Hostage Situation"

For my view, calling this a "hostage situation" is a bit like what happens when you smear tubes and tubes of lipstick on a pig, but... here's the lastest (April 23rd) from Dr. Krugman:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

What’s at stake right now is the latest Iraq “supplemental.” Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.”

At one level, this is like the behavior of an irresponsible adolescent who repeatedly runs through his allowance, each time calling his parents to tell them he’s broke and needs extra cash.

What I haven’t seen sufficiently emphasized, however, is the disdain this practice shows for the welfare of the troops, whom the administration puts in harm’s way without first ensuring that they’ll have the necessary resources.

As long as a G.O.P.-controlled Congress could be counted on to rubber-stamp the administration’s requests, you could say that this wasn’t a real problem, that the administration’s refusal to put Iraq funding in the regular budget was just part of its usual reliance on fiscal smoke and mirrors. But this time Mr. Bush decided to surge additional troops into Iraq after an election in which the public overwhelmingly rejected his war — and then dared Congress to deny him the necessary funds. As I said, it’s an act of hostage-taking.

Actually, it’s even worse than that. According to reports, the final version of the funding bill Congress will send won’t even set a hard deadline for withdrawal. It will include only an “advisory,” nonbinding date. Yet Mr. Bush plans to veto the bill all the same — and will then accuse Congress of failing to support the troops.

The whole situation brings to mind what Abraham Lincoln said, in his great Cooper Union speech in 1860, about secessionists who blamed the critics of slavery for the looming civil war: “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”

So how should Congress respond to Mr. Bush’s threats?

[A massive and painful enema comes to mind, but visit Rozius to learn what Mr. Rich recommends.]