Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Political Rants

The week that was.

Well, what did we learn this week, girls and boys?

We learned that the Afghan war is more pointless and destructive than many of us had given it credit for, thanks to the wikileaks papers. We also learned that the Iraq war is – very much like its predecessor, the Gulf War – leaving a trail of grave illness and lingering death years after the height of our attack. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent of London reports that cancer and infant mortality rates in Fallujah have reached ridiculously high levels in the wake of the U.S. assault, very likely the result of our use of depleted uranium munitions. The casing materials from these armor-piercing shells caused untold misery in Iraq in the years following the Gulf War, during which time essential medical supplies were being withheld from them by virtue of U.S. /U.K. sanctions. (Cockburn’s colleague Robert Fisk tells the story in his book The Great War for Civilization.)

This is a vastly underreported impact of war and its aftermath, at least in this country. During the twelve years of sanctions against Iraq Americans heard very little from their media or their politicians about what was happening to the general population. During the Gulf War, we attacked Iraq’s infrastructure, not sparing its water treatment and distribution facilities. The sanctions that followed that war disallowed the requisite technology to repair that infrastructure. In a country such as Iraq, this is tantamount to biological warfare. Literally hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, died of preventable water-born diseases because of this, according to the U.N. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State during much of that time, said the policy was worth the cost. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus there.

As an imperial power, we make these cost-benefit calculations all of the time. Our estimates always seem to devalue the lives of those we invade and occupy, however. It isn’t that life is cheap – it’s more specific than that. Their lives are cheap, not ours. (Though with respect to our military, ours, too.) I’m sure there are many who feel that the human costs of the most recent Iraq war were worth the benefit of removing Saddam Hussein from power. I cannot agree. This war resulted in the deaths of upwards of a million people and generated something like 4 million refugees, 2.5 million of whom landed in squalor in Jordan and Syria. There is no political end that can justify that much suffering, not in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other country we’ve been targeting.

So what did we learn, after all? Not much, it appears. Let’s keep trying.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Resistance.

It had been reported for months that the folks behind Wikileaks were in possession of a large number of documents relating to the Afghan war, and this past week they posted a large portion of them. I haven’t been able to review the documents as of yet, but I have heard some reporting on the content, and it sounds as if it confirms some suspicions once thought of as borderline treasonable when given voice by anti-war activists and the like. (Note to activists: don’t wait to be thanked.)

Thus far the most consistent criticism of the release of these documents has been the familiar claim that they reveal “sources and methods” – that Afghans who cooperate with the U.S. are named and that they will pay a heavy price. Admiral Mullens went so far as to say that Wikileaks may already have blood on their hands. Mullens and his colleagues would know something about that, of course, as the documents apparently demonstrate. I suspect, in cases such as these, that most if not all of what is secret is merely a secret from us (i.e. the American people); that military operations of the kind deployed in Afghanistan are very porous in the sense of who is working for whom. Sure, it would be better not to put people needlessly in harm’s way. But that’s what the Afghan war is all about, from what I can see.

The protestations about this are similar to the grilling those Arlington National Cemetery officials received from Senators this past week. Yes, they fucked up big time and lost track of remains. Very frustrating for the families, no doubt. But the outrage in these hearings is coming from the very body that keeps reauthorizing this endless war. For chrissake, these Senators are helping to produce the remains, and they are angry with people who merely misplaced them? If they had done what was right from the beginning instead of what they considered politically expedient, these Arlington managers might not have been overwhelmed with remains from two bloody wars – more military dead than they have seen, I’m sure, since the early 1970s.

Like Iraq, the Afghan war is a very mean conflict. People are dying there every day, including yet another 3 American servicemembers just yesterday, making this the deadliest month of the war for the U.S. If Gates, Mullen, and Obama are determined to avoid needless deaths, they might want to think seriously about ending this fiasco sooner rather than later.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Stuff and nonsense.

Just a few short takes this week. I’ve got a splitter of a headache – one of those neck and shoulder jobs. So my concentration is a bit compromised, but here goes.

Again-and-againistan. That Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the recent article on Gen. McChrystal has drawn a lot of criticism from various mainstream corporate press mavens. No surprise there. They are so obsessed with covering the ball-game stories – the ins and outs of policy making, careers, and personalities – that they neglect to examine these stupid wars that have been dragging on year after year. How closely have any of them scrutinized the rationale behind this policy?

Why the hell are we in Afghanistan? Our leaders say it’s to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda so that they cannot plan new attacks on us. But to the extent that people like Osama Bin Laden are involved in operational planning for global terror attacks, all he and his pals need is a room (or a cave, but I suspect a room) big enough for a white board. Can anyone claim that we have denied him that in nearly nine years of war? Did our drones stop the Times Square bomber? (Fact is, they helped push him over the edge.) Where’s the story on that, kids?

No settlement. Despite Netanyahu’s fence-mending visit to the White House, there is no light at the end of the Israel/Palestine tunnel. His government is still strangling Gaza, still encroaching on more and more of the West Bank (in spite of the so-called settlement “freeze”, which is so conditional as to be meaningless). Old Bibi, like so many Israeli leaders, is beholden to the Frankenstein-like settlement movement that is a political lynchpin of his ruling coalition. Even if he wanted to close the settlements, he couldn’t (and trust me, he doesn’t want to). So the suffering goes on, and we keep underwriting it.

Gusher that keeps on giving. It’s been more than 70 days since BP blew a hole in the Earth, and the hemorrhaging continues. Do you sense a pattern here? Crises that never seem to end. This is a bad one. And yet, we shouldn’t pretend as though all of this oil, gas, and dispersant is spewing into a pristine Gulf ecosystem. According to the Coast Guard, millions of gallons of oil routinely spill into the Gulf every year – something like an Exxon Valdez size spill every three or four years for the past decade. Big as this blowout is, our problem is bigger than that. Let’s make the solution bigger, too. 

That’s all I’ve got. Bed time.

luv u,

jp