Tag Archives: Iraq

Political Rants

So long, proconsul.

Gates is leaving, but his wars will remain with us, it appears. He didn’t start them, of course, but he was brought in to manage them after they went seriously off the rails. In what I will always consider to be among the clearest evidence of the existence of a permanent institutional foreign policy consensus, Gates was hired to replace Rumsfeld in 2006 when it was obvious that the Bush team’s invasion of Iraq was shaking the American empire to its very foundations. I imagine there was resistance from Bush himself, from Rumsfeld, of course, and from Cheney – they had problems with the Iraq Study Group’s findings and doubled down on their Iraq disaster, but they had lost the confidence of that institutional elite by that time, and the loss of Congress to the Democrats nudged Rumsfeld over the edge. Cheney was effectively sidelined for the remainder of Bush’s second term.

So it goes with empires, I guess. Ours rolled along swimmingly for the last century, gathering steam after World War II, flattening its dissidents, outlasting its main rivals … until we managed to elect a man so incompetent he could, to borrow a phrase, destroy the empire merely by strolling through it. I’m sure to the nation’s imperial board of trustees, George W. seemed a relatively safe bet, particularly with such seemingly reliable minders as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld keeping an eye on the store. That miscalculation is proving very costly. Just as our attack on Vietnam bled us dry (to say nothing of what it did to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians), this past decade of war – coupled with an amazingly irresponsible policy of deep war-time tax cuts – has helped to hobble our economy, perhaps beyond recovery.

Obama should well be celebrated by the ownership class in America. What the hell, he has salvaged the empire, shored up the banking system, shielded the financial managers from accountability. Beats the hell out of me why they would want rid of him, except that they may want an even better deal. He is trying to return us to that proven imperial model of having others fight our wars for us while resorting to a Murder, Inc. strategy for what is now called “high value” targets. Obama may not succeed in that effort, but he’s trying. So Gates will leave, satisfied, I’m sure, that the republic… I mean, the empire is in good hands, his charge fulfilled.

So, farewell, Proconsul Gates. Off to Capri with you, then.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Peace out.

Our entire political class is on fire to cut costs. Got a suggestion: shut down these useless wars. Yet another guy from my area has been killed in Afghanistan, fighting a war no one can justify. He’s got a wife and two kids, with a third on the way. Just one of the thousands. I see the procession of portraits every week on the PBS News Hour, as do many of my fellow Americans, sitting safe and dry in our living rooms, shaking our heads and muttering as we switch the channel to, I don’t know, Jersey Shore or some other shit. I know it’s hard to care when you don’t have any blood on the front line, but seriously – this war is simply wasting people… good people.

I don’t get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it – about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he’d planted sunflowers near his son’s gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and saw his son, he claims, and the apparition asked him what the f**k he was doing there, told him he should go home, and said that it was all right, he was in a better place. We’re on year ten of stories like this. Jesus! Time to shut it down.

Weiner and losers. Don’t know about you, but I’ve seen people in more revealing shorts strolling by on the sidewalk. The media is in full frenzy mode over this bogus Anthony Weiner “scandal”. You’d think by now the name Breitbart might give them pause, but no. Note to corporate media: For chrissake, people… the man’s a newlywed, okay? Do I have to draw you a picture? There’s really nothing newsworthy here. Cover something important for once. And by that I don’t mean Sarah Palin’s bus tour, or Trump at an Applebee’s.

Hey… somebody roll a big aluminum foil wad out on to the front lawn; maybe that’ll break their trance-like gaze. Or just wake me when they get bored with it and decide to go back to doing something that resembles journalism.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

What’s up.

Just a few thoughts prior to the most expensive mid-term elections in U.S. history.

Don’t abstain. You’ve heard this before from wiser people than me. You’ve even heard it from me. In any case, here it is again – don’t stay home on election day. Go out and vote. Vote against the money tide from corporate America. Make their Supreme Court-sanctioned pay-to-play electoral machine useless to them. It only works if we cooperate by failing to oppose their favored candidates – don’t. Get out there and mark those ballots – again, not because that’s the only thing that needs to happen in order to build a better world, but because it’s necessary to keep the media-fueled G.O.P. “tsunami” myth from materializing.

I’m most particularly addressing this message to folks in states like Wisconsin, where you are represented by the finest member of the U.S. Senate. For god’s sake, don’t replace Feingold with some vacuous millionaire CEO. And for those of you in Nevada who, I’m sure, read this column religiously, I encourage you to hold your noses and vote for Harry Reid, rather than allow that bigoted Schlafly clone to become one of the most narrow-minded members of the world’s greatest deliberative body. (Any sane person would vote against her on the basis of her incendiary anti-immigration ads alone.)  

Bloody mess exposed. I’ve sifted through only a tiny corner of the Iraq War documents released by Wikileaks, and I have to say I feel something distantly related to PTSD. Go to the Guardian site and check it out. This trove helps to confirm the oft-criticized claims of the antiwar movement; that the Bush administration was wanton in its disregard for the well-being of Iraqi civilians, that it had an administrative policy of non-intervention when detainees were being tortured, and so on. The torture revelations are not that surprising – this is the kind of approach we traditionally followed with third world allies prior to Bush’s wars: have the CIA guy observe while the El Salvadoran officer applies the thumb screw or the electrodes. In Iraq we had both the new way and the old.

Relax. When the power went off on that nuclear missile base in Wyoming, the major media outlets – including NPR – offered a brief item that amounted to, don’t worry, we never lost the ability to launch them. I slept a whole lot better after hearing that.

luv u,

jp