The Rag Blog

Four years ago in the press for the war with Iraq, the Bush administration maintained that the Iraqis had the technological, machining, and engineering capability to indigenously produce long range missiles, enrichment centrifuges, and nuclear weapons.

Yesterday, the Bush administration claimed that the Iraqis don’t have the machining capability to produce the moderately technical EFP’s they claim are coming from Iran.

During a heated debate in a class I teach on social justice, several US Marines who had done tours in Iraq told me that they had “sacrificed” by “serving” in Iraq so that I could enjoy the freedom to teach in the USA. Parroting their master’s slogan about “fighting over there so we don’t have to fight over here”, these students proudly proclaimed that they terrorized and killed defenseless Iraqis. They intimated that their Arab victims are nothing more to them than collateral damage, incidental to their receipt of some money and an education.

A room full of students listened as a US Marine told of the invasion of Baghdad and Falluja and how he killed innocent Iraqis at a check point. He called them “collateral damage” and said he had followed the “rules”. A Muslim-American student in front of him said “I could slap you but then you would kill me”. A young female Muslim student gasped “I am a freshman; I never thought to hear of this in a class. I feel sick, like I will pass out.”

I knew in that moment that this was what the future of teaching about justice would include: teaching war criminals who sit glaring at me with hatred for daring to speak the truth of their atrocities and who, if paid to, would disappear, torture and kill me. I wondered that night how long I really have in this so called “free” country to teach my students and to be with my children and grandchildren.

The American military and mercenary soldiers who “sacrificed” their lives did not do so for the teacher’s freedom to teach the truth about the so-called war on terror, or any of US history for that matter. They sacrificed their lives, limbs and sanity for money, some education and the thrills of the violence for which they are socially bred. Sacrificing for the “bling and booty” in Iraq or Afghanistan, The Philippines, Grenada, Central America, Mexico, Somalia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other numerous wars and invasions spanning US history as an entity and beginning with their foundational practice of killing the Indians and stealing their land.

Many of the classes that I teach now include students who “served” in the US military and security corporations. There are also many students who intend to join the US military upon completion of a degree because with the degree they get a bigger “sign on” bonus of ten to fifty thousand dollars. Their position is supported by many of the student body, who, vegetating according to the American Plan, believe they should “support their troops”. The excuses that they give for joining or intending to join the US military terrorist training camps are first and foremost motivated by a desire for money. One student proudly said that he is willing to kill for money, a better standard of living and an education. Another student, who had done two tours of duty to the Empire in Iraq, justified killing and torture, citing the importance of staying on top as the world’s number one super power so that his family could have the highest standard of living and unlimited access to the world’s oil supplies.

Yet another soldier-student said that there would always be wars and someone had to do it. The”it” is killing, rape, and plunder for profit. Some of the soldier-students agreed that military terrorism was thrilling. Stopping and killing people at checkpoints in order to maintain a comfortable lifestyle in the USA was worth the risk of being killed or maimed. Little did they know that the very education they would kill for could include a course on social justice in which they would be compelled to examine their motives, beliefs and actions in an evil, illegal, immoral and unjust invasion and occupation of a people who never hurt or harmed them or any of their fellow citizens.

To be fair, in this week’s discussion in class there was some mention that some of the student’s intentions had been honorable at the time that they joined the military. They wanted to “help other people”. A few woman students who want to join the military commented that they would be working to “free and defend” people here and abroad. However, for the most part and by their own admission, personal financial gain was their main focus in signing on. Their bottom line was getting the money and their thrills by joining and belonging to the biggest terrorist organization in the world, the USA.

NAJAF, Iraq – New evidence is emerging on the ground of an Iranian hand in growing violence within Iraq, but not necessarily as the US claims Tehran is involved, that is, by providing arms to Shi’ite Muslim militants.

The massacre in Najaf last month indicates that Iran could be working through the Iraqi government, local leaders in Najaf say. The killing of 263 people in Najaf by Iraqi and US forces on January 29 provoked outrage and vows of revenge among residents in and around the sacred Shi’ite city in the south. The killings have deepened a split among Shi’ites.

Iran is predominantly Shi’ite, one of the two main groupings within Islam along with the Sunnis. Iraq has for the first time a Shi’ite-dominated government, comprising groups that have been openly supportive of Iran.

The people killed in Najaf were mostly Shi’ites from the Hawatim tribe that opposes the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq as well as the Da’wa Party. These two pro-Iranian groups control the local government in Najaf and the central government in Baghdad.

The Najaf attack has provoked strong reactions among members of the Hawatim tribe and among other Shi’ite groups who are not loyal to Iran – and who became the target in those killings.

An attack on a local tribal leader led to an assault on members of the tribe by US, British and Iraqi forces. The tribe was described by government officials as a “messianic cult”.

Abid Ali, who witnessed the Najaf fighting, said a procession of about 200 pilgrims from the Hawatim tribe had arrived in the Zarqa area near Najaf to celebrate the Ashura festival. After a confrontation over the procession, Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint shot dead Hajj Sa’ad Sa’ad Nayif al-Hatemi, chief of the tribe, as he and his wife sat in their car. Members of the tribe then attacked the checkpoint to avenge the death of their chief.

MUNICH, Germany, Feb 11 (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned NATO on Sunday that failure in Iraq and the chaos likely to follow would hurt all the allies, regardless of whether they had opposed or supported the 2003 invasion.

“If the United States and our partners in Iraq fail and there is chaos in Iraq, every member of this alliance will feel the consequences,” Gates said at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of world leaders.

“Chaos in Iraq … will result in further conflict in the Middle East and will result in more terrorism reaching out to touch all of us,” he said of U.S.-led attempts to put down an insurgency and end sectarian strife in Iraq.

“There may be great disagreement in the room on how we got to where we are, but the reality is, as of today, failure in Iraq will impact every country represented in this room.”

The invasion of Iraq divided NATO, with Britain, Italy and Spain among countries that supported it, and France and Germany leading opponents.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy reiterated Paris’s criticisms of the U.S.-led war, saying Washington had been guilty of “blindness” over both the objectives and conduct of the conflict.

Asked in a radio interview to react to Gates’s comments, he said: “I respond that in Iraq today what is at stake is by definition one thing only. Respect for Iraqi sovereignty.”

“As foreign occupying troops withdraw, there will be a positive movement, in the same proportion, towards a return to Iraqi sovereignty,” he told France’s Radio J.

Gates, in his first major public address since replacing Donald Rumsfeld in December, acknowledged in reply to questions that some U.S. actions had hurt the country’s reputation abroad.

The former CIA director cited the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay as examples.

“I don’t have any doubt that there is, in certain quarters, anti-American propaganda,” Gates said. “But I think we also have made some mistakes and have not presented our case as well as we might in many instances.”

GATES SEES NO NEW COLD WAR

But Gates slapped down suggestions that U.S. actions were leading to a new Cold War with Moscow. “There is no desire for a new Cold War with Russia and one is completely unnecessary,” he said.

Gates, who studied the Soviet Union and Russia as a career CIA analyst, dismissed as the blunt talk of an old spy accusations by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday that the United States sought to force its will on the world.

He rejected calls for the United States to charge or release all prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay base on Cuba.

“There is no question that most of us would like to close the detainee facility at Guantanamo,” he said. “But there are also people at Guantanamo frankly who should never be released, who are serious committed terrorists by their own admission.”

Gates said Europe must commit more troops and money to Afghanistan if NATO was to remain a potent military alliance. Failure to give the needed resources to win in Afghanistan would be a “mark of shame” for the world’s richest countries, he said.

But he also sought to ease tensions with his counterparts that some administration critics blame on Rumsfeld’s brusque style. Alluding to a 2003 comment by his predecessor that led to anger among some allies and accusations of U.S. arrogance, he said he saw no division of “old Europe versus new”.

Instead, he said the division was between those that did all they could to fulfill NATO’s commitments and those that did not.

U.S. leadership is being tested in the Mideast. We might fail unless we change direction.

02/11/07 “Los Angeles Times’ — – THE WAR IN IRAQ is a historic strategic and moral calamity undertaken under false assumptions. It is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties, as well as some abuses, are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

Yet major strategic decisions in the Bush administration continue to be made within a very narrow circle of individuals ? perhaps not more than the fingers on one hand. With the exception of the new Defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, these are the same individuals who have been involved from the start of this misadventure, who made the original decision to go to war in Iraq and who used the original false justifications for going to war. It is human nature to be reluctant to undertake actions that would imply a significant reversal of policy.

From the standpoint of U.S. national interest, this is particularly ominous. If the United States continues to be bogged down in protracted, bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and much of the Islamic world.

Here, for instance, is a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran: Iraq fails to meet the benchmarks for progress toward stability set by the Bush administration. This is followed by U.S. accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the United States blamed on Iran, culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran. This plunges a lonely United States into a spreading and deepening quagmire lasting 20 years or more and eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.?

Indeed, a mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potential expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the decisive ideological struggle of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and Al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack that precipitated U.S. involvement in World War II.

This simplistic and demagogic narrative, however, overlooks that the Nazi threat was based on the military power of the most industrially advanced European state and that Stalinism was not only able to mobilize the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine.

In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism. Al Qaeda is an isolated, fundamentalist aberration. Most Iraqis are engaged in strife not on behalf of an Islamist ideology but because of the U.S. occupation, which destroyed the Iraqi state. Iran, meanwhile, though gaining in regional influence, is hardly a global threat; rather, it is politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that the United States must respond militarily to a wide Islamic threat with Iran at its epicenter is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.

02/10/07 “Counterpunch” — – In a very interesting analysis last month, the former chief of staff of the Russian Army, Gen. Leonid Ivashov, predicted a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran by this April. “Within weeks from now,” he wrote, “we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc.” I’m afraid this has the ring of truth.

Then you have Gen. Oded Tira, chief artillery officer of the Israeli Defense Forces declaring last month that “an American strike on Iran is essential” for the very existence of the Jewish State. Suggesting that “President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran,” he urgently appealed to the resurgent Democratic Party to work towards that Israeli goal. “As an American strike in Iran is essential for our existence,” he declared, “we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iranian issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure.”

Tira specifically urged the Israel Lobby in the U.S. to “turn to Hilary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran.” The Lobby seems to be doing a great job at that, Tira’s criticisms about Democrats’ “foolishness” notwithstanding. All the Democratic presidential frontrunners have assured AIPAC or Israeli audiences that they’re at least as hawkish on Iran as the unpopular Bush. Meanwhile the Israeli allegation that Iran poses an “existential” threat to itself, made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the U.S. Congress last year, has insinuated its way into American official discourse.

Referring to the vaguely defined “war on terror” in general, Cheney recently told Fox News, “This is an existential conflict. It is the kind of conflict that’s going to drive our policy and our government for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years.” His daughter Elizabeth (Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and the VP’s liaison with the spooky new “Office of Iranian Affairs”) wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last month, “America faces an existential threat We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can’t negotiate with them or ‘solve’ their jihad.” The administration, still led by neocons clustered around Cheney, has embraced the Israeli rhetoric of paranoiac prophesy. It has decided to attack the Islamic Republic, to end its existence, for the self-defense of Israel and America. To gain support it must sow fear and must demonize Iran, ratcheting up the rhetoric week by week.

The “informational war machine” to which Ivashov alludes has been shoveling out disinformation faster than the public can digest, no doubt on the assumption that rumors even if later disproved can usefully damage reputations and set up targets for attack. The Straussian neoconservatives who tirelessly campaigned to foist their Noble Lies about Iraq on the American people up to the Iraq attack in March 2003 might not much care if the lies they tell now about Iran are exposed down the road. What they want is regime change soon and therefore, a compelling casus belli or two.

During the lead up to the Iraq War, the main charge against Baghdad (skeptically received at the UN) was that it possessed weapons of mass destruction threatening the whole world including New York City, which President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials warned could result in a mushroom cloud over the Big Apple. Bush and Cheney intimated to certain audiences that Iraq posed a particular threat to Israel, but in general this issue was downplayed, probably because the administration wanted to avoid the accusation that it was going to war “for Israel” as opposed to America or the mythic but impressive-sounding “international community.”

This time it’s different. Although Israel attacked and destroyed Iraq’s French-built Osiraq nuclear rector in 1981 (in an illegal action then condemned by the Reagan administration and virtually all other governments, although Cheney and his neocons find inspiration in it today), and although the Israeli government enthusiastically greeted the invasion of Iraq, it didn’t overtly campaign for the war. But now it is feverishly beating the drums for a U.S. war on Iran. And as Cheney has pointedly noted, if the U.S. doesn’t attack Iran, “Israel might do it without being asked.” Most likely it will, if it happens, be a joint effort.

President Nixon, a very good poker player, once defined the art of brinkmanship as persuading your opponent that you are insane and, unless appeased by pledges of surrender, quite capable of blowing up the planet.

By these robust standards George Bush is doing a moderately competent job in suggesting that if balked by Iran on the matter of arming the Shi’a in Iraq or pursuing its nuclear program he’ll dump high explosive, maybe even a couple of nukes, on that country’s relevant research sites, or tell Israel to do the job for him.

In Washington there are plenty of rational people in Congress, think tanks and the Pentagon who think he’s capable of ordering an attack,– albeit not a nuclear one — with bombers carrying conventional explosive and with missiles from US ships in the Persian Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardner, who’s taught at the National War College recently sketched out on this site the plan as it could unfold: already the second naval carrier group has been deployed to the Gulf area, joined by naval mine clearing ships. “As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike.”

Gardiner cautioned that “It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we’ll see a few more steps unfold.

“First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led_group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff.”

As regards “the outrage stuff”, here on cue comes the New York Times’ Michael Gordon with a front page story today, February 10, headlined “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says”, and beginning “The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.”

An amazing thing happened in a courtroom at Fort Lewis, Washington on Wednesday. The U.S. Army was in the third day of what to all appearances was a kangaroo court martial of Lt. Ehren Watada, over his refusal to deploy for what he believes to be an illegal war in Iraq. (Noted one courtroom observer: “I had images of robe-clad kangaroos hopping through my head…”) The judge, Lt. Col. John Head, had seemingly done his best in the trial’s first two days to ensure conviction, while Watada had steadfastly maintained his belief that he had a duty not to follow an illegal order to deploy to Iraq.

Then, suddenly, the Army blinked, and there was a mistrial. And due to double jeopardy issues, the Army may be unable to retry Watada, or to give him anything as punishment beyond a dishonorable discharge.

Essentially, Head coerced the mistrial, ruling that Watada “did not understand” a pre-trial stipulation, prepared by the Army and signed by Lt. Watada last week, which dropped two additional charges in exchange for Watada acknowledging, among other things, that he willfully refused to deploy. Head had already ruled that Watada could not use his reason for refusal -– the illegality of the Iraq conflict -– as a defense, and so Head had excluded all of the defense team’s witnesses to that effect. To the judge, this then meant Watada was acknowledging guilt in the pre-trial stipulation. But when the Watada team successfully motioned to include a jury instruction that Watada be found innocent if he “reasonably believed” that what he was doing was legal, after prosecution witnesses had already testified to that effect, the Army’s case fell apart. Head, in his haste to control the damage, wound up declaring a mistrial over Watada’s objection.

Head tentatively set a retrial date in mid-March. But a judge or prosecution cannot simply abandon a trial in mid-proceeding over the defense’s objection because it doesn’t like the way a trial is going. That’s what double jeopardy is about, and Watada’s attorney has already said he will fight any effort to retry the lieutenant. That’s why, Wednesday night, Army spin doctors were doing their best to express satisfaction with the bizarre outcome by noting how it shows the fairness of the military justice system –- rather than by reiterating the Army’s belief that Watada acted illegally.