the continuing carnage

We have been talking about the deaths of people as collateral damage, an expenditure of consumable goods. I can think of no better example of the depravity of the “war president” and bush’s America. Iraq is being destroyed by the US occupation, and civil war. Over 2 million lives have been destroyed, caused by the direct actions, both deliberate and negligent, of the bush administration and its allies and propagandists.

After 44 months, with US resources now stretched to an unsustainable limit, and an electorate overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation of Iraq, everyone waits breathlessly for the appearance of the “Baker Report”, the reasoned recommendations of the wise people of the Iraq Study Group who will save us from our folly in Iraq. Well, there are no “reasonable” solutions to that morass of obscenity.

It is ironic that the bush should be in Vietnam, the other country that defeated us in guerrilla warfare, a country he was too scared to go to when his country needed him, at the same time we are being defeated in another guerrilla war of his choice. Of course, his arrogance doesn’t allow him to understand it. The lesson? We just need “patience”. Yeah, just long enough for him to leave this mess for his successor.

Bush went to Vietnam and boasted about how we would have won if we had not quit. This was, he said, the lesson for Iraq of the Vietnam War. He managed to be wrong about two wars at once and to anger both his hosts (how churlish!) and the Iraqi public. The American Right never admitted that they lost in Vietnam, thus the Rambo movies and, Melani McCallister argues, the US admiration for Entebbe. Iraq was their chance, they thought, to get it right. Bush had also said insulting things to the Philiippines about how wonderful it was that we had colonized them (and killed 400,000).

- Juan Cole, Informed Comment Nov 18, 2006

And so, the macabre dance continues, and the war criminal kissinger gets another chance to “get it right”.

How security guards became killers
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily, Asia Times, Nov 10, 2006

BAGHDAD - The Facilities Protection Service (FPS) created after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has become the principal incubator of death squads in Iraq, senior leaders say.

"…the forces formed were actually militias, not organized forces, because they were formed according to rations given to each party in power…

"Those politicians brought their followers into the so-called security forces. Others took bribes of US$500-$700 from each applicant to be accepted regardless of standard regulations…"
- General Harith al-Fahad of the former Iraqi army

Caught in the crossfire
Mike Whitney, Online Journal, Mar 2, 2006

[…]
In Max Fuller’s seminal article, “For Iraq, ‘The Salvador Option,' becomes Reality,” Fuller points out that the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s death squads were, in fact, trained by agents from the CIA who had honed their skills in Vietnam and El Salvador. (Recently even the New York Times has admitted that these groups received American training) Fuller sees the same pattern appearing in Iraq as in other American-backed counterinsurgency operations.

No Exit?
What It Means to "Salvage U.S. Prestige" in Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt; November 16, 2006

[…]
Sooner or later, failure has a way of stripping most of us of our dreams and pretensions. So let's start with a tiny history of failure. George W. Bush's life trajectory of failing upward has had a rhythm to it -- and a rubric, "crony capitalism." Daddy's friends and contacts helped him into and -- after he failed -- out of the oil business, into and out of the baseball business, into and now, it seems, out of the failed game of global politics. His is, as the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish and John Aloysius Farrell put it back in 2002, "the story of a man who struck out numerous times before being bailed out by big hitters who often were family members, friends, or supporters of his father."

It's appropriate, then, that the man who bailed him out in Florida when he essentially lost the presidency in 2000, Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III, would reappear six years later, in the wake of another failed election, to bail him out again now that he's screwed up the oil heartlands of the planet. Daddy -- we're talking here about former President George H.W. Bush -- has three adopted boys: His former National Security Advisor (and alter ego) Brent Scowcroft, who went into opposition to the younger Bush's Iraq policy even before the invasion of 2003 and now lurks quietly in the wings; his former CIA Director Robert Gates; and Baker.

Like Daddy, Gates was deeply involved in, but never indicted for his dealings in the scurrilous Iran-Contra affair; was later involved in the tilt toward and arming of Saddam's Iraq against Khomeini's Iran, pioneered fertile territory in the late 1980s in terms of manipulating intelligence in the debate over the nature of Gorbachev's Soviet Union, had a hand in the first Gulf War, and most recently held the presidency of Texas A&M, where he was the keeper of the flame for Daddy's library. Could you ask for a better insider CV for taking over the Pentagon from one of Bush elder's rivals in the Gerald Ford era, Donald Rumsfeld…