The Guerrilla Campaign

by Lawrence S. Wittner December 05, 2006 History News Network The shift of the Iraq War from what its early proponents claimed would be a cakewalk to what most current observers -- including the small group of neocons who originally championed it -- consider a disaster suggests that war's consequences are not always predictable. Some wars, admittedly, work out fairly well -- at least for the victors. In the third of the Punic Wars (149-146 B.C.), Rome's victory against Carthage was complete, and it obliterated that rival empire from the face of the earth. For the Carthaginians, of course, the outcome was less satisfying. Rome's victorious legions razed the city of Carthage and sowed salt in its fields, thereby ensuring that what had been a thriving metropolis would become a wasteland. But even the victors are not immune to some unexpected and very unpleasant consequences. World War I led to 30 million people killed or wounded and disastrous epidemics of disease, plus a mult...

So, the Iraq Study Group has issued its long hyped report today. Now, I’ve been out of town all day, so I guess I’ve missed all the breathless punditry and expert analysis. From what I’ve read of the report, though, it appears to boil down to: “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” That’s it. Shit. We could have all told them THAT, if they’d only asked. Not much of a silver bullet is it? http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/index.html

"They don't make wars good." - Terry Martin ( Eric Blumrich’s grandpa) No, they sure don’t. Unfortunately, sometimes war is necessary, but it’s never good. The horrors and atrocities that war unleashes, especially modern warfare, requires that option to be pushed into the back of the closet, only to be dragged out in circumstances of dire need. Certainly not for the reasons that the bushists have used for their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The plain simple fact of the matter is this: We cannot call ourselves godly, humane, or compassionate as long as we keep trotting out the war option. “Got a problem with somebody? Well, just haul out the guns and the bombs.” There is no difference between flying a plane into a building, and dropping a 500 pound bomb on a family in their house. None. Period. There is a valid Federal Government interest in reducing the number of events in which great pain is inflicted on sentient creatures. Examples of this are laws governing the use o...

New Downing Street Memos From Down Under By David Swanson t r u t h o u t Guest Columnist Tuesday 28 November 2006 More than a year before the United States launched an endless war on Iraq in what President George W. Bush told Congress was an urgently needed action to prevent an attack with non-existent weapons by non-Iraqi terrorists ... Eleven months before Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair [http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/whitehousememo] that a good way to start a war on Iraq would be to paint planes with UN colors, fly them low, and get them shot at ... Five months before the Downing Street Minutes were taken at a meeting revealing the knowledge top British officials had of the secret war plans of the Bush administration ... Just a week or two before several of the Downing Street Memos recorded US-British discussions of the coming war ... On February 27, 2002 - just five months after 15 Saudis, 2 Lebanese, and 2 Yemenis flew airplanes into US bui...

by Stephen Lendman Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal is still counting the votes in the November 26 presidential runoff election but the results seem clear - with one-half of them tallied so far they show: the peoples' candidate, Rafael Correa, 68% and the bible-toting billionaire banana tycoon oligarch who's also the richest man in the country, Alvaro Noboa, - 32% - results consistent with two exit polls and an unofficial citizens election watchdog group, but without the completion of the suspended vote count in the Guayas province that's a Noboa stronghold that when done should raise his percent of the total but nowhere near enough to close the current electoral gap against him. The people have spoken, and the Washington-directed election-riggers failed for the second time this month to arrange for their man to steal what the people of Ecuador voted en masse to deny them - the same way it turned out on November 7 when Nicaraguans reelected Daniel Ortega despite str...

By ASHLEY M. HEHER, Associated Press Writer 11/26/03 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061126/ap_on_re_us/anti_war_suicide_2 CHICAGO - Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary. At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics — Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire. Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq. "Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in yo...

by Stephen Lendman Hugo Chavez holds an insurmountable lead in two late November polls - one by Ipsos Venezuela/the AP-Ipsos Poll and the other by Zogby International-University of Miami. Both were released on November 24 and are the most current and reliable data available and are consistent with most independent poll results for months. This is in stark contrast to several fraudulent US National Endowment of Democracy (NED)-financed oligarch-run ones published to create a false perception of public sentiment in preparation for cries of fraud once the election results are in. This is now standard US operating practice in all developing countries when Washington fears an unacceptable electoral outcome, so it tries to subvert the democratic process by engineering one in its favor. That's how it's playing out in Venezuela now where things are in place to create the myth of what's impossible to achieve in fact to help Washington pull off its scheme to remove the main ...

“I feel good!” , said the bush, as he pumped his fist into the air, to start his invasion of Iraq, launching a new round of carnage in the Middle East. Smugly excited, as if it was one of those games he watched from the sidelines in his cheerleader uniform in college. Unconcerned at the impending deaths and destruction. After all, it wasn’t any of his family or friends that would be making the sacrifice. Himself, either. And now, almost 4 years later, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, millions of destroyed lives later, thousnads of torture victims later, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage later, no remorse, as he once again turns to daddy to bail out the drunken son . And daddy, to protect the family name, does. Not to right any wrongs, not to stop the carnage, not for justice, mercy, or plain humanity, but to protect the family name, and the republican party. The US is trapped in Iraq because the only plan the bushistas had was to destroy and loot. That’s it. All that talk...

and other things to be thankful for Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil (Part One) Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil (Part Two) By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006. Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set. The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue… Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project...

by Charley Reese November 20, 2006 The Baker commission – or more accurately, the Geriatric Squad – is not likely to come up with a solution to the Iraq War. The commission consists of some old political types – two ex-secretaries of state, Jim Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger; two ex-senators, Chuck Robb and Alan Simpson; two ex-congressmen, Leon Panetta and Lee Hamilton; an ex-Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor; an ex-attorney general, Ed Meese; an ex-defense secretary, William Perry; and a lone black representative, Vernon Jordan. There's not a Middle East expert in the bunch. Baker has already said in a public speech that the solution must be between "cut and run" and "staying the course." I don't know what that might be, unless it is a phased withdrawal. At any rate, they have held off making their report, in part due to the election. It has occurred to me that perhaps the real goal of the invasion of Iraq has already been accomplished. That i...

Muslim Charities and the Case of Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir By Katherine Hughes “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But ... the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” Martin Luther King, Jr.[1] “The truth shall set you free? Maybe. But first the Truth must be set free.” Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright, educator.[2] Since the events of 9/11 the government has implemented powerful new prosecutorial tools to gain convictions in its War on Terror. In an article entitled, “Terrorist Financing,” Jeff Breinholt, Deputy Chief of the Department of Justice's Counterterrorism Section, explains these tools and how they are being used to win convictions.[3] On page thirty-one of the article he lists the statutes being used in the criminal prosecution of terrorist financing and among these statutes is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)...

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...

By Les Blough http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_23423.shtml November 4, 2004 - "How will we get out of this, another dirty, Godless war, fought in the service of Global Corporatism? What will the "Exit Strategy" from this mess look like -when it is all over? The images of U.S. soldiers fleeing Vietnam have been burned into our minds for 30+ years with U.S. helicopters pushed off the sterns of ships, decades of suffering by Vietnam Veterans with disabilities, their broken families, the never-ending searches for MIAs and a national guilt that will haunt us for years to come. To these memories, the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq will carry the additional 'baggage' of the effects of depleted uranium on Afghan and Iraqi children and the loss of the culture to which all human beings owe their genesis. What images will be burned into our minds 30 years hence? Indeed, what images of us will be carried into history for those looking back?" - Les Blough,...

by Stephen Lendman […] When the most powerful military force in the history of the universe throws up its hands and effectively cries uncle, it shows how bad things are in the Kafkaesque maelstrom of Iraq. It also shows how hopeless this adventure was that should have been brain-dead and stillborn from the start - but you'd never know it from the head-in-the-sand comments of the "stay-the-coursers" in Washington that includes the president, vice-president and Democrat leadership even when their language changes. They're willing to fine-tune the tactical management of the operation as they're now about to do but never willing to give up the prize they've already invested so much in and can't afford to give up because the cost of doing it is so great. It's what journalist Robert Fisk meant when he said "the US must get out (of Iraq), they will get out, and they can't get out." Here's more evidence of how bad things are and how imposs...

see also: Family Feud: Little Bush Hits Back at Daddy Written by Chris Floyd Wednesday, 15 November 2006 http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=923&Itemid=135 Bush Initiates Iraq Policy Review Separate From Baker Group's By Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 15, 2006; A16 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/14/AR2006111401095_pf.html Strategy document calls for extra 20,000 troops, aid for Iraqi army and regional summit by Simon Tisdall Thursday November 16, 2006 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1948748,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1 President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations. Mr Bush's...

by Mary Pitt It is a comon expression that one sees on the faces of "liberal" bloggers and op-ed writers on internet web sites as we view the talking heads in the expensive suits on the mainstream media dismissing us and demanding a move to the centrist viewpoint. It's like kenneling the watchdogs because a few foxes and skunks have been removed from the chicken house. We dis-elected enough right-wingers from the House of Representatives to give the Democrats a narrow edge and dislodged a few Senators so that there wiould be a fighting chance in the Senate and we are dismissed with a pat on the head and a "Good boy" and told that, despite our efforts, our agenda will be ignored in Congress for the next two years. We have made a start on the job ahead but there are still many thieves in the counting house and we have much work left to do. Many Neo-Con sympathizers remain in the Senate and both Houses are still rife with the Old Guard who exercize earmarks on a wh...

by Stephen Lendman The political firmament shook briefly post-November 7 raising hopes change would follow the Republican's drubbing at the polls and the Democrats regaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the GOP sweep in 1994. Presumed new House speaker Nancy Pelosi stopped the tremors making it clear no substantive change will be on the table when when the 110th Congress convenes on January 3. Instead, she announced to those paying attention it'll be business as usual (as it always is) as she intends to work with the president in a spirit of bipartisanship and not be "obstructionist" even though Republicans for past 12 years never returned that courtesy or even made a pretense of doing it. Pelosi made it clear the Democrat victory will be just another betrayal of the electorate that sent her and the Democrats a strong message it voted for a mandated populist anti-Bush, anti-war agenda it won't get. It's always for the same rea...