Category: Political

Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to loot

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 10, 2003

I hope that Canada.com will forgive me for stealing this oh-so-perfect title. I could not resist.

I’ve been asked why I don’t admit that I was wrong about the Iraqi war. Why don’t I acknowledge the success and join in the jubilation of the people shown on TV yesterday. It must be arrogance on my part not to admit I was wrong and all those who supported a US-led war in Iraq were right.

True, having Saddam Hussein no longer in power is a good thing. No one denies that. But if he’s just going to be replaced by another similar to himself, who grabs power in this chaos, what’s the point?

If we were concerned about the people of Iraq, we would have brought the different Iraqi leaders together before the war and reached agreement about an interim government. We would have stabilized each region as we pushed through, rather than enter, blast, kill Iraqi soldiers, and move on. Because we did not stabilize the areas we moved through, we left hungry, thirsty people in our wake who are now being victimized by thieves and murders. We left aid workers unable to enter areas because fighting still continues.

If the focus was on bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, we would have secured the area so that Abdul Majid al-Khoei would not have been assassinated as he arrived in Iraq. Haider al-Kadar wouldn’t have been murdered by a mob. We wouldn’t have Chalabi working to seize leadership, a move that makes one wonder exactly what, or who, will replace Saddam Hussein.

Britain definitely wouldn’t be putting the control of Basra on a tribal leader on the basis that a) the leader volunteered and b) the British interviewed him for two hours, and he seemed okay. Only now are we hearing that most of the tribal sheikh were in the pay of Saddam Hussein, and are deeply distrusted in the area.

In time of war, there is always looting, but the scale of the chaos in Iraq is reaching anarchistic proportions.

A water line from Kuwait into Umm Qasr was opened this month, but it also falls short of the need, and some of that water has been hijacked by bandits who sell it on the black market, meaning that the most desperate people – the weak and the poor – are doing without.

Common Dreams

This is the same water supply system that Rumsfeld recently boasted about to American journalists, who eat this stuff up like sweet taffy on a spoon.

The US and Britain armed forces do little to stop the chaos because they are still on their primary mission of defeating Iraq. Additionally, troops fresh from the battlefield do not make good peacekeeping troops. Quite the contrary, they seem to almost encourage the chaos.

Not only are office fixtures and candy being looted – now hospitals are being stripped, food stolen, cars hijacked, people being shot. In Basra. In Baghdad. Throughout the country. What’s the response of the commanders?

“We’re seeing a lot of jubilation, (from) people who have been oppressed for years and years. We believe that this will settle down in due time,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, who is deputy director of operations for U.S. Central Command.

Contra Costa Times

This is an example of our strategy to help the people in Iraq? Equating these events with the same exuberance one would equate with a end-of-term school dorm?

Everyone pats Rumsfeld on the back for his strategic genius in using fast, small forces. Colin Powell’s star has fallen because he pushed for more troops; after all, with the strategy we followed, we entered Baghdad in two weeks. And the civilian casualties are relatively light.

Yes, but we did so at the cost of a completely de-stabilized country, which is quickly heading into a disastrous collapse of all authority, with the very real danger of many, many more civilian dead and injured, as well as early signs of widespread disease now beginning to appear. If we had gone in with the larger number of troops that Colin Powell recommended, there would have been enough people to leave behind at each community, and hold the infrastructure in place long enough until a more permanent solution is reached by the new Iraqi government.

I’d hold those pats on the back and congratulations for Mr. Rumsfeld if I were people.

I can appreciate that the military exercised great caution in bombs dropped and that the initial count of dead is relatively low – only (only?) about 3000 or so (most likely more before we’re done), but that never was the issue about Iraq. We knew that the US would win the preliminary battles – there was no question of this. But we also knew that the real problems would happen afterwards. If some are astonished at the speed with which this war was fought, I’m astonished at the speed at which these problems have surfaced.

Here’s a deal – if in one year I see peace in Iraq under a government that’s reasonably acceptable to Iraq and most of the Middle East, I’ll admit I was wrong. But in the meantime, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t find some statue to knock down in celebration.

Political

Waste not. Want not.

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 10, 2003

Guardian Unlimited’s Brian Whitaker’s Symbolic in more ways than one:

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, again threatened to escalate the Middle East conflict last night when he accused Iraq’s neighbour, Syria, of helping senior members of the Baghdad regime to escape. The US was getting “scraps of evidence” to this effect, Mr Rumsfeld added.

Asia Times:

Many believe the “Syria-next” scenario to be improbable. For one thing, the Bush administration knows that an assault on Syria would merely polarize the Middle East further. And, perhaps more significantly, even Washington hardliners don’t really believe a war is needed to change Syrian behavior.

I’ve always been a big believer in recycling.

Political

Game over, US won

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 9, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Doc wrote today:

We’ve won in Iraq. The citizens of Bagdad are elated. Nothing like a toppled statue to make a conclusive point.
…
The sounds I heard coming from Cheney this morning were very encouraging. If we do what he says we’re doing, maybe we can restore some level of trust in an Arab world that’s still very skeptical.

Right now I’m just looking forward to the day when some Las Vegas theme hotel has a headless statue of Saddam outside one of its bars

Well, hmm. Hmm.

To which I then responded with:

Let’s see – over 3000 Iraqi dead, several journalists dead or injured, battles raging all over the country, just starting to see the so-called terrorists activities start, Arab world furious, and the United States beat a tiny, ill-equipped people, and has forced them to scramble in the dirt for food and water.

Cheney basically saying that we’re occuping the country, but the UN can handle all those rag tag people that are hungry and thirsty. We’ll take care of the oil and the wealth.

Of course, we showed the world the chemical and biological weapons that made Iraq such an imminent threat. Didn’t we?

And best of all, all the webloggers don’t have to talk about this anymore – they can [go] back to talking about how great we webloggers are.

How humane.

How well informed.

Oh by the way, did you see this neat trick you can do in Radio?

A bit confused, Doc re-reads posting, and responds with:

Ah fuck.

Trying to make sense of this, I go back and re-read my post and realize there’s yes-I’m-still-peaceblogging paragraph missing.

O well.

For what it’s worth, here’s just one chunk of what Cheney said:

“Exactly what it will look like is something the people of Iraq are going to have to determine. I think it would be a mistake for we, as Americans, to say, well, look, here’s a cookie mold, this is how we do it, this is, therefore, exactly how you have to do it. I don’t think that will work. I don’t think that takes into account their unique culture and historical experience and so forth. They’re going to have to work it themselves and figure out what makes sense from their standpoint, given the social organization and the way their society has functioned in the past. And it’ll be a difficult task. But they’ve got some very able people already engaged in thinking about those kinds of thoughts and issues.”

For now I’d like to take him at his word. Let’s see what happens

I then see the following paragraph in the posting:

Later I’ll get around to blogging more about what the Mayor of Hiroshima has to say about our successful new National Security policy. And the fine time Mike Hawash is having, enjoying his protected American freedom in jail.

I think about what Doc says – let’s see what happens. Already happening:

“Where is General Garner now?,” Chalabi said in an interview with CNN from his base in Nassiriya. “People are hungry, their supplies are going to run out. Why are they not here? Why are they in Kuwait?”

Chalabi, who earlier said he was to meet U.S. officials and Iraqi politicians on Saturday to begin planning an interim authority for Iraq, also said members of President Saddam Hussein’s Baath party still posed a danger.

“The remnants of the Baath party will continue to pose a threat…as long as there is no electricity, security or water,” Chalabi said in the interview monitored in London.

“They are rapidly trying to ingratiate themselves…and try to bamboozle the American commanders into cooperating with them. The ‘de-Baathification’ process must begin here,” he said.

Doc and I might not always come from the same direction, but we’re both saying the same thing:

What makes anybody think this is all over because a statue gets pulled down?

Diversity Political

Ladylike behavior

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 6, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Under the banner of equal opportunity, the demand for full integration of women means special treatment for women. They want special breaks-a woman shouldn’t have to perform the same physical tests as a man. This agenda is driven not by women in uniform, but by their civilian advocates, who would never find themselves or their children serving in the military. The most powerful argument against women in combat, however, is not their relative physical strength. It is that decent men protect women in the face of a physical threat. The typical American male cannot pretend that the soldier to the right of him is a man and not a woman. If this bizarre social experiment of moving women closer and closer to the front lines is going to continue, American mothers had better be put on notice that we’ve got to start raising our sons differently. We’ve got to start telling them, “You’d better go hit that girl. Well, what did you do when she called you a name? Did you hit her?”

Kate O’Beirne, Washington Editor of the National Review in interview

I was struck by the ethnic diversity of the photographs of the women who were killed, captured, and injured from the 507 Maintenance Company. Pfc. Lori Piestewa was a Hopi indian, as well as mother of two children. Shoshana Johnson, an African-American, is also a mother, described as kind and friendly, and who loves cooking. And of course, I don’t need to link to anything to describe young, blonde Jessica Lynch, do I? The news is full of her rescue. She and Pfc. Piestewa were roommates and close friends.

‘This is a national security issue,’ said Bartlett. ‘They will rape and torture women in front of the men and break the men. They say that’s a problem with men. I hope we never live in a society in which men are not deferential to women”

Human Events

The stories about Pfc. Lynch, in particular, have been pretty wild. Real GI Jane stuff, with her firing back until she ran out of bullets. Chances are all of the troops, including Johnson and Piestewa, fired back until they ran out of bullets. Unless they were dead, of course.

‘We join the Marine Corps to be good Marines and fight for our country,’ Malugani said. ‘I recognize that there are physical differences between men and women, but it all comes down to the same thing: whether you can do the job.

‘Everyone is faced with challenges, everybody has weaknesses and everybody has strengths,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t come down to a male-female thing. It’s a human being thing.’

Marine lst Lt. Amy Mulugani, for Stars and Stripes

I think we now have an answer to the age-old question about what will a woman soldier do in war? Just what the men do – their jobs. And trying to stay alive to come home again.

Of course, women are excluded from combat roles in the United States. Unfortunately, this doesn’t block them from combat – just the promotional possibilities associated with combat roles.

They know that there already is a khaki ceiling. The ladder to the top jobs has to include combat positions, yet women are still formally prohibited from most combat units. (This although the lines between deployments is so thin as to be semipermeable; Shoshana Johnson, now a prisoner of war, was sent to Iraq as a cook.) The group that lobbied for a change in the combat ban, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, has been weakened by the Bush administration, swayed by conservative critics who howled about its “feminist agenda.” Among the new female voices in the Pentagon is one former master sergeant who opposes women in combat because “women enjoy being protected by men.” She says that the skills needed for fighting are “to survive, to escape and to evade,” adding, “clearly, women don’t have those as a rule.”

Quindlen: Battlefield Rape Is Less a Concern Than It Is in Service at Home

Women enjoy being protected by men.

Unfortunately, coming home means coming home to the very real possibility of sexual assault at the hands of their own commanders and fellow soldiers. I guess it’s just an example of that old male deference and protectiveness paid to women.

In times of peace the powers that be may conveniently forget how many women there now are on the battlefield, how hard they work and how well they perform. Military leaders may forget that if the number of women willing to enlist drops significantly, the ability of America to defend itself will drop significantly, too.

And they may forget how terrible it is that women who must face sexual assault from the enemy as the price of war too often expect to face it from their compatriots in peacetime. As a colonel in the Air Force whose daughter says she was attacked by a fellow cadet told The New York Times: “She knew she could have been captured by an enemy, raped and pillaged in war. She did not expect to be raped and pillaged at the United States Air Force Academy.”

In fact, no soldier should expect to be assaulted by another without significant consequences. Yet that is what has happened. Those who have always been hostile to female soldiers say that this is inevitable, given the atmosphere of esprit with which women interfere, given the machismo that is essential for trained fighting forces. This is insulting to male soldiers. The suggestion is that they are always one beer away from a sexual assault, no more able to control their violent impulses than an attack dog.
…
As their sisters did in Desert Storm, many will return from the Middle East, having served in combat despite the ban, with an official wink and a nod. Maybe it’s the same wink and a nod you get after you’ve been pinned down and penetrated by a fellow cadet, the one that says you have to go along to get along.

Quindlen: Battlefield Rape Is Less a Concern Than It Is in Service at Home

(Thanks to Norm and Joseph Duemer for links to stories)

Government

What’s next

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 4, 2003

I have been sending emails to groups that have and still are organizing marches for peace, basically posing to them the question: what’s next. Specifically, I sent emails to MoveOn and a more local organization Instead of War. The only email I’ve gotten in return from both is group emails for new actions.

Instead of War sent an email listing several new peace marches, some focused around the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. According to the note, one of the marches is sponsored by the Martin Luther King Jr Holiday Committee. I’ll be honest that even if I were still marching to protest the war in Iraq, I would not march in a protest sponsored by a committee that considers the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr a ‘holiday’. I’m sorry, but I only commemorate Dr. King’s life. This march has a very confused message.

I’m not surprised that I haven’t received any response from Instead of War in regards to “What’s Next?” From my previous experience with protests against the Vietnam war and transporting nuclear waste across Washington state as well as several other environmentally and politically related issues, I have found that protest organizations are very conservative.

The MoveOn organization, though, sent an email that started with the following:

The war with Iraq continues. No one knows if it will last weeks, months, or years. Even after the fighting stops in Iraq, the fallout from this war could span decades. We can only hope that it ends quickly, with an absolute minimum loss of life.

The email addresses the question of What next? by starting a letter to the editor campaign focusing specifically on the issues that I find myself focused on — working against a US controlled occupation of Iraq:

Even as the troops march towards Baghdad, a big controversy is brewing over what will happen when the war does end. The neoconservatives like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle envision a longer U.S. occupation of Iraq, directed entirely by the Pentagon and with only minimal participation by other countries and the U.N. Their scheme calls for setting up a provisional government in which Americans head each of the 23 ministries. In essence, they want to win the peace the way the U.S. has pushed for war: alone.

The U.S. State Department, the C.I.A., Prime Minister Tony Blair, the major humanitarian relief organizations, France, Germany, and most of the rest of the countries in the world disagree with this plan. They’d like to see the reconstruction of Iraq as a collaborative, international effort lead by the U.N. And many of them believe the Pentagon plan is a recipe for disaster.

The decision on how post-war Iraq is to be managed will be made in the next several days, and the Administration is split. The consequences will play out in Iraq and around the world for generations. By writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, you can help to sway the balance away from the unilateralism that has done so much damage and toward a collective rebuilding process.

I’m not sure that a letter to the editor campaign will help sway the balance away from the unilateralism but it will start the conversation in that direction, and this is not a bad thing. In fact, the same letter should be sent to congressional members and local politicians, in addition to those who are campaigning for political positions in upcoming elections. Start the letters with, “I am a registered voter…”.