Someone remind me: Why is the gov't at war

[Wild Bill]

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/featur...ml?id=110009715

 

Some quotes:

 

What is remarkable about this state of affairs in Washington is just how removed it is from what is actually happening in Iraq.

 

Congress thus faces a choice in the weeks and months ahead. Will we allow our actions to be driven by the changing conditions on the ground in Iraq--or by the unchanging political and ideological positions long ago staked out in Washington? What ultimately matters more to us: the real fight over there, or the political fight over here?

 

If we stopped the legislative maneuvering and looked to Baghdad, we would see what the new security strategy actually entails and how dramatically it differs from previous efforts. For the first time in the Iraqi capital, the focus of the U.S. military is not just training indigenous forces or chasing down insurgents, but ensuring basic security--meaning an end, at last, to the large-scale sectarian slaughter and ethnic cleansing that has paralyzed Iraq for the past year.

 

Where previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias, now more U.S. and Iraqi forces are either in place or on the way.

 

But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago--with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. We are now in a stronger position to ensure basic security--and with that, we are in a stronger position to marginalize the extremists and strengthen the moderates;

 

Unfortunately, for many congressional opponents of the war, none of this seems to matter. As the battle of Baghdad just gets underway, they have already made up their minds about America's cause in Iraq, declaring their intention to put an end to the mission before we have had the time to see whether our new plan will work.

 

I understand the frustration, anger and exhaustion so many Americans feel about Iraq, the desire to throw up our hands and simply say, "Enough." And I am painfully aware of the enormous toll of this war in human life, and of the infuriating mistakes that have been made in the war's conduct.

 

In fact, halting the current security operation at midpoint, as virtually all of the congressional proposals seek to do, would have devastating consequences. It would put thousands of American troops already deployed in the heart of Baghdad in even greater danger--forced to choose between trying to hold their position without the required reinforcements or, more likely, abandoning them outright. A precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake, which terrorists, insurgents, militias and Iran would rush to fill--probably resulting in a spiral of ethnic cleansing and slaughter on a scale as yet unseen in Iraq.

 

I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next. Instead of undermining Gen. Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month, let us give him and his troops the time and support they need to succeed.

 

Gen. Petraeus says he will be able to see whether progress is occurring by the end of the summer, so let us declare a truce in the Washington political war over Iraq until then.

 

We are at a critical moment in Iraq--at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle against the totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism.

 

Mr. Lieberman is an Independent senator from Connecticut.

[Eric the Red]

Aginst the government, not the soldiers

[Nicole]

what i dont get.......

 

 

why so many middle-eastern people work in the washington dc airport.

[husker rob]

Some say that Bush has brought down this country, but the stock market is at all time highs and unemployment is at an all time low, which is better then when the great Bill Clinton was in office.

 

 

I just thought I'd bring this up again because of the f*ck!ing wonderful performance of the Stock Market today. As of right now almost 400 pts down for the DOW. Largest slide in 3 1/2 years. Everyone on Wall Street is freaking out about China's stock market slide. I hope this isn't a sign of times to come (Recession).

but yet it is still higher then when Clinton was in office.

[NU fan in Denver]

Some say that Bush has brought down this country, but the stock market is at all time highs and unemployment is at an all time low, which is better then when the great Bill Clinton was in office.

 

 

I just thought I'd bring this up again because of the f*ck!ing wonderful performance of the Stock Market today. As of right now almost 400 pts down for the DOW. Largest slide in 3 1/2 years. Everyone on Wall Street is freaking out about China's stock market slide. I hope this isn't a sign of times to come (Recession).

but yet it is still higher then when Clinton was in office.

 

Yeah it is cause it has hit all time highs repeatedly for the last few months, all it is going to take is 2 more slides like yesterday to bring it below. 7th worst slide in history, that's sickening, at least it went up today. But if you look at the DOW'S 10 yr. chart its previous high came in around Dec of 1999. Then Mr. Oil came in in Jan of 00 and it took down for 3 years. This can be attributed to the crash of the numerous tech stocks and company that went bust. I know personally that the value of my investments is about 25% less than what they were in 1999. So just because the DOW is at an all time high doesn't mean everyone is well off.

[husker rob]

Not to be critical about your investment strategy, but if you are down 25% over the last 8 years, your manager needs to be fired. There are alot of funds out there have average returns of over 12% for the last 10 years.

[HuskerNCo]

Ya know, sometimes it's ok to live in my non-reality world.

 

I really hate the fact that, (no I do hate), the ugliness that tears this country apart. I hate that we are at war, (just because going to war is not my favorite answer not that I have the answers) and I worry about family and friends shipped over there, gas prices are outragous, milk is $3.00 a gallon, my 401 sucks ass at the moment, and it's snowing again!!

 

If you were of the right personality, you could become extremely depressed. I support my country and my/the military always but it does get a bit difficult at times...

 

I'm going back to my non-reality.... They serve wine there...

[Wild Bill]

Drinking cow's milk is bad for you because it causes you to have lots of mucus which in turn makes you more susceptible to upper respiratory infections.

 

I wish we'd get a good snow storm here in the St. Lluis area to knock some sense into the idiots who are wearing shorts and tee-shirts.

 

Carry on with the wine drinking, vato.

[Wild Bill]

[Eric the Red]

Soldiers share troubling health care stories

 

Again, the disgusting truth about our government (DEMs/REPs) Spend $500 billion to kill and nothing on repair

 

By Anne Hull and Dana Priest

Updated: 6 minutes ago

 

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

 

"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."

 

Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.

Story continues below ↓ advertisement

 

The official reaction to the revelations at Walter Reed has been swift, and it has exposed the potential political costs of ignoring Oliva's 24.3 million comrades -- America's veterans -- many of whom are among the last standing supporters of the Iraq war. In just two weeks, the Army secretary has been fired, a two-star general relieved of command and two special commissions appointed; congressional subcommittees are lining up for hearings, the first today at Walter Reed; and the president, in his weekly radio address, redoubled promises to do right by the all-volunteer force, 1.5 million of whom have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

But much deeper has been the reaction outside Washington, including from many of the 600,000 new veterans who left the service after Iraq and Afghanistan. Wrenching questions have dominated blogs, talk shows, editorial cartoons, VFW spaghetti suppers and the solitary late nights of soldiers and former soldiers who fire off e-mails to reporters, members of Congress and the White House -- looking, finally, for attention and solutions.

 

‘Tipping point’

Several forces converged to create this intense reaction. A new Democratic majority in Congress is willing to criticize the administration. Senior retired officers pounded the Pentagon with sharp questions about what was going on. Up to 40 percent of the troops fighting in Iraq are National Guard members and reservists -- "our neighbors," said Ron Glasser, a physician and author of a book about the wounded. "It all adds up and reaches a kind of tipping point," he said. On top of all that, America had believed the government's assurances that the wounded were being taken care of. "The country is embarrassed" to know otherwise, Glasser said.

 

The scandal has reverberated through generations of veterans. "It's been a potent reminder of past indignities and past traumas," said Thomas A. Mellman, a professor of psychiatry at Howard University who specializes in post-traumatic stress and has worked in Veterans Affairs hospitals. "The fact that it's been responded to so quickly has created mixed feelings -- gratification, but obvious regret and anger that such attention wasn't given before, especially for Vietnam veterans."

 

Michel du Cille / The Washington Post

Roberto Reyes gets instructions from (left to right) his mother, Aida Rivera, aunt, Maria Mendez, and his 12 year-old cousin, Bianca Mendez.

Across the country, some military quarters for wounded outpatients are in bad shape, according to interviews, Government Accountability Office reports and transcripts of congressional testimony. The mold, mice and rot of Walter Reed's Building 18 compose a familiar scenario for many soldiers back from Iraq or Afghanistan who were shipped to their home posts for treatment. Nearly 4,000 outpatients are currently in the military's Medical Holding or Medical Holdover companies, which oversee the wounded. Soldiers report bureaucratic disarray similar to Walter Reed's: indifferent, untrained staff; lost paperwork; medical appointments that drop from the computers; and long waits for consultations.

 

Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.

 

"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"

 

Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he said. "Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."

 

Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.

[Eric the Red]

Some say that Bush has brought down this country, but the stock market is at all time highs and unemployment is at an all time low, which is better then when the great Bill Clinton was in office.

 

 

I just thought I'd bring this up again because of the f*ck!ing wonderful performance of the Stock Market today. As of right now almost 400 pts down for the DOW. Largest slide in 3 1/2 years. Everyone on Wall Street is freaking out about China's stock market slide. I hope this isn't a sign of times to come (Recession).

but yet it is still higher then when Clinton was in office.

 

 

But who does this help? The few Americans who are able to invest. None of this is taught in High schools. Someone who is permanently disabled, on a fixed income, can afford even $50/month to invest in.

 

In other words the wedge is driving even stronger between the upper and lower class. Not good. You can only beat on the middle/lower class for so long before they erupt. Everyone should do themselves a favor and read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Learn about class struggle and the major disturbances class conflict has caused.

 

It wont be long now.

[MCAT800]

Can't think of what I was going to say, getting old I guess

[Eric the Red]

Some say that Bush has brought down this country, but the stock market is at all time highs and unemployment is at an all time low, which is better then when the great Bill Clinton was in office.

 

 

I just thought I'd bring this up again because of the f*ck!ing wonderful performance of the Stock Market today. As of right now almost 400 pts down for the DOW. Largest slide in 3 1/2 years. Everyone on Wall Street is freaking out about China's stock market slide. I hope this isn't a sign of times to come (Recession).

but yet it is still higher then when Clinton was in office.

 

 

But who does this help? The few Americans who are able to invest. None of this is taught in High schools. Someone who is permanently disabled, on a fixed income, can afford even $50/month to invest in.

 

In other words the wedge is driving even stronger between the upper and lower class. Not good. You can only beat on the middle/lower class for so long before they erupt. Everyone should do themselves a favor and read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Learn about class struggle and the major disturbances class conflict has caused.

 

It wont be long now.

 

 

howardzinn.org

 

One of the greatest writers and socially conscience persons I ever read and met. One of the greatest days of my life is when I got to sit down with one of my hero's and sit down and have a discussion with him in a classroom setting. How many people can say that?

[Eric the Red]

ZNet Commentary

War Is Not A Solution For Terrorism September 07, 2006

By Howard Zinn

 

There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

 

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

 

I remember John Hersey's novel, "The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

 

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.

 

Even the "victories" of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

 

The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence -- the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.

 

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a "war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

 

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

 

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a "suspected terrorist" is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is "inevitable."

 

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in "accidental" events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

 

For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by ``accident." Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.

 

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.

 

Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University and the author of the forthcoming book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress to be published by City Lights Books (www.citylights.com) this winter.

[Eric the Red]

"Our government has declared a military victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. I will mourn the dead -- the American GIs, and also the Iraqi dead, of which there have been many, many more.

 

I will mourn the Iraqi children, not just those who are dead, but those who have been be blinded, crippled, disfigured, or traumatized, like the bombed children of Afghanistan who, as reported by American visitors, lost their power of speech. The American media has not given us a full picture of the human suffering caused by our bombing; for that, we need to read the foreign press." -- Howard Zinn