Anti-War Blogging

November 29, 2007

Vermont Anti-War Action: The next action by the ad hoc anti-war group that has been upping the ante of late will be tomorrow (Friday) at 3:00 p.m. at the military recruiting center in Williston (166 Sycamore Street – near the box store hell zone). This action has been in the works for weeks and was the brainchild of about a dozen Mt. Mansfield High School (MMHS) students who are both opposed to the war and fed up with the continued presence of military recruiters at their school. Interestingly, the last Vermonter killed in the Iraq war was a MMHS graduate. The message of the rally is “out of our schools, out of Iraq.” The group had been planning to make the action a bit of a surprise but military recruiters somehow got wind of it and – yesterday — let the MMHS students know that they knew about it. So the surprise is over but the action will go on as planned. Join us. Support these budding activists. And, better yet, help stop this war and the military’s preying on the youth of this nation to be war fodder.

Speaking of Iraq: There’s been a lot of talk lately about how “the surge is working.” File it under “p” for propaganda, please. The problem, though, is that many of the lily-livered Dems – especially those at the top – are falling for it. On Sunday, for example, the New York Times ran this article on its front page with this headline: “As Democrats See Iraq Gains, A Shift in Tone.” Good grief. And this means that the latest round of so-called tough talk from the Dems in Congress about blocking future war funding is just plain nonsense. The writing’s on the wall. The Dems will be – once again – whipped into submission after failing to stand up to what is obviously nothing more than war propaganda.

The truth about Iraq is that it is still a mess and any of the so-called “gains” there of late are more about the strategies of the moment for the warring factions than any U.S. military strategies. In the November 19, 2007 edition of The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson details the current situation in Iraq in a fine piece titled “Inside the Surge.” Read it. And then you’ll see that – like most of the Iraq debacle – the U.S. military is fumbling and stumbling like they always have been over there. Anderson details, for example, how the current slow-down in deaths and attacks is more a result of a temporary changing of alliances in the religious/civil war the U.S. is now trying to referee. The entrenched Sunnis and Shiites are basically re-tooling and re-adjusting for the skirmishes on the horizon. And the U.S. war machine is so damn hungry for any semblance of positive news that they’re jumping on this and running with it straight to the front pages of the New York Times and the evening news. Worse, the ninny Dems are bowing to it instead of challenging it and exposing it for what it truly is: bullshit.

Iraq is mired in a vicious civil war and, worse, the U.S. presence there is fueling it. On some days the Shiite leaders will use the U.S. military to put the screws to the Sunnis. And on other days the Sunnis will return the favor. But the clumsy U.S. military will take these strategic overtures as “evidence” that things are getting better. Until, that is, the next strap-on bomb goes off on the body of a so-called friend.

There is no rationality in this struggle. It is filled with religious hatred and vengeance. Take, for example, the story Anderson tells in his New Yorker piece about two brothers and their mother seeking revenge for the death of their brother/son. The brothers declare that “ten people per finger” must be killed as revenge for their brother’s death. Yes, they decide that “justice’ will be served only after they’ve personally killed 100 people. And so they set out to kill and kill and kill, notching each new death as another step toward “justice.”

But the pathology gets worse. The mother tells her vengeful sons that she wants body parts of the new victims brought to her. “Yes, I want revenge,” she told Anderson. Don’t believe her? Here’s an excerpt from Anderson’s article:

Um Jafaar [the brother] went on to tell me that she took the body parts of Amar’s victims, wrapped in cloth, to his grave, in the holy city of Najaf, and buried them there. “I talk to my son, I tell him, ‘Here, this is from those who killed you, I take revenge.’” Moving one hand in a horizontal circle, she said, “I put them around the grave. So far, I have taken one hand, one eye, an Adam’s apple, toes, fingers, ears, and noses.” (Karim told me that the hand had made the house stink for days.) I asked her how many Mahdi men Amar had killed. “I don’t know: eighteen, twenty? But still my heart hurts. Even if we kill all of them, I won’t have comfort,” she said.

And that, my friends, is what the U.S. military is in the center of. Good luck with that. Here’s what one U.S. officer told Anderson:

Balancing the Shia and the Sunni – the politics of it – that’s the hardest part of my job. ‘Hunt bad guy, kill bad guy’ – O.K., that’s what I’m trained to do. But they don’t train you for this.

If you need a little more proof that the “surge is working” nonsense is, well, nonsense, check out this piece from Editors & Publishers. It’s an article on a recent report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism that chronicles Iraq war reporting. And the conclusion: It’s worse than what’s being reported. Far worse. Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:

Above all, the journalists — most of them veteran war correspondents — describe conditions in Iraq as the most perilous they have ever encountered, and this above everything else is influencing the reporting,” the report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism stated. “A majority of journalists surveyed say most of the country is too dangerous to visit. Nine out of ten say that about at least half of Baghdad itself. Wherever they go, traveling with armed guards and chase vehicles is the norm for more than seven out of ten surveyed.

Hmm, it seems like a pretty good time to protest. I hope I’ll see you all in Williston tomorrow.