----- Original Message -----
From: Adele Wallace
Subject: help me save the library
Join us to picket in front of City Council President Eric Garcetti's house!
Thurs. July 1 8AM - 12PM (the day 160 library workers are laid off)
2120 Avon St., in Echo Park (LA 90026)
Bring signs and books to read (fewer library hours mean we have to go elsewhere to read)
Bring your friends, children and pets.
Thurs. July 1 8AM - 12PM (the day 160 library workers are laid off)
2120 Avon St., in Echo Park (LA 90026)
Bring signs and books to read (fewer library hours mean we have to go elsewhere to read)
Bring your friends, children and pets.
The Political Action Committed of the Librarians' Guild is organizing this event to show public dissatisfaction with the City's plan to make disproportionate cuts to the Library budget. The city council and the mayor know that the lay-offs and shortened hours are not necessary to balance the city's budget. During negotiations we demonstrated many other ways to close the deficit without reducing library staff and services, but the city refused to listen. We can only wonder why.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26herbert.html?th&emc=th
Worse Than a Nightmare
By Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed: June 25, 2010
President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the
chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a
disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as
a whole will not support.
No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is
really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot
cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no
evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It's not
working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together,
the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that
something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required
for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
We've been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It's one of the most
corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production.
Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S.
cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the
enemy Taliban. The American public gave up on the war long ago, and it is
not at all clear that President Obama's heart is really in it.
For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in
Afghanistan - at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American
taxpayer dollars - is demented.
Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate,
Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside
the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You
don't go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this
ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don't want to do it, if you
have qualms about it, or don't know how to do it, don't go to war.
The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren't trying to win the hearts
and minds of anyone.
In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which
President Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and
that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next
breath, he soothingly assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will
begin on schedule, like a Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.
Both cannot be true.
What is true is that we aren't even fighting as hard as we can right now.
The counterinsurgency crowd doesn't want to whack the enemy too hard because
of an understandable fear that too many civilian casualties will undermine
the "hearts and minds" and nation-building components of the strategy. Among
the downsides of this battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to
give our own combat troops the supportive airstrikes and artillery cover
that they feel is needed.
In an article this week, The Times quoted a U.S. Army sergeant in southern
Afghanistan who was unhappy with the real-world effects of
counterinsurgency. "I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like
when they were down in a platoon," he said. "Either they never have been in
real fighting, or they forgot what it's like."
In the Rolling Stone article that led to General McChrystal's ouster,
reporter Michael Hastings wrote about the backlash that counterinsurgency
restraints had provoked among the general's own troops. Many feel that
"being told to hold their fire" increases their vulnerability. A former
Special Forces operator, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, said of
General McChrystal, according to Mr. Hastings, "His rules of engagement put
soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the
same thing."
We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan
and neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the
slightest clue about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the
military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president
to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning
of a withdrawal.
We're like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order
to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan,
only grief. We're bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to
establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We're spending endless
billions on this wretched war but can't extend the unemployment benefits of
Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.
The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a
nightmare it's over. This is all too tragically real.
Worse Than a Nightmare
By Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed: June 25, 2010
President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the
chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a
disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as
a whole will not support.
No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is
really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot
cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no
evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It's not
working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together,
the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that
something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required
for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
We've been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It's one of the most
corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production.
Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S.
cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the
enemy Taliban. The American public gave up on the war long ago, and it is
not at all clear that President Obama's heart is really in it.
For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in
Afghanistan - at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American
taxpayer dollars - is demented.
Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate,
Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside
the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You
don't go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this
ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don't want to do it, if you
have qualms about it, or don't know how to do it, don't go to war.
The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren't trying to win the hearts
and minds of anyone.
In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which
President Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and
that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next
breath, he soothingly assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will
begin on schedule, like a Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.
Both cannot be true.
What is true is that we aren't even fighting as hard as we can right now.
The counterinsurgency crowd doesn't want to whack the enemy too hard because
of an understandable fear that too many civilian casualties will undermine
the "hearts and minds" and nation-building components of the strategy. Among
the downsides of this battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to
give our own combat troops the supportive airstrikes and artillery cover
that they feel is needed.
In an article this week, The Times quoted a U.S. Army sergeant in southern
Afghanistan who was unhappy with the real-world effects of
counterinsurgency. "I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like
when they were down in a platoon," he said. "Either they never have been in
real fighting, or they forgot what it's like."
In the Rolling Stone article that led to General McChrystal's ouster,
reporter Michael Hastings wrote about the backlash that counterinsurgency
restraints had provoked among the general's own troops. Many feel that
"being told to hold their fire" increases their vulnerability. A former
Special Forces operator, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, said of
General McChrystal, according to Mr. Hastings, "His rules of engagement put
soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the
same thing."
We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan
and neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the
slightest clue about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the
military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president
to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning
of a withdrawal.
We're like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order
to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan,
only grief. We're bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to
establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We're spending endless
billions on this wretched war but can't extend the unemployment benefits of
Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.
The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a
nightmare it's over. This is all too tragically real.
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