unclear about whether I favored or opposed the slate noted and
someone who thought the programmers listed were candidates.
To be clear, I FAVOR the only slate mentioned, which was adopted
by our Committee to Strengthen KPFK and endorsed by the
programmers listed right above it. -Ed
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer85.html
The Anti-Empire Report
September 1st, 2010
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
Things which don't go away. Things the American government and media don't
let go of.
And neither do I.
Iraq
"They're leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their
hearts," declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq.
It's enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him
choke up.
Enough to make him forget.
But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the
society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans,
beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then
invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured
... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything - their homes,
their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment,
their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their
careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical
health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their
women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security,
their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future,
their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded,
traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The
air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the
most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for
children to pick them up ... an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to
fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened
by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia ... a
river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country
that may never be put back together again.
"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better
before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May
5, 2007.
No matter ... drum roll, please ... Stand tall American GI hero! And don't
even think of ever apologizing. Iraq is forced by the United States to
continue paying reparations for its own invasion of Kuwait in 1990. How much
will the American heroes pay the people of Iraq?
"Unhappy the land that has no heroes ...
No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes."
- Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo
"What we need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of
war; something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and
yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to
be incompatible."
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Perhaps the groundwork for that heroism already exists ... February 15,
2003, a month before the US invasion of Iraq, probably the largest protest
in human history, between six and ten million protesters took to the streets
of some 800 cities in nearly sixty countries across the globe.
Iraq. Love it or leave it.
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/two_wars_dont_make_a_right_20100901/
Two Wars Don't Make a Right
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: Sept. 1, 2010
The carnage is not yet complete, and President Barack Obama's attempt to put
the best face on the ignominious U.S. occupation of Iraq will not hide what
he and the rest of the world well know. The lies that empowered George W.
Bush to invade Iraq represent an enduring stain on the reputation of
American democracy. Our much-vaunted system of checks and balances failed to
temper the mendacity of the president who acted like a king and got away
with it.
It is utter nonsense for Obama, who in the past has made clear his belief
that the Bush administration's case for this war was a tissue of lies, to
now state: "The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of
Iraq in the hands of its people." We paid a huge price simply to assuage the
arrogance of a president that was unfettered by the restraints of common
sense expected in a functioning democracy. Particularly shameful was the
betrayal by the Congress and the mass media of the obligations to challenge
a president who exploited post-9/11 fears to go to war with a nation that
had nothing whatsoever to do with that attack.
With hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans dead and maimed and at a
cost of $3 trillion to American taxpayers, the U.S. imperial adventure in
Iraq has left that country in a horrible mess, controlled by a corrupt and
deeply divided elite that shows no serious inclination to effectively
govern. Nor can there be a claim of enhanced U.S. security when the real
victors are the ayatollahs of Iran, whose influence in once bitterly hostile
Iraq is now immense. The price in shattered lives and dollars will continue,
as Iraq remains haunted by ethnic and religious conflict that we did so much
to provoke.
Remember when most of the once respected mass media, and not just the
obvious lunatics on cable, bought the Bush propaganda that democracy in
Iraq, a harbinger of a new Middle East, was just around the corner? They
based that absurd expectation on the fact that an Iraqi ayatollah disciple
of the ones ruining Iran could order millions of his followers to hold up
purple fingers. What a joke we have made of the ideal of representative
democracy when Iraq is operating under an incomprehensible constitution,
which our proconsul ordered, and is still without a functioning government
six months after an election that our media once again dutifully celebrated.
Mark the obit on this disaster by John Simpson, the highly regarded BBC
world affairs editor, writing Tuesday from Baghdad that "nowadays it is hard
to find anyone who sees America as a friend or mentor." Dismissing the
original American expectation that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would
expand democracy in the Middle East, Simpson concludes: "On the contrary,
America's position in the Middle East has been visibly eroded. . America
seems to have shrunk as a direct result of its imperial adventure in Iraq."
The one positive outcome is that with the formal end of the U.S. occupation
many Americans have finally learned the lesson that imperialism does not
pay. While Bush fiddled with a nonexistent terrorist threat from Iraq, the
U.S. economy burned and the oil loot that some thought would make it all
worthwhile never materialized. Remember when the neoconservatives were
riding high and Paul Wolfowitz assured a supine Congress that Iraqi oil
would pay for it all?
Nor did the invasion even make more secure our access to Mideast oil while
competitors like China were busily securing foreign energy rights to shore
up their bustling economies. Obama acknowledged this reality in his speech
when he stated, "We must jump-start industries that create jobs, and end our
dependence on foreign oil."
For all his talk about turning our attention homeward, Obama reveals his
obsession with the imperial adventure in Afghanistan, where "because of our
drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to go on offense." Once again there is the
expectation that the occupied will embrace the occupiers and that the
deployment of massive military power "will disrupt, dismantle and defeat
al-Qaida," as if that is any longer relevant to our deep involvement in a
treacherous civil war in which we have no reliable partners.
Al-Qaida was never present in Iraq before we invaded, and according to
Obama's
own national security adviser, there are fewer than a hundred members of the
group left in Afghanistan, unable to coordinate any actions. Obama deserves
credit for extracting this country from a war in Iraq that he inherited, but
it is mind-numbing that in his nation-building efforts in Afghanistan he is
now repeating the same errors that were made in Iraq.
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