You know, I’ve got a funny feeling I’ve seen this all before

10 09 2014

President Obama is speaking now about the necessity of going after ISIL, currently the most rabid of death-eaters of the Middle East.

ISIL is terrible, and terrible for the people of Iraq and Syria.

The US, by waging war on and in Iraq, has helped (but did not solely) prepare the ground on which ISIL arose. The Iraqi government, thru spectacular mismanagement and churlish policies toward its Sunni citizens, fertilized that ground, and Syrian President Assad, by emptying his jails of militants, gleefully seeded it.

Whatever the US responsibility for ISIL’s rise, however, it is not at all clear that we have the competence to clean up our own mess.

I wasn’t opposed to the limited bombing in support of the evacuation of the Yazidis, largely because it was limited in time and place and for a specific purpose, and for which the alternatives, including doing nothing, were unlikely to work in preventing a massacre.

But this, this expanded campaign  to “degrade, and ultimately destroy” ISIL?

No.

The president’s speech was short, and of the parts which weren’t filled with the usual boo-yah blather, strove for a combination of modesty and determination: no ground troops, working with allies, humanitarian assistance, strikes in Syria (not modest!), all geared toward long-term peace.

Peace—what a lovely idea.

But if we are determined to eliminate ISIL, modesty likely will not do, and I am concerned that if these modest efforts don’t work or work as well or as quickly as the war-bangers want, then we’ll hear—are already hearing—that determination requires immodesty, and by gum the US is weak, weak, I tell ya!, unless we’re willing to kill and die and kill some more.

As I’ve mentioned before, I do not believe that we act ably or well in our military endeavors in the Middle East.

It’s not so much that I fear that we might fail as believe that we have already failed, and with this re-engagement, are about to amplify that failure.

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Categories : Politics

Wanna get it right this time

13 06 2014

It is a good thing that I don’t own a television.

Because I would have thrown a whisky bottle thru the screen had I witnessed even one of the incompetent bastards who pom-pommed us in the clusterfuck otherwise known as Operation Iraqi Freedom opine on the necessity of US military intervention in the chaos which is a direct result of the clusterfuck known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.

We owe the Iraqis, we do. We stomped into and all over their country, and while we may have liberated them from the misery of Saddam Hussein’s reign, it was only into another kind of misery. And now the psychopaths operating under the unfortunately-cool acronym of ISIS are marauding thru the country offering their own particularly murderous version of misery.

But I don’t know that there’s much we can do to make the situation better, and f we can’t make it better, we can at least have the decency not to make it worse.

Not that decency is a quality much prized amongst the clusterfuckers.


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Categories : Politics, Rant

Looking for a moment that’ll never happen

22 03 2013

I have to stop before I start screaming.

This is my last post on support for/dissent from the Iraq war—not because there’s nothing left to say, but because I could bang on and on about this, digging out every last awful pro-war piece  by allegedly thoughtful conservatives and liberals (to say nothing about the bilge which burbled out of the pits of (neo-)conservatism).

And then I could howl some more about the backhand given toward those who were right and the shrug toward those who were wrong.

No, I have to let it go because otherwise I will never let it go.

Two last things. One, presidents matter. Two, protests don’t matter.

On the first point: It was a bit of a toss-off point I made the other night, that if the president decides to go to war, then nothing will stop him, but upon reflection, I think that I nailed it.

Are there any cases in which a president wanted publicly to wage war and was prevented from doing so by the Congress or the citizenry?

It’s possible that there were instances in which a president privately mulled war with his advisers but pulled up before going public, and it is possible that in those instances it was the prospect of public push-back which [were among the variables which] stalled him. But has a president ever decided publicly to commit troops to battle and not gotten his way?

I can’t think of any.

Which leads to the second point: Once the decision has been made to go public with the case for war, it’s too late for protests.

This doesn’t make protest any less necessary, but (we) dissenters have to be aware that we are protesting to save our own minds, to make ourselves visible to one another and to reassure one another that, in fact, we haven’t lost our minds.

As regards the path to war, however, we are as ants to a tank.

If we want to matter, then, the best we may be able to do is to mitigate the worst effects of the war, to aid veterans, to send money to civic and humanitarian organizations working in-country. To make public one’s own dissent, if only to remind one’s fellow citizens that it is possible to dissent.

Maybe it will matter, next time, behind the closed doors, as the president and his (or her) advisers ponder breaking into another country. Maybe.

Is there anything more than maybe? Probably not.

What, then, is to be done? If we want to stop war and protests won’t stop war, what is to be done?

This brings me back to the first point: Don’t elect presidents who want war, who hire advisers who want war, who  can’t be bothered to think about the agonies of war.

It’s not much; it’s all we’ve got.

~~~

h/t & general fuck-yeahs to Conor Friedersdorf; Scott Lemieux at LGM, Matt Yglesias, Charlie  Pierce, James Fallows (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and everyone else who’s sunk her teeth into the backsides of the warmongers and won’t let go. [Removed link to MY because it was a mistake to have included him: he might now be truly sorry, but he was among the mongers.]


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Categories : Politics

Rage against the machine

20 03 2013

*Update* Check out Conor Friedersdorf’s review of anti-anti-war commentary.

I don’t even remember why I was against the war.

It’s easy, now, after the lies and mess and blood and money and vengeance and torture and horror and exodus, to say What a monstrous disaster.

Did I see all of this coming? I don’t know. I was skeptical, fearful of the what-ifs, but did I foresee the monster we would become, the disaster we would inflict on ourselves and the people of Iraq?

I doubt it. I doubt it.

I don’t feel vindicated for having been right. I didn’t have to argue myself into skepticism, didn’t have to fight my way past the shiny objects dangled in front of the American people in order to arrive at the summit of wisdom.

There was no summit, and I claim no wisdom. Is it really that hard to be skeptical of unnecessary war?

This is why I rage and despair in equal measure at those pundits who say “I was wrong, but I could have been right, so. . . .” They couldn’t be bothered to perform the most basic act of citizenship: to think, to think beyond one’s desires and sorrows and glee—and you betcher ass there was glee at the prospect of war—about what we were, truly about to do. Could they not be bothered to wonder at their own anticipation?

I am ungenerous in my interpretation of the commentators who supported the war, ungenerous in my reception to their ex post facto “soul-searching”; I read their apologies as justifications.

This is unfair (at least to John Cole), but I don’t care. They lost nothing by being wrong, suffered no consequences for whooping it up as the Congress and the Bush administration led us into destruction. They are sorry only that the destruction was inglorious, rather than shockingly awesome.

Again, this is unfair, I know, I know.

And it puts too much on the sideliners, not enough on the Congress and the Bush administration. I vent my rage at the pundits because I despair of influencing the politicians.

Once a president decides to go to war, that’s it, we’re going to war.

Pundits make the pitch easier; protesters are, if not ignored, a useful foil. But, truly, nothing any of us says, matters. We don’t matter, except, perhaps, to ourselves.

If a president wants war, war is what we get.


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Categories : Rant

Ten years after

19 03 2013

You know what this is about, right?

~~~

March 19, 2003-March 19, 2013.

Financial cost: $812,067, 323,000—and counting.

Cost to to US soldiers: 4487 killed, 32,223 seriously wounded, 30 percent of all who served developed serious mental problems shortly after returning home

Costs to Iraqi civilians: estimates of numbers killed range from over 100,000 to over 600,000

(And much more here)

Removal of murderous dictator: done

Democracy established: ???

Number of nuclear weapons found: 0

Evidence of links to Al Qaeda found: none

Former Vice President Dick Cheney thinks it was all worth it.

~~~

I marched against the first Gulf War in 1990, unsure whether it was necessary, worried about the fight I was sure the Iraqi army would give to the US. We’d win, I remember musing to my friends T & S, but it could be bad.

It was bad, but not in the way I thought it would be.

So endeth my venture into confident predictions about complex events.

~~~

I was in Montreal when the planes were hijacked, crashed. I got into an argument either that afternoon or the next morning with a colleague’s girlfriend over the innocence of the US, over ‘who started it’, how it would end.

At least, I think that’s what we argued about; I could be wrong. I do remember the director of my program murmuring that it was perhaps too soon to be voicing such opinions.

I don’t remember if I responded that it would be too late it if I waited, or if I just thought that.

~~~

The US wouldn’t attack Iraq, would it? Really? Isn’t it obvious this whole thing is ginned up? What the hell is in the water down there? Has everyone gone mad?

~~~

January is not the best month in Montreal in which to march around outdoors for hours, and then stand and listen to speeches for awhile longer.

But hundreds of thousands of us did, more than once. If you looked through the side streets from Ste. Catherine you could see the people streaming past in the other direction up boulevard René-Lévesque.

Some of us carried signs, some of us carried children, some, candles. We shouted and sang and chanted in French and English and Spanish and Arabic and Hebrew and we could all hear one another, but none of it mattered.

We froze our asses off for peace and none of it mattered.

~~~

Why didn’t more people listen to the skeptics, the peace-mongerers, the critics?

They didn’t like our puppets. We said mean things about Bush. We were leftists. We were anti-American. We were against all wars. We were nobodies. We were rude. And smelly. And played drums.

I mean, if the people against war play drums, that’s certainly a good reason to support war, isn’t it?

~~~

Those who were right about the war were dismissed for having been right.

Who was against the war? cry those who were for the war. How could we have known? We were too emotional, too caught up in war fever.

Why did no one speak?

What else did you expect?

So we were wrong, but we were right for having been wrong.

And those who were right? Well, they could have been wrong.

~~~

Lessons?

There are no lessons—no, wait, too many lessons, none of which will be learned.

The wrong have “moved on”. Those who admit they were wrong are cleansed by the admission; those who don’t, blame those who were right.

Lessons? There are no lessons.

There’s only next time.


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Categories : Musing