Sanity Pills

Martin van Creveld is a military historian. He is considered by many to be one of the best in the world. Several of his books have influenced modern military theory and he is the only non-American author on the US Army’s list of required reading for officers.

From wikipedia:

van Creveld has lectured or taught at virtually every strategic institute, military or civilian, in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College, most recently in December, 1999 and January, 2000. Some people consider his 1991 book, The Transformation of War, among the most important treatises on military theory ever written.

What does Martin van Creveld think of the War in Iraq? Lets have a look-see.

Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Oh dear.

Read his reasons why here.

More analysis here.

Well a little anyway.
Lets start with the following:
- We had no right to invade Iraq. Iraq posed no threat to the US and had no links to Al Qaeda. That much is as clear as day no matter what anyone else says.
- We invaded Iraq for the following reasons: OIL, He tried to kill my daddy, OIL, Haliburton, OIL, having an american base of operations in the middle east, OIL, Oedipus, and for the bunnies
- Iraq is not better off now. Yes Saddam is gone and he is/was a bad man but Iraqis were united in hating him as opposed to the west. There was an infrastructure in place(utilities, govt etc… no matter how corrupt) and there weren’t bombings taking place every day killing dozens.
- Women had more rights under Saddam than it looks like they will once a theocratic islamist regime/govt comes into power soon.
- 2000+ and counting US deaths and at least 100k Iraqis killed by US military. This is the blood on our conscience that will not wash away much like Vietnam.
- The US is most definitely not safer now than we were before we invaded. This has not only created a great recruiting tool for “the terrorists” but also caused a general feeling of ill will with the Muslim world and absolutely wasted the political cache and sympathy we had following 9/11

Now where do I agree with Bush: We cannot pull out now or anytime soon.
- Just because we invaded for the wrong/no reason and have destroyed the country doesn’t mean we can “cut and run” now. We have to fix or at least make a good faith effort to fix the mess that we have caused. Those 100K+ deaths and the many more to come are on the US’s hands now.
- The leaders of the resistance are definitely aligned or associated with Al Qaeda now and they are more organised than any other group in Iraq. If we leave, they will take over and that is bad.

What we should do:
- Apologize. Not to the american people but to the Iraqi people. Engage in diplomacy and use Imam Al Sastani (sp) one ofthe more respected people in Iraq to calm tensions. Explain US intentions clearly without double talk.
- Stop torturing people. Pass laws. Prosecute Rumsfeld and Cheney (realistically at least a slap on the wrists). Make the 10% or so of the military in Iraq who are complete idiots take some “How to behave like a decent human being” classes.
- Insist on a true democracy. Model it after the former Pakistani govt(an Islamic republic where women had at least quasi-equal rights) or a democracy that works in a majority muslim nation(indonesia?Bangladesh?).
-Send more soldiers if necessary. Thats what the generals want. Hire actually qualified people to implement the occupation!
- Impeach Bush

I came acrossed an article that I find very interesting. It talks about a presidential daily briefing on September 21, 2001 where Bush was told point blank that there’s no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Details of this briefing are not widely known due to its classified nature, but what makes it so intriguing is an additional juicy morsel of information: Saddam found Al Qaeda as a threat, and was actually planning potential action against them.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner
workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won’t say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

The mysteeeeeerious briefing… what else could have been disclosed? Maybe W had a temper tantrum. Poor muffin.

Rewriting history? Piss off Cheney, you’re a deceitful, treasonous, sack of turd.

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Man this is getting so damn old… we just keep seeing the same words in different forms all day long, but until these idiots own up to it, we can just keep repeating their words back to them as they trip over their responses.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

“You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

I guess not.

More here.

cunt (kŭnt)
n. Vulgar Slang.

1. The female genital organs.
2. Sexual intercourse with a woman.
3. a. Offensive. Used as a disparaging term for a woman.
b. Used as a disparaging term for a person one dislikes or finds extremely disagreeable.

Here‘s why.

Side note: My Rep., John Tierney, kicks ass at the beginning.

FINALLY!!!

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) is calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. I hope he’s not one of the few Democrats that has balls (and common sense). We have to get out of there as soon as possible.

Considering I’ve never heard of Murtha, and that he appears to be an old-timer, I doubt he’s making these statements to gain some notoriety for a personal political gain. He’s just doing the right thing, which is a lot more than can be said for the Presidential hopefuls: Hillary “Cunt” Clinton and Joe “Senator MBNA” Biden.

You’re doin a heck of a job Ziad.

Ziad Cattan was a Polish Iraqi used-car dealer with no weapons-dealing experience until U.S. authorities turned him into one of the most powerful men in Iraq last year — the chief of procurement for the Defense Ministry, responsible for equipping the fledgling Iraqi army.

As U.S. advisors looked on, Cattan embarked on a massive spending spree, paying hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds for secret, no-bid contracts, according to interviews with more than a dozen senior American, coalition and Iraqi officials, and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The money flowed, often in bricks of cash, through the hands of middlemen who were friends of Cattan and took a percentage of the proceeds.

“Before, I sold water, flowers, shoes, cars — but not weapons,” said Cattan, who signed most of the 89 military contracts worth nearly $1.3 billion to equip Iraqi security forces, according to the documents. “We didn’t know anything about weapons.”

Cattan’s improbable rise and fall raises troubling questions about American oversight of the Iraqi army’s development, considered the most important mission in reducing the number of U.S. troops in harm’s way.

The portrait that emerges from interviews and documents is a Defense Ministry whose members were picked with the care of choosing a pickup basketball team. U.S.-appointed military advisors often selected inexperienced Iraqis and watched as they cut pell-mell weapons deals that eventually totaled one-third of the entire procurement budget.

Lots more where that came from.

So we tortured a guy into saying what we wanted… and then we went to war over it… BRILLIANT.

A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible” evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.”

I bet if he thought they wanted it, he’d also tell them about the dragons and the clouds and the magical fortress in the sky.

More here.

After Pants of Time showed me some horrible pictures from Iraq, I’ve had my fill of decapitations, scorchings, and general carnage, but some others out there haven’t. Mark and Marc at Morning Sedition interviewed Chris Wilson, a porn site operator who’s been trading free membership to his site for soldiers in Iraq who send him pictures of the unbelievably gruesome. I imagine he gets a lot of traffic.

Yum!

I know for some of you it’s difficult to watch Bill O’Reilly, but this is a good one.

Phil Donahue, who’s generally a clown, gives Billy a taste of his own medicine.

Video here.

Thanks onegoodmove.

12 explosions in Baghdad killed 152 and wounded 542.

Stuff like this doesn’t even make the front page anymore.