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 Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2005 10:45 pm Post subject: Afghan update |
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| http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/04/afghanistan_violence/index.html |
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Dirk Bruere at Neopax
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| Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 1:30 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
| Quote: | http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/04/afghanistan_violence/index.html
Iraq update |
http://icasualties.org/oif/
FFF
Dirk
The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millenium
http://www.theconsensus.org |
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robert bowman
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| Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 9:18 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/04/afghanistan_violence/index.html |
It was a better world when an afghan was something my grandmother knitted.
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Guest
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| Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 7:55 pm Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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robert bowman wrote:
| Quote: | It was a better world when an afghan was something my grandmother knitted.
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One of the great flaws of the internet is that there's no easy way to
just laugh when someone says something funny. So I'm left wondering
whether I should post a "LOL!" or a smiley face or (laughing), or if
even in our silence, the writer knows we laughed. Anyway, laugh I did.
Eric |
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Guest
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 3:12 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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| Quote: | From News Dissector:
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A journalist I admire, Rod Nordland, is leaving Baghdad after two years
as bureau chief for Newsweek. He raises some profound doubts about the
U.S. mission there:
"The most powerful army in human history can't even protect a two-mile
stretch of road. The Airport Highway connects both the international
airport and Baghdad's main American military base, Camp Victory, to the
city center. At night U.S. troops secure the road for the use of
dignitaries; they close it to traffic and shoot at any unauthorized
vehicles. More troops and more helicopters could help make the whole
country safer. Instead the Pentagon has been drawing down the number of
helicopters. And America never deployed nearly enough soldiers. They
couldn't stop the orgy of looting that followed Saddam's fall. Now
their primary mission is self-defense at any cost, which only deepens
Iraqis' resentment.
"The four-square-mile Green Zone, the one place in Baghdad where
foreigners are reasonably safe, could be a showcase of American values
and abilities. Instead the American enclave is a trash-strewn wasteland
of Mad Max-style fortifications. The traffic lights don't work because
no one has bothered to fix them. The garbage rarely gets collected.
Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green
Zone's checkpoints. They've repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers,
accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good
days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers to Americans and
Iraqis alike. Not that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have much to smile about.
They're overworked, much ignored on the home front and widely despised
in Iraq, with little to look forward to but the distant end of their
tours and in most cases, another tour soon to follow. Many are
reservists who, when they get home, often face the wreckage of careers
and family."
Dirk Bruere at Neopax wrote:
| Quote: | liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/04/afghanistan_violence/index.html
Iraq update
http://icasualties.org/oif/
FFF
Dirk
The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millenium
http://www.theconsensus.org |
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Scott Lowther
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 4:00 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
| Quote: | From News Dissector:
A journalist I admire, Rod Nordland, is leaving Baghdad after two years
as bureau chief for Newsweek. He raises some profound doubts about the
U.S. mission there:
"The most powerful army in human history can't even protect a two-mile
stretch of road.
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And the most powerful air force in the world couldn't even protect the
WTC. RUN! We must abandon Manhattan! It's a quagmire! New York is just
Yankee for "Viet Nam!" |
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Guest
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 7:59 pm Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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Odd that you would claim equivalence between a terrorist attack on a
peaceful city and a militarily-occupied zone, where troops are
expressly deployed to combat a violence that nonetheless continues
daily.
Eric
Scott Lowther wrote:
| Quote: | liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
From News Dissector:
A journalist I admire, Rod Nordland, is leaving Baghdad after two years
as bureau chief for Newsweek. He raises some profound doubts about the
U.S. mission there:
"The most powerful army in human history can't even protect a two-mile
stretch of road.
And the most powerful air force in the world couldn't even protect the
WTC. RUN! We must abandon Manhattan! It's a quagmire! New York is just
Yankee for "Viet Nam!" |
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Doug Freyburger
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 10:01 pm Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
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Odd that you would claim equivalence between a terrorist attack on a
peaceful city and a militarily-occupied zone, where troops are
expressly deployed to combat a violence that nonetheless continues
daily.
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Not odd. No military force in the world can stop a
dedicated individual willing to die in the act. True
with a terrorist act on a peacefull city, true in a
military occupied zone. Both frustrating though I
don't see it as humorous the wat Scott does (?). |
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Guest
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 7:50 pm Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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Quite odd, I think.
Not equivalent to Baghdad:
No terrorist problems in NYC. A single terrorist event, almost a decade
after a previous one. Measures adopted. None since.
Equivalent to Baghdad:
No terrorist problems in NYC. Tens of thousands of troops sent in after
a bombing campaign. Most every single day, dozens of terrorist attacks
since, scores killed. Every...single...day. The tens of thousands of
troops prove incapable of stopping it, in spite of shooting into cars,
bursting into homes, locking thousands of New Yorkers in prisons where
they are abused. Every day, more buildings down, more people killed,
local auxiliaries unsafe wherever they gather. Conclusion- it goes on
because the New Yorkers see the troops occupying their city as the
enemy.
Eric
Doug Freyburger wrote:
| Quote: | liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
Odd that you would claim equivalence between a terrorist attack on a
peaceful city and a militarily-occupied zone, where troops are
expressly deployed to combat a violence that nonetheless continues
daily.
Not odd. No military force in the world can stop a
dedicated individual willing to die in the act. True
with a terrorist act on a peacefull city, true in a
military occupied zone. Both frustrating though I
don't see it as humorous the wat Scott does (?). |
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Doug Freyburger
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:37 pm Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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hulk_arnold_hercules@yahoo.com wrote:
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Quite odd, I think.
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Who wouldn't expect the two of us to disagree on
political matters ;^)
| Quote: | Not equivalent to Baghdad:
No terrorist problems in NYC. A single terrorist event, almost a decade
after a previous one. Measures adopted. None since.
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And less than a decade since the measures have been
adopted so there is no evidence that those measures
actually work. It will take two decades after 9/11
before I'm convinced.
My point remains - No one can stop a dedicated
individual willing to die in the act, unless that
individual is stupid enough to get caught on the way
to the act. The measures mostly address repeated use
of old tactics.
One of your good points remains - The way to reduce
repeat events is to reduce the desire of the people
at the source. No one should be surprised that the
two of us disagree on methods on that point.
| Quote: | Equivalent to Baghdad:
No terrorist problems in NYC. Tens of thousands of troops sent in after
a bombing campaign. Most every single day, dozens of terrorist attacks
since, scores killed. Every...single...day. The tens of thousands of
troops prove incapable of stopping it, in spite of shooting into cars,
bursting into homes, locking thousands of New Yorkers in prisons where
they are abused. Every day, more buildings down, more people killed,
local auxiliaries unsafe wherever they gather.
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And very many of the perps are killed. Can't stop
a dedicated individual willing to die in the act.
| Quote: | Conclusion- it goes on
because the New Yorkers see the troops occupying their city as the
enemy.
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While this is true, it is also a primary goal of the
terrorists. Blow up their own fellow Muslims as
collateral damage trying to get at an infidel, and
protray the US as the bad guy. In the hotter spots
like the road between Baghdad and the airport the US
is playing right into this goal. In other locales
the reports are different. So do hot spots grow or
shrink? I've heard reports going both ways. |
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Guest
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| Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 12:25 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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Doug Freyburger wrote:
| Quote: | Who wouldn't expect the two of us to disagree on
political matters ;^)
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True. No need for me to belabor my point.
| Quote: | My point remains - No one can stop a dedicated
individual willing to die in the act, unless that
individual is stupid enough to get caught on the way
to the act. The measures mostly address repeated use
of old tactics.
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I'd agree with you if it was a matter of a dedicated individual. I'd
agree with you if it happened once every few years. The reason I feel
Scott's equivalency doesn't fit- quite aside from his point, for which
I have even less time- is because Iraq is occupied _and_
out-of-control, neither of which is the case in NYC.
Eric |
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Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:33 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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Here's one of my "Busy, so just a quick post" posts that drive the one
batty fella batty....
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050609/our_newest_proconsul.php
Our Newest Proconsul
Robert Dreyfuss
June 09, 2005
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who
specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a
contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother
Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent
contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry
Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.
It's a foregone conclusion that the Senate will confirm Zalmay
Khalilzad to be the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, replacing John
Negroponte. Still, it's worth stepping back to consider what
Khalilzad's appointment says about the Bush administration's continuing
refusal to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster in Iraq-and about
the Democrats' inexplicable inability to step forward and challenge the
president as Iraq continues to deteriorate. His confirmation hearing
Tuesday slipped by almost unnoticed, thanks in part to a docile stable
of Democrats who decided to give him a free pass, rather than seize the
opportunity to lambaste the president's Iraq policy.
First, on the man himself: it's hard to imagine anyone worse than
Khalilzad for the Baghdad job. Like one of Alexander the Great's
proconsuls, Khalilzad neatly steps into one U.S.-occupied neocolony,
Iraq, from another, Afghanistan. Khalilzad, born in Afghanistan, has
been deeply involved in U.S.-Afghan policy for more than two decades.
He is arguably as much to blame as anyone for the catastrophic mistakes
that led first to that country's civil war, then to the rise of the
Taliban, and finally to the Afghanistan of 2005: a warlord-dominated
narco-state, in which heroin and opium provide fully half of the gross
domestic product, and in which a thriving, Taliban-led Islamic
fundamentalist insurgency is recently showing signs of emerging, once
again, as a mortal threat to a tottering regime in Kabul. Zalmay
Khalilzad, it seems, is getting out just in time.
In Baghdad, Khalilzad will be forced to deal with an Iranian-backed
coalition of Shiite fundamentalist parties that is that country's main
power. Yet Khalilzad will be right at home. For two decades, Khalilzad
has consistently argued that the United States ought to support Iran's
ayatollahs, Afghanistan's mujahideen and the Taliban.
In the 1980s, Khalilzad served as a senior State Department official in
charge of the Afghan war, and he worked closely with Thomas Goutierre
of the University of Nebraska, whose center received CIA, Pentagon and
Unocal funding in the 1980s and '90s, in support of the Islamist
guerrillas. That, of course, was the U.S.-backed jihad that catapulted
Osama bin Laden to prominence and that created a worldwide network of
militant Islamist guerrillas schooled in terrorism, including
assassinations and car bombings.
In the early 1990s, during the first Bush administration, Khalilzad was
hired by his mentor, Paul Wolfowitz, as a defense policy planner.
During that era, Khalilzad argued forcefully that the United States
ought to build up the Islamic Republic of Iran against Iraq. He also
drafted a controversial defense policy paper for Wolfowitz and
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that called on the United States to
exert a hegemonic, post-Cold War strategy of dominance so that "no
rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the
territory of the Soviet Union." It also called for a policy of military
preemption of emerging threats. In 2003, the twin policies of hegemony
and pre-emption combined to result in the invasion of Iraq-and
Khalilzad will now have to deal with the unhappy aftermath.
In the mid-1990s, Khalilzad was a paid consultant to Unocal, the
American oil company that was courting the new Taliban government, and
he happily attended receptions for turbaned Taliban dignitaries
visiting Texas, Nebraska and Washington. The fact that Khalilzad was
part of the coterie of U.S. officials and businessmen who genuflected
to the Taliban while seeking U.S. influence in Central Asia's oil and
gas industry somehow didn't make it into the official State Department
biography of Khalilzad that was distributed at his confirmation
hearing. That biography does note that Khalilzad served as a RAND
Corporation military strategist from 1993 to 1999.
The impossible task that awaits him in Baghdad is, at least, poetic
justice, for it was Khalilzad who helped to champion the forcible
regime-change strategy in Iraq beginning in the 1990s. Along with the
core of foreign policy radicals and neoconservative strategists,
Khalilzad joined the Project for a New American Century to demand, in
1998, that President Clinton shift adopt a policy for "removing Saddam
Hussein and his regime from power." Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz et
al., Khalilzad was a key architect of the war-on-Iraq policy that
seized the Bush administration from its inception in January, 2001.
Given all this, it is clear that Khalilzad's appointment is the latest
evidence that the Bush administration has no intention of rethinking
its Iraq strategy. The United States has only two exit strategies in
Iraq: The first is simply to declare victory and get out, and the
second is to scrap the current puppet regime, make a deal with the
resistance and the Sunni insurgency, and internationalize the oversight
of the new government in Baghdad. Khalilzad, of course, will support
neither one: he is part and parcel of the failed policy of trying to
keep the lid on a growing resistance movement with an occupation army
that is not up to the task, and of backing the tenuous, ever more
fractious alliance of Shiite religious parties and Kurdish warlords
that now purports to control the country. The civil war that
looms-whether it is triggered by a Kurdish grab for Kirkuk and Iraq's
northern oil fields, or by a Shiite demand for more Islamization of the
country, or any one of several other flashpoints-will happen on
Khalilzad's watch. The seven-point plan for Iraq that Khalilzad alluded
to at his confirmation hearings gave not a hint of fresh thinking.
Yet, aside from some mild grumbling, the Democrats let Khalilzad-and
the Bush administration-off the hook at his hearing. Polls show that
the American public is teetering on the brink of a wholesale rejection
of the Bush-Khalilzad Iraq policy: too many U.S. casualties, too much
carnage, and, at $1 billion a week, too much money. Perhaps the
Democrats are hoping that the 2006 elections will be run on the old,
familiar turf of taxes, Medicare, Social Security and the environment.
But as in 2004, they will be mistaken. The issues in 2006 are still
likely to be terrorism, Iraq, and national security. Their meekness on
challenging one of the architects of the administration's errors in all
of those areas is a sign that they still don't get it. |
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robert bowman
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 8:26 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
| Quote: | Their meekness on
challenging one of the architects of the administration's errors in all
of those areas is a sign that they still don't get it.
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Or else they get it all too well.
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Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 11:15 pm Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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Khalilzad's being a Moslem in this administration certainly adds an
interesting twist. I'm surprised more of the right hasn't taken their
anti-Moslem paranoia full around the ball smack-dab against Bush-
Khalilzad, Saudi oil money and princely pals, sharing podiums with
CAIR, never seen eating ham....
Eric
robert bowman wrote:
| Quote: | liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
Their meekness on
challenging one of the architects of the administration's errors in all
of those areas is a sign that they still don't get it.
Or else they get it all too well.
----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---- |
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Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 2:41 am Post subject: Re: Afghan update |
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Where are the "patriotic" supporters of this war when the time comes to
risk themselves? Anybody know of any able-bodied, courageous supporters
of the war who might be available? Ah, they're Ugandans...
Two stories...
http://www.occupationwatch.org/headlines/archives/2005/05/private_securit.html
At least 200 Ugandan youths on Saturday signed up for security work in
Iraq and at American installations worldwide.
The Ugandans who go to Iraq will be deployed to guard public and
private installations in the war-ravaged country where the United
States forces continue to battle local insurgents.
***
But Samia Bugwe MP Aggrey Awori condemned the exercise.
"It is tragic for the Uganda government to allow its citizens to be
recruited as mercenaries. It is not true that they are only going to
provide guard services. How do you provide only guard services in a
country like Iraq? These people will definitely shoot back when they
are shot at," Awori said.
But Kasango denied the Ugandans would work as combat personnel.
***
Kasango said other countries had also been targeted to provide people
needed for various jobs at American installations across the world.
In Uganda the local firms conducting the exercise are targeting
able-bodied people with high education qualifications. Military
experience is an added advantage, sources said.
The State Department has reportedly cleared private firms in different
countries of the world to source employees for mostly security work at
US installations because Americans are shunning the lucrative, but
risky jobs.
***
Do you feel a draft?
Ever notice how the airlines exaggerate the amount of time a flight
should take so that they can claim your plane is "on time" even if it's
really 20 minutes late?
The Army apparently has. Earlier this year, without any public notice,
the Army reduced its recruiting goal for May from 8,050 new recruits to
6,700, the New York Times reports today. But as it turns out, the Army
couldn't even reach the reduced goal: The Army will admit later this
week that it lured in only 5,000 new soldiers in May -- just 75 percent
of its new goal and only 62 percent of its previous goal. As the Times
notes, it's the fourth month in a row that the Army has failed to meet
its recruiting goals.
No wonder the Pentagon postponed its usual monthly recruiting report
earlier this month. A Pentagon official said then that the military
needed some time to contextualize and explain its recruiting results to
the American people. Now that we're getting a glimpse at the numbers,
we sure understand the concern. The Times notes that the Pentagon has
added 1,000 new recruiters since last September, started a new ad
campaign, offered starting bonuses of up to $2,000 and begun sending
sending Iraq and Afghanistan vets out on rounds with recruiters. The
payoff for all of those efforts: By the end of May, the Army was "about
8,300 soldiers behind its projected year-to-date number of enlistees
sent to basic training by now," the Times says. The Pentagon is hoping
for a big summer, when it says that recruiting is generally easier. But
one recruiter tells the Times that he doesn't think that's going to be
the case this year. "I don't see much interest among the high school
seniors," he said.
We can't imagine why.
-- Tim Grieve
Dirk Bruere at Neopax wrote:
| Quote: | liberalbear@lycos.com wrote:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/04/afghanistan_violence/index.html
Iraq update
http://icasualties.org/oif/
FFF
Dirk |
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