This seems to be the full extent of neocon “policy.” It’s actually getting boring. Every time they open their yaps, they’re screaming for more tax cuts and more bombs.
Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and prominent neoconservative Max Boot has surfaced on Foreign Policy magazine’s website this week, bemoaning the unpopularity of the Bush Doctrine despite its disastrous results in Iraq.
Taking advantage of hindsight, Boot says that if only the world had taken seriously warnings about Hitler’s Germany and later al Qaeda, the catastrophes that they created could have been avoided. Boot then refers to two bipartisan congressional reports that have issued stern warnings regarding terrorist and nuclear threats from Iran and Pakistan. Claiming that diplomacy is failing in Iran and the “current approach” in Pakistan’s tribal areas is not working, Boot concludes that only one option remains — attack:
For all the empty talk of “tough diplomacy,” the uncomfortable reality is that there is only one option that in the short term is likely to forestall Iran from going nuclear: airstrikes on its atomic installations. […]
“Preemption lite” — the current approach of picking off terrorist leaders [in Pakistan] with armed Predator drones — can help to weaken and slow the jihadists, but it can hardly defeat them. That would, in all likelihood, require an invasion of western Pakistan, perhaps accompanied by preemptive airstrikes on Pakistan’s nuclear installations.
I swear it’s getting to the point where they’re going to demand we nuke Switzerland because you just can’t trust a supposedly neutral country that manufactures Swiss Army knives.
The Republican response to [Obama’s economic stimulus] speech this morning was instructive. They agreed to work with the president on a stimulus as long as it isn’t as big as it needs to be, as long as it consists of more tax cuts than spending, and as long as those tax cuts don’t just go to the middle class and poor but are also more tilted to business and wealthy investors.
I have the song “Broken Record” running through my head. I can’t imagine why.
Update: LMAO. I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but it turns the theme of this post inside-out in the funniest possible way.
“You did all this for the election? Is this the way you treat children?” a man asks as he points to sniper wounds on dead little boys. Those kids couldn’t have been more than five years old.
I loved Israel. I did. Some of the people I admire most in the world were Israelis. They would be horrified, were they alive, to see what Israel has done. It’s hard to imagine Golda Meir condoning this, Yitzhak Rabin allowing their country to murder children. When children are 1/3 of the war dead, the most you can say for Israel is that they’re showing depraved indifference to innocent life.
Mike was talking in comments about how my “reporting” is imbalanced, and how Hamas is doing awful things, too. You know, I’m not a fucking reporter, and I don’t give two tugs on a dead dog’s dick what Hamas is doing. Hamas is not a nuclear-armed democracy targeting children with snipers, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus.
Cons like Mike seem to think that two wrongs make a right. They haven’t evolved past the playground: “He started it!” “They’re doing it, too!” They do not understand that just because somebody else plays dirty doesn’t mean that you get to play dirtier. That works great in adventure novels written by chickenhawks and wanna-be Rambos. In real life, that attitude leads to dead kids, worldwide outrage, and ever-escalating violence.
Do you really think that killing babies is going to make Israel stronger, safer, and more admired? Let’s have a look at the evidence:
Lebanese militants fired at least three rockets into Israel early Thursday, threatening to open a new front for the Jewish state as it pushed forward with a bloody offensive in the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 700 people.
Two people were lightly injured, and the rockets that exploded in Israel’s north raised the specter of renewed hostilities with Hezbollah, just 2 1/2 years after Israel battled the guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. Hezbollah started the 2006 war as Israel was battling Palestinian militants in Gaza.
The brutal Israeli war on the population of Gaza is the nail in the coffin of the neoconservative doctrine. Their policies have hardly strengthened ties between Turkey, Israel and the United States, as they had argued. Turkey had a special place in the thinking of figures such as Perle, who lauded it as a secular example for the Muslim world and a close ally of Israel. But in 2002 the Islamically tinged conservative Justice and Development Party (Turkish acronym AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept to power and has ruled Turkey ever since. In 2003, the AKP dealt a cruel blow to the hopes of Perle and his colleague Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz when its members of parliament voted against allowing the U.S. military to invade Iraq through Turkish territory. Erdogan more recently has been a profound disappointment to the Israeli right because of his willingness to talk with Hamas leaders. Hundreds of thousands of Turks, many of them AKP supporters, have demonstrated in Istanbul against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Erdogan drew anguished Israeli protests when he told an election rally in Ankara that Israel was “perpetrating inhuman actions which would bring it to self-destruction. Allah will sooner or later punish those who transgress the rights of innocents.” Turkey has received Hamas leader Khalid Mashal and has worked for an early cease-fire in the current conflict, putting the blame for it on Israel. The right-wing Jerusalem Post observed ominously, “Turkey has just taken its seat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council and Ankara pledges to be Hamas’s conduit to the United Nations,” and urged Israel to recall its ambassador from Ankara.
Massive demonstrations and protests in Jordan calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador over the Israeli military’s disregard for civilian life have caused Prime Minister Nader Dahabi to tell the parliament, “Jordan will look into all options, including reconsidering relations with Israel.” So much for Feith, Perle and Wurmser’s plan to solidify ties between Israel, Turkey and Jordan.
But at least the new Iraqi government will support Israel rather than Hamas now that Saddam Hussein is gone, right? Think again. The Islamic Da’wa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called last week for all Muslim countries to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel and to cease all public and behind-the scenes contacts with it. Large demonstrations have been staged against Israel in Mosul, Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala. The spiritual leader of many of the world’s Shiites condemned Israeli aggression in Gaza and said that “mere verbal expressions of condemnation and disapproval” were not enough, calling instead for “practical steps” to break the Israeli blockade and stop the attack. For a fatwa of the chief Shiite authority in Iraq to demand practical steps against Israel is a little noticed but ominous development for the Israelis that could help politicize Shiites even further on this issue.
[snip]
Iran’s influence with Hezbollah in south Lebanon has grown from strength to strength, and was enhanced after Israel’s disastrous 2006 war on that country when it sent extensive reconstruction aid. Hezbollah has been able to rearm, and has joined a national unity government that recognizes its militia as a sort of national guard for the south of Lebanon. It gained new allies in Iraq. It had been formed in part by the Islamic Da’wa Party of Iraq, which naturally supports it, as does the large and influential Sadr Movement in Iraqi Shiism. Hezbollah, more popular than ever, was able to get out massive crowds in Beirut to pro
test Israel’s assault on Gaza. And Gaza itself is now viewed by the Israeli establishment as an Iranian beachhead on the Mediterranean, the sort of development that the neoconservatives confidently predicted their policies would forestall.
It would seem to me that Israel is much, much worse off than before. A harsh reality that necons on both sides of the ocean do not seem to understand is that you will never be able to kill enough people to force your opponents to humbly submit. Oppressed populations have traditionally risen up against their oppressors. Ask England and France, two colonial powers who discovered that an incensed citizenry is more than a match for superior militaries. Ask the Russians about Afghanistan. Ask America, once Bush the Clueless has finally slunk back to Texas and an adult is able to survey the damage in Iraq and go, “Holy shit. We are so never going to win this one.”
Speaking of Iraq, has blind support for Israel done us any favors? It wouldn’t seem so:
threatened on Wednesday to resume attacks on American targets inside Iraq over Washington’s support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “I ask the Iraqi resistance to engage in revenge operations against the United States, the biggest partner of the Zionist enemy.”
It seems we have sown the wind and shall soon be reaping the shit storm.
About the only folks happy in this whole mess are the neocons who need a fresh stream of dead bodies to masturbate to, and al Qaeda:
Israel’s assault on Gaza has really created an almost unbelievable no-lose situation for al-Qaeda. If Hamas “wins”, then al-Qaeda gets to share in the benefits of the political losses incurred by its Western and Arab enemies (Zawahiri mentions Mubarak and the Saudis in this tape, but not the Jordanians) and can try to take advantage of the political upheavals which could follow. If Hamas “loses”, al-Qaeda still wins. It will shed no tears at seeing one of its bitterest and most dangerous rivals take a beating at Israel’s hands or losing control of a government that they have consistently decried as illegitimate and misguided.
But it’s the children I keep coming back to. So many dead kids. So many torn and shattered bodies. All so that the grownups can compete to see who has the biggest dicks. Don’t let talk of “security” and suchlike fool you. If all Israel wanted was to stop the rockets, there were better ways to do that. Treating Palestinians as if they were valuable human beings would have been a good start. No, this is just a bunch of macho men wanting to dominate and destroy because they think it’s weak to show your enemies any respect, to try to solve things with brains rather than bullets. These children are falling victim to a horrific fallacy, the idea that you’ll win more friends by killing people than treating them decently, the belief that they can make a lot of angry militants with guns and no fear of dying fearfully submit if they’re ruthless enough.
I’d like to ask them, and the Mikes of the world, one simple question:
If those were your babies you were burying, would you be crawling on your knees to throw yourself on the mercy of your babies’ killers, or would you be reaching for your gun because you had nothing else to lose?
Maybe now you can understand why all of this shock-and-awe bullshit is going to get us exactly nowhere. Democracies are supposed to be able to rise above this eye-for-an-eye idiocy. We’re supposed to be showing the world a better way.
So far, it doesn’t seem like we’re setting the kind of example we should want anyone to live up to.
The United States thwarted an effort by Libya on Saturday to persuade the U.N. Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza after Israel launched a ground invasion, diplomats said.
[snip]
But diplomats said the United States refused to back the Libyan-drafted text and killed the initiative, since council statements must be passed unanimously. Later the United States refused to back a watered-down call for a truce, the diplomats said.
The United States, one of five permanent Security Council members, insists that any statement or resolution state that the Palestinian militant group Hamas is a terrorist organization that seized power in Gaza from the legitimate Palestinian Authority.
WASHINGTON, Jan 6 (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to New York on Tuesday to discuss with key powers how to get a ceasefire in Gaza that the United States says must be durable, sustainable and indefinite.
Rice was to meet foreign ministers gathering for a United Nations Security Council meetings on ending the Israeli offensive launched last month with the stated aim of stopping Palestinian rocket attacks on civilians in southern Israel.
More than 600 Palestinians have been killed and at least 2,700 wounded since Israel began its campaign in Gaza, which is controlled by the Hamas Islamist group. Nine Israelis, including three civilians hit by rocket fire, have died.
“We would like an immediate ceasefire, absolutely, an immediate ceasefire that is durable and sustainable and non-time-limited,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters at his daily briefing.
More than 30 people have been killed in two separate Israeli strikes on clearly-marked United Nations schools where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing violence in Gaza, an official with the world body said today.
John Ging, Director of Operations in Gaza of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said that 30 people died and 55 others were injured when three Israeli artillery shells landed at the perimeter of a UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
“Those who were in the school were all families seeking refuge,” Mr. Ging said of the school that was hit in Jabaliya, which usually serves as a girls’ preparatory school.
Another artillery shell struck an empty boys’ school in Jabaliya, he said.
In a separate attack last night, three Palestinians, who had sought refuge in a small co-educational UN school in Gaza City, died when an Israeli missile hit the building’s toilet facilities.
He underscored that all UN schools in Gaza are clearly marked, flying the UN flag, and that the Organization has provided the GPS coordinates of all of its installations in the area to Israel.
Raw footage from the BBC. Warning: It’s graphic.
You know it’s horrific when even the Bush regime can’t stomach what Israel’s doing.
Israel ordered a pause in its Gaza offensive for three hours Wednesday to allow food and fuel to reach besieged Palestinians, and the country’s leaders debated whether to accept an international cease-fire plan or expand the assault against Hamas.
With criticism rising of the operation’s spiraling civilian death toll and Gazans increasingly suffering the effects of nonstop airstrikes and shelling, Israel’s military said opened “humanitarian corridors” to allow aid supplies to reach Palestinians.
[snip]
Outrage over an Israeli strike Tuesday near a U.N. school continued, with the U.N. agency responsible for the building demanding an “impartial investigation” into the attack. Gaza health officials put the death toll from the strike at 39, while the U.N. said 40 were killed.
Israel said its forces fired at militants who launched mortars from that location.
About 300 of the more than 670 Palestinians killed so far are civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. figures. Of those killed, at least 130 are children age 16 and under, says the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tracks casualties.
[snip]
More than 500 aid trucks have been shipped into Gaza since operations began. But even when aid crosses into Gaza military operations have prevented officials from distributing it, leading to food shortages in some areas.
A World Bank statement Wednesday said there are growing signs of a severe public health crisis in Gaza because of a shortage of drinking water and an escalating failure of the sewage system.
I’m sure Mike will gleefully proclaim that militants firing a few mortars from the streets outside a school justifies killing forty people, including children. And Israel will now pat itself on the back and tell us all how wonderful and humanitarian they are for letting up on the white phosphorus and cluster bombs long enough to bring in a few more aid trucks, which have exactly three hours to try to feed starving and sick civilians before the bombing resumes. Hamas, of course, has no compunction about using civilians as cover, because that’s how insurrections are won.
Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor in Gaza, tells Sky News that the number of civilians injured and killed in Gaza proves that Israel is deliberately attacking the population.
The people of Gaza continue to be caught in the middle of the power play between Israel and Hamas:
JERUSALEM, Jan 5 (Reuters) – People in Gaza were in dire need of food and medical supplies, aid agencies said on Monday, but Israel’s ground assault and air raids were hampering relief efforts.
Freezing cold is compounding the misery of children caught in the conflict. And body bags for victims are in short supply.
[snip]
Hospitals were inundated with Palestinian wounded, the ICRC said. Fresh supplies were urgently needed, including painkillers and anaesthetics but also body bags and sheets to wrap corpses.
The situation in Gaza since the Israel Defense Forces launched their ground offensive on Saturday night has become both chaotic and extremely dangerous. It is difficult for the ICRC to move around and assess the urgent humanitarian needs created by the continued shelling and bombing, and by fighting on the ground. The ground attack has forced a number of people in the north of the Gaza Strip to flee their homes.
The fighting is causing damage to hospitals, water supply systems, government buildings and mosques. A number of water supply lines have been severed during bombardments, making it very difficult for families in certain areas of the Gaza Strip to get hold of safe drinking water.
And the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports:
According to the Coastal Municipalities Water Utilities (CMWU), about 70% of the Gaza Strip population has no access to water…
Gaza City and northern Gaza are particularly affected due to electricity cuts and a lack of fuel for back-up generators….
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society estimates that thousands of homes have been damaged since the beginning of military operations, exposing their residents to cold weather…
There is an almost total blackout in the governorates of Gaza, North Gaza, Middle Area, and Khan Yunis. Most of the telephone network (both land lines and cell phones) is also not functioning, since it now depends on back-up generators with dwindling fuel stocks.
In today’s Ha’aretz, Amira Haas quotes a Palestinian friend, after recounting more stories from the Gaza Olmert does not want us to see:
It’s cold and the windows are open; there’s fire and smoke in open areas; at home there’s no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there’s no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?”
Actually, that depends on how you define “normal.” If you mean a human being with a conscience, then no. If you mean “normal for a neocon,” then yes. I’d say, absolutely, they are normal.
When I first saw Glenn Greenwald’s piece yesterday on Michael Goldfarb’s latest missive, I thought there had to be some kind of mistake. Glenn made it sound like Goldfarb, the Weekly Standard writer and former John McCain aide, had endorsed deliberate military attacks against innocent civilians.
But it wasn’t a mistake; that’s exactly what Goldfarb argued. Under a headline that read, “Ruthless,” Goldfarb commented on an Israeli airstrike that killed a Hamas leader, his wives, and his 12 children.
The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.
That, of course, is the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It’s the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings. And it’s the logic that leads infinitely weak and deranged people like Goldfarb and Peretz to find value in the killing of innocent Palestinians, including — one might say, at least in Goldfarb’s case: especially — children.
Pause a moment. Absorb that, before you continue reading.
Palestinians carry the body of Ismail Hamdan, 11, during his funeral in Beit Hanoun northern Gaza Strip, Thursday, Jan. 1, 2009. Hamdan was killed Wednesday after he was injured Tuesday in an Israeli airstrike. His two sisters, Haya, 12, and Lama, 4, were killed Tuesday by the airstrike. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries — from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan — are able to do so because they don’t really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human. For obvious reasons, one typically finds this full-scale version of sociopathic indifference — this perception of brutal war as a blood-pumping and exciting instrument for feeling vicarious sensations of power and strength from a safe distance — in the society’s weakest, most frightened, and most insecure individuals.
“Cycles of violence” continue until one side wins decisively. Personally, I’d rather that were the Israelis, since they’re civilized people and not barbarians.
Or, as Goldfarb put it: “it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us.”
If you see Palestinians as something less than civilized human beings: as “barbarians” — just as if you see Americans as infidels warring with God or Jews as sub-human rats — then it naturally follows that civilian deaths are irrelevant, perhaps even something to cheer.
And that is why Olmert and Peres, two ostensibly normal people, can stand before the world as Gazans starve, freeze, thirst and die, and say, “There is no humanitarian crisis.”
You’d think that Bush’s Global War on Terror having turned in to the greatest single recruiting tool for al Qaeda would’ve given other world leaders a bit of a clue. Alas, stupidity knows no borders:
Benjamin Netanyahu was on CNN today saying “We’ll have to bring down the Hamas regime.”
The disproportionate and heavy-handed Israeli attacks on Gaza have been a bonanza for Hamas. The movement has renewed its standing in the Arab world, secured international favor further afield and succeeded in scuttling indirect Israeli-Syrian talks and direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. It has also greatly embarrassed Israel’s strongest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.
While it is not apparent how this violent confrontation will end, it is abundantly clear that the Islamic Hamas movement has been brought back from near political defeat while moderate Arab leaders have been forced to back away from their support for any reconciliation with Israel.
I’ve wanted to blog on Gaza, but it’s impossible to know where to begin. I have sympathies on both sides: I don’t expect Israel to just absorb missiles without responding, but I don’t expect Palestinians to blithely accept being starved, either. It’s one of those tragedies with no clear right or wrong, no spotless heroes, no irredeemable villains.
As we hear that the IDF is bombing universities and killing United Nations personnel in addition to the hundreds of Gazans already dead in the three days of the Israeli attack on Gaza, we will hear the inevitable cry “but Hamas has been lobbing rockets at Israelis for years from Gaza!”
Juan Cole tells us about these rockets, and provides some perspective:
Israel blames Hamas for primitive homemade rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli city of Sederot. In 2001-2008, these rockets killed about 15 Israelis and injured 433, and they have damaged property. In the same period, Gazan mortar attacks on Israel have killed 8 Israelis.
The Israelis on Saturday killed 5% of all the Palestinians they have killed since the beginning of 2001! 230 people were slaughtered in a day, over 70 of them innocent civilians. In contrast, from the ceasefire Hamas announced in June, 2008 until Saturday, no Israelis had been killed by Hamas. The infliction of this sort of death toll is known in the law of war as a disproportionate response, and it is a war crime.
But of course you won’t see this on your evening news, not unless you live outside of the US. You’re more likely to know about this if you live in Tel Aviv than if you live in Milwaukee.
There’s more in that article that might be helpful in conversations with those who love to proclaim that Israel can do no wrong.
At this moment of extreme crisis, J Street wants to demonstrate that, among those who care about Israel and its security, there is a constituency for sanity and moderation. There are many who recognize elements of truth on both sides of this gaping divide and who know that closing it requires strong American engagement and leadership. Click Here
I support immediate and strong U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to urgently reinstate a meaningful ceasefire that ends all military operations, stops the rockets aimed at Israel and lifts the blockade of Gaza. This is in the best interests of Israel, the Palestinian people and the United States.
One of the many things that makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so utterly dispiriting is that it’s impossible to think of anything good coming of any of this. Worse than that, it’s hard to imagine that even the people involved think anything good will come of it.
What, exactly, do the Palestinians lobbing rockets into Sderot think they will accomplish? That the Israelis will look about them and say: Holy Moly, I had no idea this place was so dangerous!, and leave? Do the Israelis think: even though we’ve bombed the Palestinians a whole lot, and it’s never done much good before, maybe this time it will be different! Maybe Hamas will say: heavens, this is a pretty serious round of attacks; maybe we should just sue for peace — ? Or what?
I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides.
From here, it looks like they’re intent on creating more terrorists. Demolishing a village and ensuring kids don’t get an education is a pretty good way of proving you’re a right bunch of bastards.
It’s not the first time they’ve done something outrageous in this village:
In 1983 the IDF declared Al Aqabah a “training area” and even engaged in live fire training in the village, killing 8 villagers, wounding dozens more and driving many residents to leave until an Israeli court several years ago ordered an end to training inside the village.
That’s just so far beyond the pale of decency it’s not even describable.
Our military’s turning Iraq and Afghanistan into a holy war. And we all remember how well it went the last time when Christian armies swept into the Middle East and employed a kill-or-convert policy.
When I interviewed Mikey Weinstein the other day, he mentioned video that they had found that showed Christian missionaries actually embedded with American troops in Afghanistan. The missionaries actually traveled with American troops, handing out Bibles in the local language to Afghanis. This was done for a show on JCTV called Travel the Road. You can see the MRFF page about this here…. Here’s what MRFF writes about this situation:
Season 2 of this series ended with three episodes filmed in Afghanistan — Journey to the Line: Afghanistan: Part 1, Terrors of the Night: Afghanistan: Part 2, and Fog of War: Afghanistan: Part 3. For these episodes, the missionaries were completely embedded and, thus, actually permitted to stay on U.S. military bases, travel with a public affairs unit, and accompany and film troops on patrols, all for the purpose of evangelizing Afghanis and producing a television show promoting the Christian religion. The number of DoD Public Affairs regulations violated in the military’s participation and assistance in producing a religious program alone is staggering, not to mention other violations (including constitutional) documented in the content of the program, which include the outrageous violation of the United States Central Command’s General Order 1-A, which absolutely prohibits any proselytization whatsoever in the Middle Eastern theater of operations. In complete disregard of this bedrock standing order, the U.S. Army facilitated these evangelizing Christian missionaries in their distribution of New Testaments in the Arabic native language (“Darri” dialect) to the Afghani people.
Jason Leopold has more on the situation I reported last week where the military allowed Christian missionaries to be embedded with them, travel with them to meet Afghan villagers and then hand out Bibles to them and proselytize them to convert to Christianity. One of the things I didn’t mention was that an active duty military chaplain said in one of the videos that he tries to convert Afghani Muslims himself:
In one scene, an Army Chaplain named Capt. Brad Hanna of the Oklahoma National Guard, talks about the possibility of a “revival” in Afghanistan and says he frequently speaks to Afghans about converting to Christianity. Hanna was made a full-time support chaplain for the Oklahoma National Guard after he returned from Afghanistan.
And he wasn’t the only soldier helping the missionaries:
Additionally, Decker and Scott prominently cite SSgt. Sheldon Hoyt, who was stationed in Afghanistan with the Oklahoma National Guard’s 45th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, as playing a hands-on role in helping the missionaries facilitate their proselytizing as opposed to simply being a tour guide of sorts.
These fuckers are now planning to step up their efforts in Afghanistan. Obama, as Commander in Chief, needs to put a swift end to this fuckery. It was bad enough when we thought we were spreading democracy at the point of a gun. The fact that we’re handing people Bibles while training guns on them, and that this is done by American fucking soldiers in fucking uniform on official fucking duty, is so far beyond outrageous it’s unbelievable.
Things like this make me ashamed to be an American.
My dad taught me that when you fire a gun, you are responsible for everything the bullet does until it comes to a full stop.
So did mine. It made sense to me, and it makes sense to George, who goes on to ask why countries can’t do the right thing. It’s a damned good question.
One of the commenters answered thusly:
I take the opposite side of this argument. Cluster bombs are force multipliers. They keep us from having to put quite as many young Americans on the field. Moral leadership? Not killing sons and daughters by tying the hands of our armed forces IS moral leadership.
I wasn’t the only one who piled on. You can read our smackdown there, but what I wanted to discuss here was the fact that this isn’t by any means the first time I’ve noticed this line of thinking.
I hear it spilling from self-righteous conservative lips constantly, with only rare concurrences from lukewarm liberals. It’s the thinking that led us into Iraq to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” It’s the thinking that leads to things such as this:
“We were walking, I was holding my grandson’s hand, then there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson’s hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn’t make out which part was which.”
That’s the testimony of one man caught up in the disastrous airstrike on a Afghan bridal party wrongfully identified as a Taliban force back in July. The carnage was so complete they had to bury the 47 victims in 28 graves. US and NATO troops have denied the attack, but say they are investigating. In another similiar attack back in August they denied involvement at first too. Then investigated and found themselves blameless, only to finally admit their culpability and apologise once independent footage of the destruction surfaced. In a third such incident, in November, footage surfaced before the kabuki dance could begin. So far this year, such mistakes have cost over 600 Afghans their lives.
That is what is known among neocons, hawks and xenophobic fuckwits as “collateral damage.” I have another word for it: tragedy. How anyone can read that without weeping is beyond my comprehension.
Dehumanizing the enemy has been a traditional past-time of governments at war and the patriots who cheer them on regardless of the merits. War is sometimes necessary. This callous disregard for its victims is not.
When we start thinking of hugely destructive weapons as mere sanitary “force multipliers” and moral leadership as “kill as many of their civilians as you like, as long as you excuse it by saying it was ‘for our troops,'” all we manage to do is destroy our own humanity, lose sight of the real target, and create many more enemies to fight.
I don’t understand why some people find it so fucking hard to recognize that the dead they are so callously dismissing as collateral damage were sons and daughters, too.
Neil Gaiman, viewing an exhibition of Robert Capa’s war photographs shortly after September 11th, 2001, was struck by an epiphany:
…I found myself looking at the photos of combat, of wounded civilians, of people whose worlds had crumbled and fallen, without any sense of irony. These people were us. Whatever side they were on. They were us, and the images had a truth and an immediacy I couldn’t have imagined until recently.
Think of that, should you ever find yourself tempted to dismiss civilian dead, maimed children and grieving grandfathers as nothing more than an unpleasant side-effect of a supposedly just and glorious war.
Two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center ran a devastating report describing the infiltration of neo-Nazis into the ranks of the American military. The Pentagon’s official response was steadfast denial of the problem.
The SPLC’s David Holthouse just published a follow-up report, and found, predictably, that the problem is getting worse as the conflict in Iraq drags on:
A new FBI report confirms that white supremacists are infiltrating the military for several reasons. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.”
The FBI report details more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. For example, in September 2006, the leader of the Celtic Knights, a central Texas splinter faction of the Hammerskins, a national racist skinhead organization, planned to obtain firearms and explosives from an active duty Army soldier in Fort Hood, Texas. That soldier, who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was a member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.
Fantastic. As if we didn’t have enough of these insane fuckers to deal with, now we’ve handed them the training they need to be even more fucking dangerous.
And if you think we’re going to win Iraqi hearts and minds with a bunch of skinheads in the mix, think again:
One of the Blood & Honour members claiming to be an active-duty soldier taking part in combat operations in Iraq identified himself to Kennard as Jacob Berg. He did not disclose his rank or branch of service. “There are actually a lot more ‘skinheads,’ ‘nazis,’ white supremacists now [in the military] than there has been in a long time,” Berg wrote in an E-mail exchange with Kennard. “Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don’t every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I’m so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”
Asking yourself how batshit insane haters like this ended up in the military, aren’t you?
The source of the problem, as the report explained, was the extreme pressure military recruiters were under to fill their recruitment quotas. “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces,” said Barfield, “and commanders don’t remove them . . . even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.” The military downplayed a neo-Nazi presence in the ranks, Barfield added, “because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”
Well. Isn’t that just an excellent fucking reason not to do something about a problem that’s going to (literally) blow up in our faces? There aren’t enough cursewords in the dictionary to express what I’m thinking right now.
David Neiwert calls our military “the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School.” He’s absolutely right, and it’s absolutely appalling.
Yet another Bush-era mess we’ll be cleaning up for a long time to come.
