If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
From Raed in the Middle:
Iraq already has a secular constitution that protects Iraq’s unity and human rights, and gives very important rights to minorities, but this didn’t prevent the Iraqi government before the fall of Baghdad from committing all the mistakes they did.
Some lackluster US vassals, unwilling to commit much in terms of troops, promised material help to the US client government of Iraq instead.
Switzerland said Aug. 15 that it would freeze a deal to send armored personnel carriers to Iraq until Baghdad guaranteed that the vehicles would not be used in combat operations.
"The US forces surrounded the village of Mazraa near Baiji and detained five children under 10 years old, calling on the residents by loudspeakers to hand over several other children showed on TV channels celebrating the killing of US soldiers after roadside blast last week," a police source from Baiji told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The US propaganda still insists that the resistance against them is Sunni-Arabs only, and anti-Shi'a completely (something I blasted here). Now, I caught this snippet in a propaganda piece about more advanced roadside bombs that pierce armor:
Now, the U.S. military believes Iraqi bomb makers are building these deadly weapons themselves. And they have set up workshops in poor, densely-populated neighborhoods, where they can easily hide their activities.
Last Thursday, VOA accompanied a unit from the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division to one such place in the gritty industrial area of Sadr City, east of downtown Baghdad.
Remember the so-called California Energy Crisis? The one caused not by insufficient power capacity due to restrictive construction laws, not by incomplete deregulation, but by the firms conspiring to manipulate the network? Manipulate by synchronising the switch-on of large users, by scheduling the maintenance of power plants, by moving elkectricity across the state's borders, to produce blackouts. Blackouts that drove prices high, giving them large profits, while as an added benefit, putting presure on lawmakers to remove the remaining checks on them.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, and the 2004 US elections, a lot of non-Americans deceived themselves about the Democrats. About the Democrat leadership, not so much the membership and voters: the majority of the former were just as pro-war and just as dead wrong as the Republicans, only used a different language, wanted the war to be fought differently; and their support network/echochamber was less well known than the neocons'.
...Sixty-three percent want US troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent National Journal "insiders poll" found that a similar margin of Democratic members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is considered beyond the pale of "sophisticated" debate.
The continued high standing of the hawks has been made possible by their enablers in the strategic class -- the foreign policy advisers, think-tank specialists and pundits. Their presumed expertise gives the strategic class a unique license to speak for the party on national security issues... It's more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats how to get it right.
...At the bottom of the pyramid are the liberal hawks in the punditocracy, figures like New Republic editor Peter Beinart, Time writer Joe Klein and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. These pundits, along with purely partisan outfits... help to both set the agenda and frame the debate. The journalistic hawks churn out the agitprop that the more respectable think tanks turn into "serious" scholarship, some of which eventually becomes policy, or at least talking points, when adopted by the politicians.
...Central to the liberal hawks' mission is a challenge to other Democrats that they too must become "national security Democrats," to borrow a phrase coined by Holbrooke. To talk about national security a Democrat must be a national security Democrat... The liberal hawks caricature other Democrats just as Republicans long stereotyped them. The pundits magnify the perception that Democrats are soft on national security, and they influence how consultants view public opinion and develop the message for candidates... It matters little that people like Beinart have no national security experience -- as long as the hawks identify themselves as national security Democrats, they're free to play the game.
...Even at their darkest hour, the strategic class found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq. The hawks decided it was acceptable to criticize the execution of the war, but not the war itself...
Pollack continues to thrive at Brookings and, despite never visiting the country, has a new book out about Iran. Shortly after the election, Beinart penned a 5,683-word essay calling on hawkish Democrats to repudiate "softs" like MoveOn.org and Michael Moore; the essay won Beinart -- already a fellow at Brookings -- a $650,000 book deal and high-profile visibility on the Washington ideas circuit. Subsequently a statement of leading policy apparatchiks on the PPI publication Blueprint challenged fellow Democrats to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle of the party.... A number of leading specialists signed a letter by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century asking Congress to boost the defense budget and increase the size of the military by 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.
...why does so much of the Democratic strategic class march in lockstep? There's no simple answer. The insularity of Washington, pressures of careerism, fear of appearing soft and the absence of institutional alternatives all contribute to a limiting of the debate.
...Those insiders who doubt the wisdom of a hawkish course often get the cold shoulder if they stray too far from the strategic line. After criticizing the rush to war, Ivo Daalder of Brookings became the foreign policy point man for Howard Dean's insurgent campaign... Today Daalder blames the antiwar movement for Dean's defeat and calls for more troops in Iraq.
...A few small progressive think tanks, helped by the dissident establishment, have tried to pry open badly needed institutional space for a bolder national security policy. A few courageous elected officials are attempting to drum up Congressional support for withdrawal. Thus far, the hawks have drowned them out. Unless and until the strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes.
