Many of you have probably been seeing the headlines recently echoing the Obama administration’s triumphant declarations regarding the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq. This ranks as possibly the greatest line of PR spin since “Mission Accomplished” was declared 7 years ago. Actually, this is worse, since then at least Bush could claim the pretense of actually believing that to be the case. In this situation, Obama has no excuse for not understanding the depth of his own duplicity.

Seamus Milne of the Guardian U.K. does a good job here in succinctly dismantling the BS behind the recent Orwellian Newspeak headlines. And, oh yeah, it is all about the oil, and foreign corporate control of it. Back to the future. The 1950’s all over again.

The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all; it’s rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush’s war on terror was retitled “overseas contingency operations” when Obama became president, US “combat operations” will be rebadged from next month as “stability operations”.

But as Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the New York Times: “In practical terms, nothing will change”. After this month’s withdrawal, there will still be 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counter-terrorism” missions. In US military speak, that covers pretty well everything they might want to do.

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Meanwhile, the US government isn’t just rebranding the occupation, it’s also privatising it. There are around 100,000 private contractors working for the occupying forces, of whom more than 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals”, typically from the developing world. One Peruvian and two Ugandan security contractors were killed in a rocket attack on the Green Zone only a fortnight ago.

I thought we were attempting to rid Iraq of the presence of ‘foreign fighters,’ not hire them. But then, American troops are the most predominate source of ‘foreign fighters’ in Iraq, one of those obvious points which seemed to escape the previous administration when it used to lecture about its goal of eliminating such fighters from the country.

Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000, to be based in five “enduring presence posts” across Iraq.

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What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon. One reason for that can be found in the dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies, including three of the Anglo-American oil majors that exploited Iraqi oil under British control before 1958.

The dubious legality of these deals has held back some US companies, but as Greg Muttitt, author of a forthcoming book on the subject, argues, the prize for the US is bigger than the contracts themselves, which put 60% of Iraq’s reserves under long-term foreign corporate control.

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The Iraq war has been a historic political and strategic failure for the US. It was unable to impose a military solution, let alone turn the country into a beacon of western values or regional policeman. But by playing the sectarian and ethnic cards, it also prevented the emergence of a national resistance movement and a humiliating Vietnam-style pullout. The signs are it wants to create a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region. The struggle to regain Iraq’s independence has only just begun.

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Another essential piece from Tom Engelhardt, regarding America’s ever-increasing distraction and detachment from the moral and political consequences of its own policies and actions. Here, Engelhardt goes into more depth regarding America’s continued pursuit of completely robot-ized warfare, its effects and the questions it raises about our own society. It is interesting to think how Americans would react if any other country on planet earth would give itself the right to patrol robots around the U.S., ones which could at anytime unleash a barrage of firepower, often killing scores of people, many of them guilty of nothing.

According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry.  Worse yet, these were capable — so the CIA director and vice president claimed — of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States.  It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration’s resolution authorizing force in Iraq because “I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.”

So where are you now, Senator Nelson, now that this threat of total destruction is actually being manifested? However, the specter of devastation is not coming to pass through the machinations of some mustacheod dictator, but by the regimes of corporate power, such as BP. If some terrorist group was actually able to cause the amount of total destruction the lives and well-being of as many Americans that BP’s reckless actions are causing (and going to cause), the country would be shrieking for vengeance and retribution.

Yet, when spraying mass toxins, spreading death and destruction to whole regions of the country, killing off entire ways of life, are the result of the incessant pursuit of corporate profit, and the satiation of an unsustainable way of life in our society, no one openly proposes any real ‘regime change’ and the shutting of such operations down. This is especially true when these entities are some of these same policy makers most lucrative campaign contributors. And now we have a totalitarian-style blackout of any and all information coming from the Gulf region, and our compliant media doesn’t question it. We are truly reaching some serious day of reckoning in this nation (and on this planet).

Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “ mushroom clouds ” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten.  Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.

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“We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command told   author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don’t get hungry. They are not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

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Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.”  It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions.  He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.”  Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”

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It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times ).  It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk… and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice — the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away — or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

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After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this.  If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

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In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances.  In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo.  And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of “terrorists,” we won’t like it one bit.  When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less.  And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news.  Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones.  It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

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An informative expose’ on the Israeli attack against the American naval ship the USS Liberty, and the cover up that ensued. Produced by the BBC, it is curiously unfortunate that not only has this program received practically no airtime in the United States, but the entire issue has received next to zero exposure in the U.S. Perhaps that can and will change in the coming days.

This op-ed from noted historian Dr. Matthew Feldman published in truthout serves as a sad reminder of how easy it is to politically bank on the currency of lies today in what Gore Vidal has accurately described as “the United States of Amnesia.” Plus, anyone that includes segments from Stanley Kubrick films in their essay is most likely going to be worth reading.

No wonder the US military said the tape was lost .

Those murderous images leave you gasping for air like a punch in the gut at boot camp. Then you hear a bit of cackling, some banter, and more shooting. Dahr Jamail reported in Truthout that a dozen people were killed in the massacre, including two Reuters news staff, with another two children wounded but (amazingly) alive. The US troops sounded as if they were having fun, like aiming for high-score on an arcade game.

Since war and occupation have killed far more in excess of one million Iraqis in this illegal war (and rendered another few million others homeless), the July 2007 events don’t add up to much. An Apache gunship using sauntering Iraqis for target practice, then blasting a vanload of rescuers and children trying to help a wounded, writhing man as an encore. Big deal. Happens all the time in Iraq. Except that this was recorded. And not lost, thanks the courageous Wikileaks’ anonymous source.

Cue momentary hand-wringing by the mainstream media - a bit too much force here, maybe a logistical failure there? - then back to news-as-titillation for us all.

So it goes in Iraq.

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Now entering the seventh year of “pacification” in Iraq, these fictions are only getting worse. Not in terms of morality, mind you - that Rubicon was crossed even before this illegal invasion was launched - but these aren’t even good lies any longer. These are lazy lies. Indeed, these are the worst kinds of lies, thought Oscar Wilde, so artless as to be disbelieved when expressed.

[Oscar] Wilde’s wit was legendary, at least until Europe’s self-immolation attempt during the Great War adjudged it too shallow. Interwar society had little to laugh about - or just took itself altogether too seriously, as Wilde might retort. Fittingly, his celebrated dialogue [from] “The Decay of Lying,” jibed that politicians “never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie?”

A fine lie? At 120 years since its publication in Victorian England, I doubt our politicians know any longer, if they even knew in Wilde’s day. Given recent evidence, since our military certainly can’t tell the difference between a news camera and a rocket launcher, asking them for comment is about as useful as asking Bin Laden (remember him?) about his views on the recent passage of US health care reform. With both, you can only get propaganda. Bad propaganda.

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The stories of late have all the imagination of a tired and stupid bureaucracy simply going through the motions. In the early days, at least I could watch the humorous lies of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf - the Orwellian Iraqi information minister during the 2003 invasion, also known as  ”Comical Ali” - to soften the blow. His imaginative creations were the only funny part of a “liberation” that never, at any time, had truth on its side.

And what’s worse, the lies these days are mirthless. They are no more than dead air, stale and lifeless. They are stillborn lies.

Of course, lies launched us into Operation Iraqi Freedom in the first place. Remember those silly Uranium tubes from Niger, that spectral WMD? Deception, moreover, has kept us afloat when soggy, from a fish-hooked “Coalition of the Willing” to the “bad apples” floating around at Abu Ghraib. Today, under a new administration, also claiming to be leaving Iraq at some point this century, our pack of lies has simply been reshuffled and dealt to us again. No need for new cards here; our war (cheer)leaders are counting on America’s willful ignorance and moral abeyance regarding Iraq.

Read The Complete Essay

Constitutional lawyer and published author Glenn Greenwald provides insightful commentary regarding the killing of Iraqi journalists and civilians captured on the army video released by WikiLeaks in April. This article is not only informative, but is embedded with video links from other news sources, including interviews on the topic, which are worth seeing.

The following are a few segments from Greenwald’s posting on Salon.com…

Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That’s why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today — about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation — is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.

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But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies.

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And, of course, imagining what Fallows asks us to imagine — that this was all being done to us, rather than by us — is exactly the exercise which is most steadfastly avoided. Besides, even if it were to be engaged, it would be dismissed as an exercise in “moral relativism.” When we do X, it is right; when others do X to us, it is wrong. That’s the benefit of being so Exceptional.

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An active duty U.S. soldier currently deployed in Southeastern Baghdad, where this incident occurred, writes a very thoughtful and nuanced analysis of this matter to Andrew Sullivan, and says:
90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists.

War is a disgusting, horrible thing. As cliche as that excuse has become, for people to look at the natural heartbreaking nature of it and say that they’re somehow anomalous just shows how far people who have not experienced war have to go to understanding it.

Read the complete post on Salon.com

This is pretty disturbing stuff. Released by WikiLeaks, this classified US military video shows the slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack back in 2007. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The incidents captured in this released video material are no real surprise to those knowledgeable about life on the ground in that war torn country. It is unfortunately par for the course for what has been going on in Iraq since its invasion by American and British forces in 2003 (an aggressive act initiated under disingenuously manipulated pretexts, which is a criminal act unto itself).

For more information visit the special project website at www.collateralmurder.com

Dan Murphy of The Christian Science Monitor filed this report upon the initial release of the video…

A video released on the Internet Monday by WikiLeaks, a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from the US and other governments, appears to show the killing of two Iraqi journalists with Reuters and about nine other Iraqis in a Baghdad suburb in 2007 that is sharply at odds of the official US account of the incident.

Read the complete CSM report Here

Another excellent analysis by William Astore, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and an Oxford doctorate and military historian. This could read “Iraq” or “Afghanistan,” or any number of locales we choose to interject our armed forces.

The world’s finest military launches a highly coordinated shock-and-awe attack that shows enormous initial progress. There’s talk of the victorious troops being home for Christmas. But the war unexpectedly drags on. As fighting persists into a third, and then a fourth year, voices are heard calling for negotiations, even “peace without victory.” Dismissing such peaceniks and critics as defeatists, a conservative and expansionist regime — led by a figurehead who often resorts to simplistic slogans and his Machiavellian sidekick who is considered the brains behind the throne — calls for one last surge to victory. Unbeknownst to the people on the home front, however, this duo has already prepared a seductive and self-exculpatory myth in case the surge fails.

The United States in 2007? No, Wilhelmine Germany in 1917 and 1918, as its military dictators, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his loyal second, General Erich Ludendorff, pushed Germany toward defeat and revolution in a relentless pursuit of victory in World War I. Having failed with their surge strategy on the Western Front in 1918, they nevertheless succeeded in deploying a stab-in-the-back myth, or Dolchstoßlegende, that shifted blame for defeat from themselves and Rightist politicians to Social Democrats and others allegedly responsible for losing the war by their failure to support the troops at home.

The German Army knew it was militarily defeated in 1918. But this was an inconvenient truth for Hindenburg and the Right, so they crafted a new “truth”: that the troops were “unvanquished in the field.” So powerful did these words become that they would be engraved in stone on many a German war memorial.

It’s a myth we ourselves are familiar with. As South Vietnam was collapsing in 1975, Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., speaking to a North Vietnamese counterpart, claimed the U.S. military had never lost a battle in Vietnam. Perhaps so, the NVA colonel replied, “but it is also irrelevant.” Summers recounts his conversation approvingly, without irony, in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. For him, even if we lost the war, our Army proved itself “unbeatable.”

Though Summers’ premise was — and remains — dangerously misleading, it reassured the true believers who ran, and continue to run, our military. Those military men who were less convinced of our “unbeatable” stature tended to keep their own counsel. Their self-censorship, coupled with wider institutional self-deception, effectively opened the door to exculpatory myths.

A New American Stab-in-the-Back?

Warnings about a new stab-in-the-back myth may seem premature or overheated at this moment in the Iraq War. Yet, if the history of the original version of this myth is any guide, the opposite is true. They are timely precisely because the Dolchstoßlegende was not a post-war concoction, but an explanation cunningly, even cynically, hatched by Rightists in Germany before the failure of the desperate, final “victory offensive” of 1918 became fully apparent. Although Hindenburg’s dramatic testimony in November 1919 — a full year after the armistice that ended the war — popularized the myth in Germany, it caught fire precisely because the tinder had been laid to dry two years earlier.

That groundwork is laid regularly today in America on the right-wing media machine of Fox, talk radio, the National Review and the like.

Read The Full Report Here

No real surprise here, though the open discussion of holding a former British Prime Minister accountable for war crimes is noteworthy, and possible grounds for similar pursuits in the United States.

“Today’s revelations show that Lord Goldsmith told Mr. Blair at the outset, and in writing, that military action against Iraq was totally illegal,” The Mail stated.

The disclosures help to wreck Blair’s hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and former U.S. President George Bush declared war on Iraq. They also could lead to Blair’s being charged with war crimes.

Lord Goldsmith’s letter came about a week after a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, at which ministers were secretly told that the US and UK were set on “regime change” in Iraq.

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Another ever-insightful and even somewhat brutal analysis from Tom Engelhardt in the TomDispatch, this regarding some of the reasons behind the seeming folly of the current course of action in Afghanistan and the players involved in convincing Obama to succumb to this decision, one which will almost assuredly result in what what will be years and years of more war there.

A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority

You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered.  It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn’t on the deck of the USS Missouri ; he never bowed his head.  Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief, but as the commanded-in-chief. 

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Finish the job in Afghanistan?  Based on the plans of the field commanders to whom the president has bowed, on the administration’s record of escalation in the war so far, and on the quiet reassurances to the Pakistanis that we aren’t leaving Afghanistan in any imaginable future, this war looks to be all job and no finish.  Whatever the flourishes, that was the essence of Tuesday night’s surrender speech. 

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In addition, the Taliban now reportedly take a cut of the billions of dollars in U.S. development aid flowing into the country, much of which is otherwise squandered, and of the American money that goes into “protecting” the convoys that bring supplies to U.S. troops throughout the country.  One out of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted the Afghan National Army in the last year, while the ill-paid, largely illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their “ well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes,” not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15%, are, as its politely put, “years away from functioning independently”; and the insurgency is spreading to new areas of the country and reviving in others.

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Meanwhile, the money flowing into Washington political coffers from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care industries, real estate, legal firms, and the like might be thought of as a kind of drug in itself.  At the same time, according to USA Today , at least 158 retired generals and admirals, many already pulling in military pensions in the range of $100,000-$200,000, have been hired as “senior mentors” by the Pentagon “to offer advice under an unusual arrangement”:  they also work for companies seeking Defense Department contracts.  

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Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s here in the United States, in Washington, where knowledge is slim, egos large, and national security wisdom is deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down.  The president campaigned on the slogan , “Change we can believe in.”  He then chose as advisors — in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error , narrow and unimaginative thinking, and over-identification with the powerful could easily be compiled — a crew who had never seen a significant change, or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with — and still can’t. 

As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantanamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush’s wars will, despite promises otherwise, soon enough be made. 

As for Obama’s claims that he has a measured plan, and that we will be on schedule to begin removal of U.S. troops within two years, I am left with recollections of Churchill’s statement that one should “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter…” The idea that events will unfold as one plans them to within war strategy is near delusional.

Read The Complete Post from TomDispatch.com

Bob Herbert from The New York Times here lamenting the course of action this nation is being thrust into…

After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

As a friend of mine responded in regards to the issues raised by Herbert….

One reason I voted for Obama was that he saw the Iraq fiasco for what it was. I was hoping that he would stand up to the M-I [military-industrial] complex. If that’s political suicide, so be it. Funny how when Ron Paul during the debates said the first thing he would do is withdraw our military from all over the world, not just the hot spots that no one reported it, even though he said it on national TV — was nowhere to be found in the newspapers the next day.

Folks decry the expansion of government into health care, environmental regulation and other areas — calling it socialism — yet fail to acknowledge that the M-I complex has hijacked our country, presumably, I suppose, because militarism is “patriotic,” but also because it comes down to whose ox is getting gored and whose bread is being buttered (Wow, my metaphors are out of control).

The Warfare State rolls on…

Read Herbert’s complete essay Here

Scott Ritter weighs in on the situation with his piece “McChrystal Doesn’t Get It — Does Obama?”

Thus the solution itself becomes the problem, thereby creating a never-ending circular conflict which has the United States expending more and more resources to resolve a situation that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, and everything to do with crafting a politically viable salve for what is in essence a massive self-inflicted wound. It is the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail, a frustrating experience made even more so by the fact that any massive commitment of troops brings with it the fatal attachment of national pride, individual hubris and, worst of all, the scourge of domestic American politics, so that by the time this dog bites its tail, it will be so blinded by artificialities that rather than recognize its mistake, it will instead proceed to consume itself. In the case of Afghanistan, our consumption will be measured in the lives of American servicemen and women, national treasure, national honor, and, of course the lives of countless Afghan dead and wounded.

Read The Full Article