It appears there is no "surge" from the perspective of the people who live in the prison camp that used to be called Baghdad. A Guardian reporter has posted YouTube video from Baghdad. As an Iraqi citizen, he has managed to get into places no other journalist can.
Normally I wouldn't use frontpage privileges to promote movies but this one is something special. On Sunday I was channel surfing and came across former TV host Phil Donahue talking on C-SPAN with Brian Lamb. Donahue spoke how the Iraq War is no longer on many Americans radars when it comes to keeping up with the news. As a result, he (and a colleague) released a new documentary called Body of War and all I can say is "Wow."
Body of War is a feature documentary featuring Tomas Young, 25 years old, who was paralyzed from a bullet to his spine - wounded after serving in Iraq for less than a week. Body of War is Tomas' coming home story as he evolves into a new person, coming to terms with his disability and finding his own unique and passionate voice against the war. The film is produced and directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, and features two original songs by Eddie Vedder. Vetter's new song "No More" is powerful. Very powerful.
Everyone should see it. It's not playing anytime soon in Vermont but I'm sure it will make its way up here. For more information check out http://www.bodyofwar.com/. In the meantime, here's the trailer.
House Democratic leaders could complete work as soon as Monday on a half-trillion-dollar spending package that will include billions of dollars for the war effort in Iraq without the timelines for the withdrawal of combat forces that President Bush has refused to accept, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said yesterday.
In a complicated deal over the war funds, Democrats will include about $11 billion more in domestic spending than Bush has requested, emergency drought relief for the Southeast and legislation to address the subprime mortgage crisis, Hoyer told a meeting of the Washington Post editorial board.
If the bargain were to become law, it would be the third time since Democrats took control of Congress that they would have failed to force Bush to change course in Iraq and continued to fund a war that they have repeatedly vowed to end. But it would also be the clearest instance yet of the president bowing to a Democratic demand for more money for domestic priorities, an increase that he had promised to reject.
Well, then. Today, I was witness to a truly inspiring day of direct action. With results, as you can see from the sign that was on the recruiter's office in Williston, today. All of you old coots who grumble about the youth of today, it's time to listen up. More below the jump...
Voters and the media continue to ask the presidential candidates to state whether troops will remain in Iraq should they be elected.The candidates are also being queried about the troop level that might remain as part of other military and foreign policy objectives.
Some answers are better than others.However, in addition to the answers so far, the question: "will there be troops in Iraq [1, 2, 4 etc.] years into your presidency?" also misses the mark.
What the candidates have not yet said, below . . .
Despite better education and more awareness within the general population, a pervasive bias remains against people with mental health problems.
Suffering from mental illness too often means suffering from prejudice or discrimination as well. The systemic biases in our communities and institutions exacerbate the very illness afflicting those who most need support and understanding. Prejudice and lack of access to care are another set of roadblocks for people struggling with acute and/or chronic serious mental health problems.
It is an all-consuming task, for many who have mental problems, to cope with their disabilities and work toward maintaining or preserving - to the full extent they can - a functional life. This burden frequently falls on the family and loved ones who help to care and take responsibility for those with mental/behavioral health and personality disorders.Now, throw in the added burden of prejudice, neglect, a judgmental community that fails at its duty to be a support system (or to allow a support system to be in place), and life for the mentally ill is one nasty uphill fight.
If you haven't guessed already, this is about the U.S. war on Iraq . . .(more below)
Congressman Peter Welch met today with a group of some 100-120 Vermonters to discuss the war in the Aldrich Library in Barre today. Hoo boy, where to begin... Let's just say that it was the most heated confrontation that I've ever personally witnessed between constituents and a politician. Much more below the jump, it's a long one...
A couple of issues near and dear to the hearts of Vermont activists are playing out (or beginning to).
First is the aftermath of Rep. Dennis Kucinich's move to do what so many Vermonters wanted Rep. Peter Welch to do - sort of. As everyone has no doubt heard by now, Kucinich called the impeachment question on the floor of the House (where motions on impeachment are considered privileged and must be addressed). Yay Dennis, except, well - it was a call for the impeachment of Cheney, which seems to me to miss the target politically and ethically. Long past are the bygone days where people on the left wondered whether President Bush was no more than an ineffectual empty suit. Cheney may be his most crude, effective and brazen hatchet man, but he is still a hatchet man - a mere symptom of the problem that is Bush himself.
In any event, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland moved quickly to table the motion, but was stymied by a block of Democrats joined (ultimately, after some vote-switching) by Republicans who thought a public debate over the merits of ditching a vice president whose approval rating is nearly in the single digits would somehow embarass his critics more than his defenders (this is bizarro world, isn't it?). The motion was not tabled, but, after getting the dissident Dems marching to his drum, was then quickly sent by Hoyer to the Judiciary committee where the profoundly disappointing Chair, Rep. John Conyers, will simply stack it to die along with the other Kucinich impeachment resolution gathering cobwebs in that committee.
But the question on everyone's mind is - will Kucinich simply bring it to the floor again (and aim at Bush next time)? By House rules, it remains a privileged motion that must be considered. If Kucinich is serious, he could well bring it to the floor on primetime every day of the session. He's gotten gobs of good feedback on this, so activists are watching and waiting...
Second is Rep. Welch's moment of truth on Iraq funding that is now on on its way.
Am I being harsh? Perhaps. Maybe it's just the first expression that came to mind.
If you're a Vermonter, you probably already know about Sen. Leahy caving in to the right-wing noise machine's phony righteous indignation and voting to condemn MoveOn.org's NYT ad that (perish the thought!) General Westmoreland Petraeus might not actually be so on the level in regards to Iraq.
Well, as you now know, the Continuing Resolution that would extend fiscal year 2007 spending at the same levels for 7 weeks into fiscal year 2008 has just passed. And yes, there is Iraq money in there. The MoveOn condemnation was an amendment to that bill. So they stuck it on a must-pass bill, and sadly, Welch and many others didn't attempt to kill the amendment as far as I know. Not good. Welch voted for the bill.
Former US Ambassador to Croatia, Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control, (and Townshend resident) Peter Galbraith has written a new piece on Iran and discusses what he thinks is the appropriate solution to a potential international crisis.
In his continuing effort to bolster support for the Iraq war, President Bush traveled to Reno, Nevada, on August 28 to speak to the annual convention of the American Legion. He emphatically warned of the Iranian threat should the United States withdraw from Iraq. Said the President, "For all those who ask whether the fight in Iraq is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control large parts of the country."
On the same day, in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, battled government security forces around the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam's holiest places. A million pilgrims were in the city and fifty-one died.
The U.S. did not directly intervene, but American jets flew overhead in support of the government security forces. As elsewhere in the south, those Iraqi forces are dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia founded, trained, armed, and financed by Iran. When U.S. forces ousted Saddam's regime from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration's failure to plan for security and governance in post-invasion Iraq.
In the months that followed, the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) appointed Badr Organization leaders to key positions in Iraq's American-created army and police. At the same time, L. Paul Bremer's CPA appointed party officials from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to be governors and serve on governorate councils throughout southern Iraq. SCIRI, recently renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), was founded at the Ayatollah Khomeini's direction in Tehran in 1982. The Badr Organization is the militia associated with SCIRI.
In the January 2005 elections, SCIRI became the most important component of Iraq's ruling Shiite coalition. In exchange for not taking the prime minister's slot, SCIRI won the right to name key ministers, including the minister of the interior. From that ministry, SCIRI placed Badr militiamen throughout Iraq's national police.
In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned would be a disastrous consequence of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. And while the President contrasts the promise of democracy in Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in southern Iraq.
To read more of this informative article click here.
The following comes courtesy of the Welch press office...
Leahy said, “It seems clear that the President has no idea how to end this war and has every intention of laying it on the doorstep of the next President. He would leave as many troops stuck on this treadmill next summer as we had there a year ago. The surge that was supposed to usher in a political solution among Iraq’s warring factions has failed, with a settlement no closer today than it was one, two or three years ago. Meanwhile we have become an excuse for Iraq to avoid reaching a settlement. We have been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II. It’s time to begin bringing our brave troops home from the middle of Iraq’s civil war.”
Sanders said, “President Bush misled us into this war 4 1/2 years ago, and he is still misleading us. Bush’s ‘troop withdrawal’ program will leave us with as many troops in Iraq as we had before the ‘surge’ troop buildup -- about 130,000. Even more importantly, this president has no idea as to how to end this war. Bush’s advisors concede that this war, already longer than World War II, could go on for another five to 10 years. This is unacceptable. We need to bring our troops home and develop a new and more effective strategy for fighting the very serious problem of international terrorism.”
Welch said, “The President made clear tonight that there is no end in sight to the war in Iraq. He continues to blindly pursue a failed military strategy for a civil war that demands a political and economic solution. The American military has achieved every objective this President has given them. They are now stretched beyond their capacity, leaving America exposed to threats elsewhere around the world. Continuing to referee a civil war with no end in sight is unacceptable to our military, unacceptable to the American taxpayer, and unacceptable for America’s national security. President Bush has no strategy in Iraq other than running out the clock on his presidency, knowing that this war will soon be another President’s burden. It is imperative that Congress finally use the power of the purse to end this war and bring our troops home.”
I front paged this yesterday and immediately took it down, thinking it wasn't GMD-related. But hey, if it's good enough for The Washington Note, then by all means it's good here.
Here's what Miss South Carollina, Lauren Caitlin Upton had to say on why a fifth of Americans can't find the U.S. on a world map.
UPDATE: Upton finally responds to press inquries. The State, a South Carolina newspaper has the scoop.
Here's a doozy. Bush-supported Iraqi Prime Minister (such as the position is) Al-Maliki is bristling at criticism that he's inneffective and irrelevant - particularly the recent calls (from people like Hillary Clinton, Carl Levin and a bunch of Republicans) that he step down.
"There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages"
Okay, so far so good...
"for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin,"
Hm. Leaving out someone a little more obvious, aren't we?
But here's the payoff quote. Why should the criticism of Maliki stop? Because...
"This is severe interference in our domestic affairs."
Update, 10:46 PM... I am reminded by Steve Benen of many things, perhaps most significant is that the reality of the Turk-Kurd dynamic is just too much to blithely gloss over. I try to slide over it below (while acknowledging it) to make this whole piece more thematically tight, but that's just ridiculous. Any new borders would have to include a Kurdish state. And any Kurdish state would incur the wrath of the Turks - but that's still a scenario more managable than a Turkey-absorbed Kurdistan, so try this map instead. Eh, I'll stick with state, local and national politics...
(Please note: I am not promoting this as the solution, merely...making conversation... those who read this site know that I am not a foreign policy guy.)
The trisection of Iraq into three states - one each dominated by Kurds, Shia and Sunnis - is a notion that never quite goes away, but is never quite seriously addressed either. Even it's high-profile proponents such as Senator Joe Biden hardly seem to mention it anymore. Iraq, which was carved into a state arbitrarily in the post-colonial era, never truly gained the sort of national identity that the secular baathists were trying to create, and it can certainly be argued that now is a less than ideal time to somehow make it work - especially since it's now being suggested that hardwiring these underlying divisions into the nascent, dysfunctional parliament may have only served to exacerbate the friction.
But it always does raise one question for me. If the geographic carving knife is on the rhetorical table, instead of making one problematic state building project into three, is it worth considering going the other direction? For example:
Problem:
Solution?
Again, I'm not proposing it, but it's an interesting point of conversation (including some very big associated problems)...
Leave it to impeachment expert and aggressive progreesive, David Lindorff to point out what's the Dems need to do.
Democrats are their own worst enemy
By Dave Lindorff
If it weren't so depressing, it would be entertaining to watch the loathed, ridiculed and remarkably unpopular Bush administration continue to run circles around the supposedly ascendant Democrats in Congress.
Now that Democrats have provided Bush with full summer funding for his outrageous and doomed escalation of the Iraq War, they are finding themselves incapable of stopping even that affront to the American public, which last November made it clear it wanted this bloody madness in Iraq to end.
Having accepted Bush's terms - that cutting funds for the war is "undermining the troops" the Democrats in Congress are now unable to challenge Bush's new line - that they should provide even more money to the troops for raises. They are also vulnerable to the new pitch- that they should - listen to the generals- and give the escalation (still being called a "surge" after six full months) until November. All of this is obviously setting the stage for September, when Bush will come back to Congress with a 2008 supplemental funding request to fund the war through the rest of his sorry term of office.
Of course, come November, the generals, who know who gives out the promotions and who are loath to admit that they've lost yet another war, will accommodate their commander in chief and say that they need more time again - say until next February or March. And in this way they'll string out the war, and keep the killing and dying going on, until Bush and Cheney can safely leave office and hand their mess to a new administration.
If the Democrats want to escape this trap of their own making, they are going to have to do something that has eluded Democrats for a generation- really back to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. They are going to have to stand up and be leaders. (Okay, Johnson was a war criminal and should have been impeached for the Gulf of Tonkin fraud, but he did stand up and lead on Civil Rights legislation, Medicare and the so-called War on Poverty.)
I orginally saw this on Raw Story but MCJoan over at "The Big Orange" has another good synopsis.
Seventy congressman have sent a letter to Bush stating they will no longer vote for more funding for the Iraq occupation and from now on, the only Iraq funding bill they will vote for is for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Here's a copy of the letter:
Dear Mr. President:
We are writing to inform you that we will only support appropriating additional funds for U.S. military operations in Iraq during Fiscal Year 2008 and beyond for the protection and safe redeployment of all our troops out of Iraq before you leave office.
More than 3,600 of our brave soldiers have died in Iraq. More than 26,000 have been seriously wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or injured in the hostilities and more than 4 million have been displaced from their homes. Furthermore, this conflict has degenerated into a sectarian civil war and U.S. taxpayers have paid more than $500 billion, despite assurances that you and your key advisors gave our nation at the time you ordered the invasion in March, 2003 that this military intervention would cost far less and be paid from Iraqi oil revenues.
We agree with a clear and growing majority of the American people who are opposed to continued, open-ended U.S. military operations in Iraq, and believe it is unwise and unacceptable for you to continue to unilaterally impose these staggering costs and the soaring debt on Americans currently and for generations to come.
Sincerely,
Rep. Lynn Woolsey (CA); Rep. Barbara Lee (CA); Rep. Maxine Waters (CA); Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA); Rep. Rush Holt (NJ); Rep. Maurice Hinchey (NY); Rep. Diane Watson (CA); Rep. Ed Pastor (AZ); Rep. Barney Frank (MA); Rep. Danny Davis (IL); Rep. John Conyers (MI); Rep. John Hall (NY); Rep. Bob Filner (CA); Rep. Nydia Velazquez (NY); Rep. Bobby Rush (IL); Rep. Charles Rangel (NY); Rep. Ed Towns (NY); Rep. Paul Hodes (NH); Rep. William Lacy Clay (MO); Rep. Earl Blumenauer (OR); Rep. Albert Wynn (MD); Rep. Bill Delahunt (MA); Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC); Rep. G. K. Butterfield (NC); Rep. Hilda Solis (CA); Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY); Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY); Rep. Michael Honda (CA); Rep. Steve Cohen (TN); Rep. Phil Hare (IL); Rep. Grace Flores Napolitano (CA); Rep. Alcee Hastings (FL); Rep. James McGovern (MA); Rep. Marcy Kaptur (OH); Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL); Rep. Julia Carson (IN); Rep. Linda Sanchez (CA); Rep. Raul Grijalva (AZ); Rep. John Olver (MA); Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (TX); Rep. Jim McDermott (WA); Rep. Ed Markey (MA); Rep. Chaka Fattah (PA); Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ); Rep. Rubin Hinojosa (TX); Rep. Pete Stark (CA); Rep. Bobby Scott (VA); Rep. Jim Moran (VA); Rep. Betty McCollum (MN); Rep. Jim Oberstar (MN); Rep. Diana DeGette (CO); Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA); Rep. Artur Davis (AL); Rep. Hank Johnson (GA); Rep. Donald Payne (NJ); Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (MO); Rep. John Lewis (GA); Rep. Yvette Clarke (NY); Rep. Neil Abercrombie (HI); Rep. Gwen Moore (WI); Rep. Keith Ellison (MN); Rep. Tammy Baldwin (WI); Rep. Donna Christensen (USVI); Rep. David Scott (GA); Rep. Luis Gutierrez (IL); Lois Capps (CA); Steve Rothman (NJ); Elijah Cummings (MD); and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).
****Although Peter Welch is not listed in MCJoan's diary, He is one of the 70 who signned the letter, per Jack McCullough. Check it out in the comments!
David Corn in the Washington Post rebutts neo-con hack Bill Kristol's seemingly delusional assertion that history will remember George W. Bush's presidency as a roaring success (and that, my friends, was a hard sentence to type without laughing or crying).
The whole piece is a must read, but one particular sentence just made me think for a moment:
Still, Kristol advises, stick with the "surge," train more Iraqi troops, and all will be well. The United States has already spent $19 billion training 346,500 or so Iraqi troops and police officers, and now merely six battalions -- down from 10, according to Gen. Peter Pace -- can function independently. That is, only 3,000 Iraqi troops are operating on their own after all this time and money.
Now if you do the math it means that the going rate for each successful Iraqi military or police officer to "stand up so we can stand down" is a breathtaking 6.3 million dollars (in the Bush ledger, that's one post-Katrina superdome repair).
