January 15, 2007, 1:30 pm
Grumbling in the Ranks

Vocal opposition to President’s Bush’s strategy of sending more than 20,000
additional troops to help secure Iraq has grown to include some of the
troops themselves.

A group of more than 50 active-duty military officers will deliver a
petition to Congress on Tuesday signed by about 1,000 troops calling for an
end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. “Any troop increase over here will just
produce more sitting ducks, more targets,” said Sergeant Ronn Cantu, who is
serving in Iraq.

Under the 1988 Military Whistleblower Protection Act, active duty military,
National Guard, and Reservists may communicate with any member of Congress
without fear of reprisal, even if copies of the communication are sent to
others.

–

I’m not a progressive, and I don’t believe those who lay claim to that term have any hotline to The Truth.

On content and style, FSD is written and is unlikely to change. Since then, I have written volumes, and I would be surprised and disappointed with myself if the style AND content didn’t change. I’m putting up more recent things at Insurgent American, if you’re interested.

We “organics” ought to be nothing if not a little protean, eh?

(-:

Thanks for reading my book, by the way.

Gramsci made the distinction between traditional intellectuals and organic intellecutals that rise out of their work lives. Apparently not only the content will change, but the style as well.

And you don’t understand, Stan, the fear that the US is going to bomb Iran and Syria? When Nixon was withdrawing from Vietnam he bombed Cambodia and Laos, causing as many casualties as the Pol Pot movement in this Secret war.

The thing is that Bush is not merely delusional and contemptuous of the US and world population, he appears to be bloodthirsty. When he was a kid his friend reported that he used to torture animals, and he supervised the excecution of an enormous number of Texans, baiting some of them. He exulted in the lynching of Hussain and they just excecuted his relatives.

I know that the primary historical forces involved are systemic, but the personal does sometimes play a part. Bush stated to Seymour Hirsh that great presidents won WARS, and his relish for the position of a War President, lacking all military experience, appears to be partly driving by his vindictiveness.

Bush may lack men but he has plenty of bombs and I think it is a good guess, for a number of reasons, that he will bomb Iran, which has a large trade with Russia and China.

Also still cannot understand why people believe Bush on the bombing of Iran.I still do not go along with this.. I have said this before some time ago on your site Stan. An yet the plethora of articles on how the US is going to Bomb Iraq just keep flowing and flowing, while the blood of Iraqis keep flowing and flowing. This is right up Bush’s ally of course.

Nor do I understand why one would believe Bush when he said he is going after el Sadr.

Sadr bloc decides to return to government…”
8th Jan, 2007 Bagdad. Google Uruknet ( Sadr. has 30 seats in the Iraqi US Puppet government.)

And while Bush’s is speaking in very broad generalities of how the Iraqis are fighting each other he is not telling you what your US forces are doing. And while Bush is telling you he is taking on Iran he is licking their boots, as he needs them badly.

Even today, US forces raided dormitories in Tikrit universities - smashed up everything in site as well as students - and took away 4 students and one professor.
see article by Ghazwan al-Juburi Voices of Iraq.

Tikrit is a Sunni area. Yet Bush tells us that it is only el Sadr that is killing Sunni’s and secular Shiite
Iraqis.

The first question to ask oneself is why would Bush bomb Iran when these Persian/Iranian backed mulllahs in the US’s puppet Iraqi government in cohorts with
the US forces are co-jointly decreasing the Arab population in Iraq.

Does one think Bush’s brother Jed or Jeb or whatever. is going to take the Iranians place in Iraq?

And if Bush did attack Iran then he would have no friends left in Iraq to do the dirty work for him.
All he would have is enemies from a broad political spectrum.

I assume this is what you mean by the ‘real end of the war” Stan. I hope I am right this time.

The issue of the bombing of Iran has been the main
talking point of the Iraq invasion for the past nearly 2 years. And it still is keeping everyone diverted
from the truth, and acting as a cover for what the US is really doing in Iraq. .

Also in my previous comments above, “Desert Storm” should have read “Desert Fox” in regard to Clintons criminality. This was when the US forces under Clinton bombed an Iraqi maternity hospital, a teaching hospital, an outpatients clinic and the Health Ministry, then the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, then for good measure they knocked out the water-supply for 300,000 Iraqis.

In addition under Clinton, the US implemented no-fly zones of two-thirds of Iraq in which they carried out more than 330,OOO sorties. At the same time the US US and Britain entered Iraq’s air space on military missions 21,000 times killing hundreds of Iraqis. Kurt Nimmo correctly states on his site “Despite nearly 4 yrs of punishing attacks Saddam Hussein neither threatened to use or used any weapons of mass destruction.

But then most people in the US believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction then because Clinton had told them so, before Bush told them so. So that makes both Clinton and Bush liars.

No doubt the bombing of Iran will be a continuing
saga- and I wonder what excuse the progressives will have when it does not happen.

Sadly they will not be able to excuse the death-toll of the Iraqi people. And no doubt they will have the audacity to try.

We have just completed the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, and now we honor one of his loyal disciples of peace, Dr. Martin Luther King. So, We are duty bound to speak out in this time against the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and especially the fascistic conduct of President Bush in daring to announce an escalation of the criminal war on Iraq in the face of national elections and opinion polls in which the American People sent a clear message to the federal government that they want the war on Iraq to be ended.

Dr. King made a profound and courageous speech on April of 1967 breaking the silence of dissent against the war in Viet Nam. I recall it now because the import of such historic moments today is how we apply their moral and political lessons to our own situation. Really, we are practicing elementary principles of Martin Luther King’s philosophy in resurrecting his voice for peace in 2007. Wouldn’t that be what he would want us to do ? Oppose these wars in his name .

In that speech King said

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered…. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. …. We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation”

Sadly, these words are stil pertinent to U.S. policy today !

King also said:

MLK quote: Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poorÑ both black and whiteÑthrough the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a so- ciety gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Today: The Federal government has no urban policy anymore and boldly declares so. Billions of dollars now being sent to destroy lives in Iraq would do a lot in our cities today.

MLK quote: Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor

Today: our youth are dying for oil profits

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA13Ak05.html

The Somalia thing was a political feint meant to reinforce the narative of “terrorists,” by showing the US in the GWOT after the attackers of the Embassy in Nairobi (it actually killed 27 civilians instead).

As to wider escalation, there are not enough troops available for it. Period. When LBJ escalated to half a million, he had a draft. The Bush administration will not do that.

No one has bombed Iran or Syria.

The number of contract-mercenaries is around 25,000, not 100,000. The other contractors are involved in KBR service and construction scams and whatnot. They are not combatants, and therefore not troops.

When the US kinapped the Iranians in Kurdistan, on the second attempt they were confronted by their own peshmerga allies… some escalation. It blew up in their faces.

The “surge” is not symbolic in the least. It is intended to neutralize the troublesome muqawams Sunni militias in Baghdad, but even more importantly to neutralize Muqtada al-Sadr.

These panic attacks about the imminent attack on Iran have been going on unabated for a year now, and the failure of these attacks to materialize has proven insufficient to disabuse people of this thesis. People cling to it like an old teddy bear… and I am at a complete loss to understand why.

In April 2004, the US, with approximately the same overall troop numbers in Iraq, was nearly confronted with a Saigon ‘75 scenario when a dual rebellion broke out, basically in two places: Fallujah and Najaf.

Now, Anbar, Ninevah, and Saladin are virtually liberated territory for the Sunnis; and the only testy allies the US has left in Iraq are two parties who are extremely tight with Iran - the SCIRI and the Da’wa. In their contest for political hegemony within the ineffectual “parliament” that nonethelesshad international recognition and the protection of the UA armed forces, the Da’wa was weaker than the SCIRI and so made a political alliance with the Sadrists… who part ways with both the SCIRI and the Da’wa in wanting a re-unified Iraq and an immediate Anglo-American withdrawal. But Maliki could not secure his post as the Prime Minister without the parliamentary majority that Sadr gives him in their coalition. But every time Maliki is given instructions that he can’t possible get away with from his US masters, Sadr puts him in check by making a very credible threat to slam the door on their parliametary alliance.

The security forces working with the Americans in Baghdad are largely composed of the Badr Army, a large SCIRI militia, trained in and still quite loyal to Iran. The SCIRI is run by a fella named Hakim, who along with Maliki, want to establish a Shia-dominated rump state in SE Iraq, only loosely federated with the Sunnis. The Americans do not want this (1) because it would set up a great Sunni guerrilla wall between the oil fields of Kirkuk and vicinity and the port at Um Qasr, and (2) it would leave Iran in a position to be the most influential actor in the region.

So they are stuck with Sadr — the unification advocate who wants the US out (and opposes their attempts to impose a hydrocarbon law on Iraq giving US multinationals a crack at Iraqi oil) — and SCIRI-Da’wa — Shia federationists, who would let the US TNCs run wild in Iraq’s oil economy, but would build a permanent political alliance with Iran… who, by the way, is inking bilateral aggrements with China and Russia so fast one can hardly keep up with them.

The US is attmepting to solve this dilemma with a depserate attempt to neutralize the 60-80,000 Mahdi militia members, who are strongly supported within Brooklyn-sized Sadr City, around 4 km from the Green Zone. They have convinced themselves that removing Sadr’s influence will clear a path for Maliki to behave as a good US puppet, or Hakim (they don’t care which… they courted him after the last debacle of a meeting between Maliki and Bush); and they will figureout how to cajole a wedge between the puppet and Iarn later.

Of course, what they are really about to do is ignite April 2004 (the sequel), and possibley give the civilians of Sadr City the Fallujah treatment in the process.

If the movement is going to get out in front of this vicious bullshit, we really have to familiarize ourselves with the complexity of it.

Whe we spend a year warning of an attack on Iran that would result in a quick and decisive tactical defeat of the US in Iraq; and the administration never fulfills our dark prophecies; it makes us look…. ahem, uninformed.

Don’t get me wrong. The neocons have demonstrated remarkable foolishness and self-delusion; but they can’t do just any damn thing, because what they CAN do is circumscribed by very real conditions and capacities. Maybe they will eventually fall on the idea of attacking Iran… when they do, it will mark the real beginning of the real end of the Iraq war.

The Army and the Marine Corps are experiencing what Generals themselves are calling a “readiness crisis.” What happens when relatively acquiescent SE Iraq becomes “the swarm”?

It appears that the twenty thousand troops or so is a symbolic approach to this widening the war, and possibly escalating if further, since the troop incrrease is insignificant. There are not one hundred and fifty thousand US troops in Iraq, but TWO hundred and fifty thousnad, including a hundred thousand civilian ‘Contractors.’

The increase is therefore less than ten percent. This can only be a prelude to more increase of war forces, and it would have been useful to say so to stiffen the Dem spines.

But it’s fine as it is, since the most important thing is active oppostion, not dwelling on specialized points.