Mounting Death Toll Which Makes a Mockery of US Optimism
By the time General Petraeus had finished speaking yesterday the slaughter in Iraq for the previous 24 hours could be tallied. It was not an exceptionally violent day by the standards of Iraq: seven US soldiers lay dead and 11 injured in the capital; other instances of sectarian violence included a suicide bomb which had killed 10 and wounded scores near Mosul while 10 bodies were found in Baghdad. Three policemen were killed in clashes in Mosul, and a car bomb outside a hospital in the capital had exploded, killing two and wounding six.
In Baghdad, on the surface the overt violence appears to have diminished. There are fewer loud explosions. But, the city is now being partitioned by sectarian hatred and fear; by concrete walls and barbed wire. Claims that the US military strategy is paving the way for a stable society bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground.
The US is accused of manipulating figures relating to violence to fit their case, ignoring evidence which shows that the influx of 30,000 troops has done little to end the continuing bloodshed.
The death of Omar al-Husseini in the Huriya district of Baghdad is one of many which does not even figure in the American reckoning. His killers, masked and carrying guns, dragged him away as his mother wept and his father pleaded for mercy. That was the last time they saw their son alive. Three weeks later they heard that he had been killed.
Omar was 20. His killers were Shia, he was a Sunni, the victim of a spree of murders which has ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods through the city. But both the US military and the Iraqi police have told his parents that as far as they are concerned the abduction and killings were purely criminal acts. This means, statistically, that his death is not included by the US in the calculations for sectarian killings produced yesterday.
The causes behind the daily death toll, if addressed at all, draw conflicting accounts. Mourners carried the coffin of a young mother along the streets of Sadr City yesterday. She had been killed, said the locals, along with her two daughters when US and Iraqi government forces had stormed four homes. The US military confirmed they had exchanged small-arms fire during the operation, but insisted they had no reports of civilian casualties. Also yesterday, attendants at the Baghdad morgue did their round of collecting bodies, nameless victims of faceless killers.
Omar’s father, 48-year-old Barzan, said the attack on his son came after the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia, declared that they must leave their home. ” We were going to leave, we did not want any trouble. We had very excellent relations with our Shia neighbours, but they could not do anything to help us “, he said. “They [the Mehdi Army] were also saying that my two sons were involved with the insurgents. That was not true, they had nothing to do with politics. Mohammed was away when they came, but Omar was there and they took him away and shot him. The police and the Americans say he was an Ali Baba [thief] and this killing was something to do with that. But everyone knows why he died, it is because we are Sunnis.”
Barzan had fled with his family to the Khadrah district where he found refuge with his cousin. They could not watch much of General Pertraeus’s address on satellite TV because of a power cut. Four years after the war, electricity supply in the city has dwindled to one hour a day.
Not far away from Barzan’s new home are other houses, some with singe marks on doors and windows, properties of Shia who had been terrorised and driven out the other way. The walls being put up by US contractors at a record speed are formalising this break-up of Baghdad along sectarian lines. Militias rule the roost in the newly created ghettos; armed young men with sunglasses manning checkpoints, collecting levies from passing traffic, and meting out their own justice to victims who would never make the calculations on the effects of the surge.
The Americans at first welcomed the forming of the vigilante groups, calling them “guardians”; in some areas this was described as part of the ” Sunni awakening”, away from the insurgency. But this began to be tempered after tales of extortion began to surface, and now some have been arrested for “suspected al-Qa’ida ties”.
The purge of the neighbourhoods, however, has helped to bring down the number of violent deaths, providing fewer sectarian targets. Residents seeing their neighbours being driven out are too afraid to do anything. Ali Mohammed, a Shia in Huriya, spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ” If we say anything we will be attacked,” he said. “So what can we say? We know of people being driven out, being killed, but there is no one we can go to.”
Others say the surge itself had led to the rise in intimidation by the militias. Rashid Kamal, in Amariya, said: “The Americans drove out the militias, but they only went into other areas. It is this which led to the places where Sunnis and Shia were living together being split up. People who have been neighbours for generations were forced to leave in a few hours.”
Since the start of the surge, the deaths of US soldiers have fallen from a peak of 120 in May to 56 in August. But there are significant discrepancies between the figures for civilian deaths presented by the US military and independent estimates. According to American authorities, 165 civilians were murdered in Baghdad in August, a slight increase on the previous two months, but a sizeable decrease since the beginning of the surge. However, figures released by Iraq’s Interior Ministry suggest that at least 428 people were murdered in Baghdad last month, and 612 in July. The Associated Press’s tally of civilian deaths throughout Iraq in August was 1,809, the highest this year.
Under the US military’s rules, a corpse shot in the back of the head is a ” sectarian” killing, while one shot through the front is deemed to be a criminal one. Even under this arbitrary criterion it would be difficult on many occasions to distinguish which particular group a death may fall under. Attendants at the Baghdad morgue point out that victims often bear multiple gunshot wounds.
Hours before General Petraeus appeared in Washington, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, gave his own assessment of the surge. “The key to reconstruction, economic development and improving peoples’ standards of living is security,” he said. Violence in Baghdad, he declared, had ” dropped by 75 per cent”. He failed, however, to provide any figures.
© 2007 The Independent
I cant take the word of this Gen.Petraeus for anythng and my heart gets more and more heavy by the minute. Tony
We are all now standing in all the blod of the people of Iraq and our own troops. They kill in our name like it or not.
Time to organize and take the country back. Anything else is a waste of time, including blogging here, unless it is for that purpose.
It’s time “we the people” took charge again, steered the ship back on course. Whenever you’ve got a monarchical George at the helm, it becomes necessary to intervene.
Best idea I’ve heard is National Initiative for Democracy.
Estimate of the number of dead expected in Iraq by 2017
“Iraq and American Death Count to 2017″
http://www.chycho.com/?q=2017
“The numbers from this estimate are devastating. It is expected that over 8 million Iraqi civilians and well over 27 thousand coalition troops will be dead by March 2017. The monthly death rate for coalition troops will increase to approximately 300, while Iraq’s monthly death rate will increase to close to 95 thousand, which is frighteningly close to the more than 130,000 deaths per month witnessed in Rwanda in 1994… These numbers do not included the expected death toll due to Depleted Uranium poisoning.”
Even though more than a million Iraqis were killed (excluding about a million Iraqis, who died during Clinton sponsored sanctions, and millions of Iraqi refugees due to the American occupation) since the invasion of Iraq by the blood-thirsty American Christian terrorists, I am appalled that the blood of these innocent Iraqi children, women, and men, hasn’t satisfied the thirst of the American christian monsters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is beyond the comprehension of any human being.
The following interview shows how the US is causing the deaths of Iraqis and Iraqi instability.
“When General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker spoke of success stories in Iraq during their congressional testimony, they largely focused on the situation in Anbar province where former Sunni insurgents are now fighting Al Qaeda alongside U.S. troops. Critics of the military’s policy in Anbar have accused the U.S. of fueling the sectarian civil war in Iraq by funding former Sunni insurgents. It is widely known the U.S. is paying the former insurgent forces but General Petreaus denied the U.S. was directly arming them.” www. democracynow.org, 9.11.2007.
What is it going to take to stop the corporations, military industrial complex, and the Israel Lobby from continuing these genocidal rampages?
I truly believe that we, Americans, are so insulated and our notion of reality is so distorted that we believe that we are good guys.
Absolute power breeds aggression and disregard for morality, human life, and laws. A glaring example, the complete genocide of the Native Americans.
How would most Americans respond to a statement such as this? The USA is the greatest terrorist state in the world and its the biggest threat to peace on earth.
What is it going to take to stop this madness? Sadly, our thinking might start to change when the Iraq War ($12 Billion a month) economically bleeds this country to death. When the middle class is destroyed via the transfer of wealth to the mega rich.
In Washington, we hear talk of gradual withdrawal of our troops which translated into increased bombing. We tried that in Vietnam; didn’t work.
Nope, were are not leaving Iraq any time soon. At least not until this country is economically ruined.
By cherrypicking facts, and using a tunnel vision, you can make any event look sucsessful.
Take the Titanic:
-The titanic sucessfully completed 85% of its voyage, doing so in record time.
- the titanic succressfully avoided any and all collisions with other shipping.
-Not one single passenger was killed by fire
-100 % of passagers and crew were sucessfully transfered from the ship to the water.
- At the end of its madien voyage, the Titanic sucessfully arrived on land.
- The orchestra always played magnnficently.
This week we have had news about a “military” solution in Iraq. This has been compared to a “polical” solution. How many have spoken out about the pathetic state of the people in Iraq?
Just this week, Common Dreams had an article about an outbreak of cholera - 5000 infected. It occured because of the lack of drinking water. Electricity is also in short supply. There are 1.4 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Millions more, who can’t afford to leave, have been internally displaced.
Under these circumstances, to talk of “winning” the war in Iraq or of “victory” in Iraq is ludicrous and disgusting.
canuckchuck: you peeled the correct banana on that one. Your post was awesome! We could also take the Hindenburg for that matter. Fuck Petraeus and Bush’s war of genocide. Excuse my plain English.
Jesus W + General Pancreas. What a gig! Hey General, wipe your chin! The General: “You know, you gotta go down in order to get down”
“Mounting Death Toll Which Makes a Mockery of US Optimism”
The headline suggests we care more about our image than our victims who are at least 1 million dead, 4 million fled. I see this a lot offline, too.
Super Blog CANUCK, it should be required reading for Congress.
Derby35,
Yes, it was awful all the horrible things that were said about the general. And he was right about everything and only was doing his duty in giving the relevant statistics. He was totally justified in asking for a few more months and promising success. The general should have been recognized as the man of honor and integrity he was and he should have been given the respect he deserved. That General Westmoreland … oh, wait, you were talking about Petraeus. I always get them mixed up.
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“Car: -by Honda.”
“Mass murder: -by US Government.”
“Evil: -by Satan’s little helpers.”
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“This picture is brought to you by the USA leaders under licence from Lunatics Incorporated, a division of *The Devils Associates* and registered as a *mass profit organisation* under the auspices of the National Dysfunctional Government Ass., - a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Dark Future Corporation.”
“If you, your family or your friends have a problem with Wanton Death and Destruction Inc., please rise up (EN MASSE) and turn it all around.
## DO IT NOW !! ##
~ You know it makes sense!”
Senator John Warner asks Betrayus if Iraq policy is making us safer, and Betrayus came back with a “deer in the headlights” response of “I don’t know”. I don’t need to comment. That idiot response speaks for itself.
Don’t forget: 30K troops sent in for this so-called “surge” (what hype) - and just how many were previously designated as physically unfit, before they were sent (again) to the front lines?
It’s true. Military docs (who will say you are malingering if your leg is half cut off) declared a lot of those sent for the surge as absolutely physically unfit, were sent there anyway.
This is the genius military tactic “they” devised? Wow. I am so underwhelmed by their strategic brilliance.
Without the horrible mismanagement of funds, things could have been much different in Iraq, after the (illegal) invasion. All the money that went to Haliburton and other mega-contractors (what a waste- notoriously shoddy workmanship) could have gone directly to the Iraqi people (food/shelter/health care/education- hey, we could really use all of that, right here in the US!).
People are a lot less likely to fight amongst themselves, when their basic needs are met- and then given an opportunity to learn.
“Just following orders…” Nuernberg was the last time of note that such a lie..excuse me, a line… was used. Thank you General, Ambassador. I think the last good Ambassador was either made by Nash, or in India. Generally speaking, Petreaus belongs to King George.
The Bushits are simply, stolidly, resolutely, and totally following the plan they set in motion in 2000. They hear not the cries of the dying, the maimed, the wounded. They hear not the agony of their own people, for their own people and the people whom they own, are part of their plan.
Bush proves my contention: that, in the Universe, there is no “good” or “evil,” it is all locked up within their hearts and minds. No need of a God or a Devil, they can play both parts with great alacrity, even with great joy.
After all, what else can humans who hate all other humans do?
War criminal Petreus, or how do spell that name Betray Us?
MIKETAMPA1: Yeah, you have some options if you want to have a debate. For one, try a string here that isn’t so un-arguable. Lke Ralph Naders on nuclear power.
Who in their right mind thinks this war with Iraq is justified? Oh yeah, for starters, the ones who do don’t bother to blog, they’re too busy counting money or reading the stock market results, or those who work for the Halliburton types, munitions factories, chemical companies, the Pentagon or are committed to a nut house.
Other options are to attend an Evangilical church or join the Republican party and volunteer to work for one of the candidates. You could get some good debates going, but you would likely find yourself out numbered. There are often strings here at Common Dreams that get hot and heavy on either side.
We hear about the Jewish Holocaust all the time. What about the Iraqi Holocaust? The U.S. imperialists are doing a good job of committing a holocaust on the Iraqis. How about the Native-American Holocaust where more people were killed than the supposedly 6 million Jews.
General Petraus is lying. Film maker and journalist Rick Rowley who has just returned from Iraq, where he closely tracked the situation in Anbar province: “Well, when General Petraeus says that they’re merely applauding these tribes from the sidelines, he’s lying. I mean, while we were embedded with the Americans, we saw American military commanders hand wads of cash to tribal militias. And when he says that they are facilitating their integration into the country’s security forces, what he means is they’re pressuring Iraq’s government to incorporate these militias wholesale into the police forces. In fact, that’s one of the promises that these tribes are given, that after working with the Americans for a few months, they’ll become Iraqi police, be armed by the Iraqi state and be put on regular payroll. So it’s completely disingenuous, what he’s saying.”
The level of discourse in this country is severely distorted and impoverished to the point that most people here never get to the heart of the matter whether the topic is Iraq, health care, the huge gap between the very rich and the rest of us, and more. Why are we in Iraq? For the oil and for geopolitical advantage in the Middle East so we can stay #1 superpower. Guess what? The ruling class has NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER to leave Iraq. All this talk of leaving is so much hot air. We are building bases and an embassy for permanent occupation. Unless, that is, we get driven out as we did from Vietnam, and will again from Iraq. This NEVER gets discussed except in rarified forums on independent news radio programs and at certain websites. Why is health care in this country a dysfunctional mess that never gets reformed? Because the health care special interests–the insurers, the pharmaceuticals, the highly paid health care CEO’s all would stand to lose bigtime in a single payer system that would cover all. Health care in the United States is thoroughly corrupt, and the corrupted are making sure that the real solution doesn’t get serious consideration here. This is what they have always done and will do until people get curious and wake up. Sicko should have ignited a cry of outrage but instead it got only a resigned sigh from the exhausted, dispirited American masses. The disparity between the very rich and the rest of us? It has made us more like Mexico and less like Canada, more like India and less like Germany. What happened to the thriving middle class of the post WWII era? Gone.. turned into a debtor class one medical misfortune away from bankrupcy. Meanwhile the very rich live lives of demigods.
I think this whole war has made a mockery of humanity.
CANUCKCHUCK__Fantastic line of reasoning!!! That should be hung in the halls of Congress for those fatheads to read.
Those Dumbocrats are never going to get anything done about this rotten occupation. We need to get away from this partison politics and use the Independents, and we have a great leader to save our country—Sen Joe Lieberman!! He is an awesome example of powerful thought and action and would solve all of our problems.
I agree with mirf59 that the National Initiative is the best idea. In the interest of time when so many lives are at stake, I opt for Incorporating We the People. A different, much easier and quicker path to the same results. We the People make the laws that govern our corporation. So does the National Initiative for Democracy.
The real possibility of owning equal shares of non-transferable stock and each American getting big dividends from the lease of trillions of dollars worth of our public resources is a powerful incentive for the people.
With one simple act of incorporation We the People would become the largest, richest, most powerful corporation against which all others would have to compete for our business once they met our ethical and environmental standards.
The public treasury belongs to We the People, not to other corporations. Let’s make it official.
Our corporation would be headed by an administration that works for We the People, not for other corporations. One that we could hire and fire at yearly stockholders meetings according to performance.
Incorporate to organize. No matter what party you belong to, you will accrue big dividends from the lease of our public airwaves, public lands, mineral rights, oil leases, etc. Money that now goes into the pockets of other corporations and financial institutions. Money that you never see again, that is wasted, that kills and maims. And politicians of the oligarchy keep taxing you for more.
The best way to beat other corporations is at their own game. Turn things on their head by becoming a bigger corporation than theirs. In fact, We the People could buy out other corporations and become the largest, most profitable and most environmentally sound corporation.
If We the People want it, our corporation would give the best education, healthcare and provide the best vacation and retirement possible for its employees. And it would produce big dividends and quality of life earnings to its shareholding citizenship.
I’m not a fan of organized religion or anything but somewhere in the bible there’s something about the forces of evil (AKA: the anti-christ) “fooling even the elect”.
Obviously the USA’s leadership has lots of American people and many others in developed nations, believing the most absurd things like:
USA is waging a “war on terror”,
USA is a Great defender of human rights and democracy, &
A nation with “liberty and justice for all”.
What else but further lubrication of the war machine? There are too many corporate and political issues to be satisfied, so the merciless carnage of another culture can be sacrficed to these interests. The farcical nature of these so-called fact-finding committees reaffirms the hypocrisy of our political system, compounded by the impotence of the American public. No doubt reasons will be found to perpetuate this nightmare indefinitely. How exactly is “victory” in Iraq defined? What end needs to be accomplished to be able to say we “won”? We unleashed a civil war in a country that will be ongoing for decades, and we are now turning our sights on Iran? Insanity! So we continue to deplete our moral, economic and human reserves. We’re not fighting terrorism. We’re breeding it! Can anyone be naive enough to think otherwise?
Never forget: 9/11 Truth will end the War Of Terror.
You: Question
You: Research
You: Reason
You: Form your own independent conclusion
Optimism is refusing to see the facts as they stand because it is too depressing.
Optimistic people will even consider the color of a coffin to be nice.
I think it is selfish people expect the Iraqis and troops to die for the illusion of safety. How would they feel if it was them? I do not think the bible asks people to become selective christains.
Under the US military’s rules, a corpse shot in the back of the head is a ”sectarian” killing, while one shot through the front is deemed to be a criminal one
sound familiar?
“IF they run, they are VC, if they stand still, they are well disiplined VC”
The truth is they are not interested in safety. It’s all about money and oil. Halliburton had its mission accomplished by making all that money. I’m afraid we’re in it for the long haul.
The troops who are in Iraq now, canuckchuck, most certainly CHOSE to join the slaughter/occupation well after the drumbeats sounded. Either they were stupid or malevolent.
Not my kind of “heroes”. Enemies, more like it.
ezeflyer– I think you are on to something here. Think about it there are 300 million Americans.Now supposedly 1% of Americans own half the wealth and the next 2 % own a quarter. So 3% of Americans own 75% of the wealth. So we have to deduct 9 million people from the population because they make up the 3% and probably would not partake in this “experiment”. We are left with 291 million Americans. Everyone of them “donates $5 to a non profit organization called “Take Back America”.If all these citizens contribute we are left with the small sum of almost 1.5 billion dollars. Although citizens can donate as much as they are willing so the sum could be much greater. With the “donate” money we start buying corporate shares. First we start with the media. Say Fox Network for instance. We push our agenda of the redistribution of wealth through this media outlet and host fund drives and encourage local events and fundraising programs to keep the donations rolling in as we reinvest more money in buying back vital resources say energy companies. Also people who donate to our non profit are given direct shares in it. Meaning whenever money is donated it is either reinvested to buy back more of our country,or it is redistributed among our donaters. Each week or month we would have to set a goal of how much we wished to invest in buying back the infrastructure Say 1.5 billion. If that goal is met we invest directly in buying up corporations. If that goal is surpassed we distribute over goal money to the doners. It would have to be totally transparent and all money would be directly accounted for. It seems like it could work but what constitutes an “non profit”?? If the money is totally be reinvested or sent to the donatees it is ,no??
Look at the catholic church they own tons of realestate and take in trillions in donations.
Now, wouldn’t you say this is an honest report? I wonder if this report makes any difference to the co-criminals in the Congress, assuming they read it.
We should start building Take Back America with funds from OUR labor not give it to the IRS!
everyone who finds the war in iraq and our continuous human rights and international law abuses to be putrid and sick MUST STAND UP and NOT sit back down until we fix this. WE ARE THE ONES WHO CAN STOP THIS. and no one else will if we wont. so yall quit bein defeated and WORK!!! :o) u r not alone, tho it may seem so (i live in GA! cmon! i know this!)
A bit off topic, but look what the Russians have just developed in the way of new weapons:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/12/wbomb112.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox
I like the part about how the bomb is “environmentally friendly”.
Somewhere, Stanley Kubrick is laughing.
MISANTHROPE
HA HA HA HA HA HA………….. who will be the first to develop a bomb big enough to blow the whole world up………..and how will they test it???? HA HA HA HA HA………………….YOU JUST HAVE TO LAUGH……
In a Demockracy people die; they die happily and for no reason.
We, the christian west, are succeeding in destroying a country, and we feel that it is our right, our duty, to do so to protect our interests and those of our allies in the middle east, i.e. Israel. This carnage, this senseless waste of human life, of human labor, will continue until the anglo-american empire collapses, and it is my mission, as it should be of all readers, to remove the current rulers. I’m now convinced that 9-11 was manufactured by the rulers, ruthlessly killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to justify the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. I would not be surprised if there were another such catastrophic event leading up to the presidential elections, or at least the perception of a possible threat rammed down our throats by the corporate reporting mechanism, affectionately known as the media. I fear for the future of our children.
The question is what to do? Voting democratic just ain’t going to cut it.
We the people have let Bushitler do terrible things. What will stop him ? Not his court cronies, not his congress cronies ( All Reps and many Dems ), not his Christian cronies and not the corporate cronies. We the people will have to stop him, we need a leader to step up and take charge. The election process has failed. The spirit of 1776 is haunting us. We have become sheep without a sheperd and bushitler is a wolfe.
Mounting Death Toll Which Makes a Mockery of US Optimism. interesting words…us optimism… if he had said administration optimism, i would not object. Kim Sengupta, you make too many assumptions. i am not optimistic!!!!!!
BillB–I do not think the corruption of this system is going to allow for any leader who will truely represent “we the people”. We are to far gone and the corruption exist in every level of government from local to the fed. The only way change is going to come is through our local communities. We need a total grass roots organization that will represent the people for a change. Instead of paying billions in taxes to fund war without end this organization would push legislation that would seek to abolish the federal reserve and the whole income tax system. It would put the burden back on corporations to pay their fair share in taxes. It would push legislation to abolish Nafta,Cafta,gatt, and any free trade organization. If corporations want to leave America in search of cheap labor they will pay a hefty tariff/ tax to pursue such a treasonous decision. Keep in mind this would all take place locally. There would have to be a national representation, but every local group would be self sustaining and have to raise its own local funds to pursue local legislation. This takes away the potential for centralization of power(which WAS the goal of our forefathers in creating the states as free and independent). We would have to only except doantions from our local constituents. The details could be discussed further, but the central theme would be to put responsibility back in the local community and make each community responsible for it’s own legislation and fundraising. Really just a more localized version of states rights. Weaker communities would be inspired by more successful communities, and implement some of their techniques to become more organized. Mainly the purpose of these local organizations would be that power was displaced in so many different areas that it could never be centralized to a few peoples control.Call it the “We the people” party.
misanthrope: Thank God Russia has Putin in charge. Without checks and balances in our government, we continue to unleash more death, destruction, misery and suffering around the world with our ‘all volunteer military gone wild’ .
I would love to see the Russians tell Bush & company that if you bomb Iraq, we bomb Israel. And China backing Russia in an all out war. Checks and balances need to be maintained among nations also. When any one country gets too strong, the urge to unleash their firepower on a weaker entity is all to often satisfied.
Of course I hope push doesn’t come to shove…who wants to get blown up?…but somebody has to stop the bully on the block.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russians began dismantling their nukes, and we started building new ones. Look at our military budget. It has very little to do with the defense of this country, but a lot to do with the imperial ambition of the corporation executives and the bankers.
peaceman,
Sometimes I think the Cheneys of the world almost ensure human extinction within this century. Cheney will willingly take a small probability p of starting a worldwide nuclear war in order to have a reasonable probability, say 0.50, of significantly enriching his cronies and himself. But as he, and those like him, continue to take that risk, the chance of no worldwide nuclear war becomes (1 - p)**n, where n is the number of times they take the risk. For example, for p = 0.05, then worldwide nuclear war becomes more likely than not for n > 13. We can only guess as to the value of p in each case or how many times Cheney and his kind will take that risk this century, but it does not look promising if we cannot keep Cheneys from getting in a position to take such risks.
On the other hand, maybe the Russian detonation shows our warmongers and predatory risk-takers the way forward so they can have another world war without human extinction. Woo-hoo!
tbones:
The largest and fastest growing third party, the Greens are THE grassroots party.
Yours is a great idea. And incorporating We the People would circumvent ALL party and candidate differences, uniting Americans of all classes and political persuasions. Maybe Ralph Nader, RFK Jr., or other progressive attorneys could incorporate We the People and issue the citizenship shares of our public treasure before the oligarchy does it and tries to insert a poison pill.
I found this article by K. Darbandi very interesting:
The War on Iran, Iraq Fiasco & US Public
By K. Darbandi (August 31 2007)
Why is the US so close to another major war in the midst of the Iraq war fiasco? While polls show that the majority of the US public is for pulling out of Iraq, there is no indication that they are having any anti-war sentiments about an attack on Iran. In this country there is no massive outcry against the current administration’s obvious and public call for yet another war. Ordinary logic would have guided one to believe that the global bully has learned its lessons and will start negotiating with the regional bully, Iran. To the amazement of many, it seems as if the political space is there for Bush administration to keep pounding the war drums. Reports indicate massive fire power is ready to be launched against the I.R. regime and the Iranian state and society as a whole. The US public is hardly blinking.
Only if People Knew
There are, of course, a lot of individuals and political movements and action groups in US and Europe that are spending valuable time and effort opposing US current policy. The vital connection, however, between these trends and the public at large is missing. Some in the progressive anti war camp might be thinking that the US public at large is not opposing Bush policies on Iran because of media propaganda by networks such as Fox, or the intrigues of big business like Halliburton and other employers of Bush and Cheney, or even maybe the Israeli lobby and other mysterious interest groups.
These assumptions, are however, truly insult to peoples’ intelligence. It assumes that after 4 years the US public is not yet aware that 9/11 and Iraq are not connected,-other than the fact that both involve Arabic speaking peoples. It assumes that people do not still realize that Iraq war was pre-emptive, a war of choice, and waged on shaky allegations and against international law. It assumes that in the wealthiest democracy on earth, the public has been stupefied to such extent that they just need to know the facts and they’d be acting in a very anti-warish fashion. The Fox news and a few very large conglamorates have done it again: the US public still does not know that Israel is the biggest recipient of US aid and with it, has been slowly exterminating a whole group of people. Only if people knew after more than 40 months that their soldiers in the filed are also torturers, kill detainees in their custody, and rape and murder 13 year olds and their whole families; only if they had seen the Abu-Ghraib pictures and videos, they would know how criminally disposed the US military can be and how much worse the next war is going to get! Only if the US public knew how they have destroyed a country of 25 million people they would stop their president from picking on another one of 70 million!
The simple fact is that no public is that stupid and ignorant; they might not stand up to the moral and ethical standards of progressive intellectuals, but in the social context of US society, with all the availability of information, social comfort and leisure time, people can not be in such depths of intellectual deprivation. There is nothing in water or genetically wrong with the American public to force such general behavior, and there is no lack of access to alternative information other than big media in this country. The vast majority has enough leisure time and basic life comfort to access and pursue all sorts of information that affects them.
The US public is so not anti-war that in the past weeks, even front-running Democratic presidential candidates have shown their worth to be head of state to the public by leaving “the military option on table” against Iran (Clinton), or to promise to invade unilaterally another country’s territory, in this case Pakistan, in pursuit of the ‘terrorists’ (Obama). Somebody needs to explain how front-runners of the so-called opposition party are so overtly against international law and pro-military in the midst of Iraq war fiasco? The lady and the African-American candidates are only responding to the trends already present in the country. They are trying to look Presidential in the eyes of the US public. As Mr. Chomsky has put it, the assumption of the US ruling elite is that they own the world, and in my view, Clinton and Obama are only working based on this assumption.
Anti-war activists in the US could be having a wrong assumption about US public, in that they assume people in general are inherently good, moral and ethical beings. So if they are complicit in participating indirectly in one genocide after another, send their sons to commit one atrocity after another, then there must be a lot of brain washing and false propaganda going on that has led them to act that way.
Superman, Video Games & Disney World
The US public turned against the Iraq war only after it started going South. Check the US opinion poll history on Wikipedia for yourselves. The public image of the war, promised by Rumsfeld was to get in quick, smash everything, make it safe for oil drilling and to pull out, putting the place in the hands of a loyal puppet regime to deal with the aftermath. Sort of like the rhythm of events in classic Superman movies, where things are as clear as black and white: it is Superman, and there are the Bad Guys. And the red and blue guy can’t just take it slow like Sherlock Holmes and use his head to solve the problem. No, there is not much to dwell on; he is muscular, fast and invincible. And boy is he American!
Well, the Iraq war started and was projected like the ending of a Superman movie, but in time gradually turned into Raiders of the Lost Arc, with the US forces playing the German Nazi nitwits of the movie: they are on the set only to be blown away. And Harrison is, by the way, totally absent from the Akron! So people gradually lost interest, and I don’t blame them; what happened to the happy ending? Most of them want Out now, allowing Iraqi warring factions to fight each other to total death and destruction. You see, even the sentiments against the Iraq war has a very Xenophobic and racist tone to it: they know fully that it was US boys that smashed up the place, but the ethical conclusions are not drawn from it. Instead, the slimy sense of superiority kicks in that the Iraqi’s are not worthy of our reconstruction help and our boys getting blown apart for it, so give me the remote and let’s change the channel; forget about it! All right, maybe the mess is too much for Iraqis to clean up by themselves, let’s ‘internationalize’ the situation, i.e.: let’s call the foreign-speaking Cleaning Ladies to take care of the mess, just like how the German, Polish, S. Korean and other forces are cleaning up Afghanistan. You see, it is not inspired labour to do a spotless job cleaning another one’s mess, hence the perpetual dirt in Afghan land!
The opposition of US public to Bush policies in Iraq is not really against the initial policy of going to war, and it is not really about abandoning the ‘mission’ and the devastated Iraqis, but simply that the ‘involvement’ in Iraq is not culturally digestible any more: it has become too culturally alien to watch.
It used to look like video games: buildings or tiny figures on the screen only to be blown away in a cloud of dust. It used to be sanitized. It is now a bit too messy: the tortures, civilian deaths; the clean-cut look is not there any more. What happened to the smart bombs Rumsfeld?! US Military spent billions since Vietnam war to repackage foreign wars and bring a whole new look to the sensory internalization of its global crimes in US public eye. The US public is now used to this cleansed packaging and gets very uncomfortable when wars are not presented to it in that way. The US military has succeeded very well in its packaging strategy since Vietnam, so much so that the public does not even have the stomach to tolerate the real thing any more!! Pentagon strategists over the years have indeed become victims of their own success!
The number of injured-to-deaths is disproportionately high in this war thanks to the same Military planners that repackaged wars since Vietnam. So too many young soldiers are coming home without limbs or faces, and that have totally ruined the Superman image all were expecting. This war has caused a cultural crisis in this country.
The advance in medical evacuation and body armors has not helped much to foster the culturally familiar ways of war. The idea was to bring down the death casualties, but Pentagon and its huge Medical establishment got so busy saving combat wounded lives that they totally forgot that what is saved are basically human remains with heart beat: mutilated, faceless and brain-damaged young men and women of the volunteer armed forces. The number of these victims of the economic and educational system of US is growing everyday, and the financial, social and medical infrastructure to support their tattered existence has yet to be constructed.
Cultural identity is dear to all but the pocket book is a completely different matter for the public. The US public has realized that this war is costing us too much and might, just might, ruin the plans for the next vacation to Disney World. Taking away the fairy tale image is one thing, but you can’t rub us of our fairyland! Hardship is for losers, and Americans are winners, especially when it comes to their fun time! People did not turn against the Iraq occupation because of the crimes against the Iraqis, or the complete disconnection of 9/11 with Saddam; but they did partly depart from supporting it after all the implicit economic rewards turned into a financial nightmare.
At this juncture, the cultural crisis is compounded with the financial fiasco, one that the public knows it has to pay for it sooner or later. The public needs a change, is desperately awaiting a solution to this quagmire. The progressive intellectuals propose solutions; the Democrats have several solutions, but so does president Bush. Frighteningly, his might be the most compatible in presenting itself as a solution to the current cultural crisis.
Give me Back my Culture
Well then, Bush says, let’s reflect calmly on the true reasons for this fiasco. There must be something in the picture now that was not there when we went to save the Iraqis from Saddam. Uh of course, it is the hostage-taking terrorist-breeding, girl-stoning Jew-hating Iranians! They are the real cause for the havoc in Iraq. Bush says: “I can fix it for you all; I will restore your Superman, fix your video games and arrange your trip to Disney World. Just let me get these hairy dark bastards, and I will get you to your blond Cinderella in time for the 9 o’clock fireworks extravaganza!
So says Bush:”Hear me out folks! I have the cruise ships ready in the Gulf. We’ll go in fast and swift, mostly from air and the sea; from that altitude you won’t even see blood; I promise it will be clean, like the games. Then we occupy the southern oilfields, and I will bring all the money back with cheap Iranian oil, and Iraq will be ours again to manage…How’s that?” Go get them Tiger!
Fox News and ‘300’
What Fox news does in the current political and cultural context is quite similar to what the movie 300 has done: to make the public feel good about itself by inviting them to attack and destroy a sub-human race of evil creatures. A “Few Good Men” will annihilate the incompetent, savage and inhuman enemy in a very one-sided event. A large number of people who watch Fox actually do not care about the truth, they want to hear what is said, it is a sort of an affirmation ritual to feel better; but as the war-junkies that they are, they won’t rest until they get their war. In this context, the movie 300 is part of the war plan; to de-humanize the Persians, who are depicted in the picture as actually all the colored and sexually ambiguous people on this earth. The neurotically selfish culture will reaffirm its racial superiority once again while we all wait for the anti-war sentiments to grow in the US public. As Ostad Dehkhoda would have said it: this calf has aged, but has yet to turn into a cow!
We need to understand better why people turn against wars. The US public, by and large, is disposed of a very anti-intellectual culture and with the current popular cultural traits, it will never turn against wars for the reasons that progressive intellectuals do. The link is missing, and has been missing for decades between us and the social body. The prime reasons lie in the current cultural traits of the public and our failure to understand the public in its fullness, with the good and evil that it carries with it, like all other peoples in other societies.
More wars will come and go, but what we can start to accomplish for a beginner, in my opinion, is to smash the Democratic hold on the Left in this country. Everything else will follow from that.