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Iraq War

The Democrats are STILL Punks!

The Democrats are PUNKS! I keep saying it over and over, but they still won’t man up.

They were elected in 2006 with a mandate from the American people: Stop the Iraqi occupation and bring our soldiers home. With Bush’s veto of the Iraq spending bill, their failure to override that veto, and then their immediate concession to Dubya’s demands that withdrawl timetables be removed from the bill, they have punked out once again.

That cowboy is riding this Democratic Congress as if it was jackass that is its symbol. I keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to pop up on C-SPAN in the middle of a Senate debate.

I completely agree with Michael Rivero at WhatReallyHappened.com:

And I told you that this was EXACTLY what was going to happen. The Democrats would make a big noise about withdrawel, Bush would veto, and the Democrats would cave so that Bush has his endless war and the Democrats are able to go into the 2008 elections saying, “Well, we tried to stop the war.”Well, trying is not good enough. We The People worked hard to put the Democrats into Congress in 2006 and the Democrats have officially blown their chance. They do not get another one as far as I am concerned.

I don;t care what Congress wants to do or tries to do, only what they actually do matters and in terms of the mandate they were sent to power with in 2006, they have failed utterly and completely. They will not stop the war. They have ignored Kucinich’s bill of impeachment against Dick Cheney.

Anyone have a good blueprint for a decent guillotine?

Trying to stop the war simply isn’t good enough. Yoda told us, “There is no try. Only do or do not.”

The Congress is supposed to have equal power with the president. Why are they allowing the carnage and the Bush administration’s crimes to continue?

Because they are PUNKS!

Mission Accomplished For Real

Originally posted by Nadir on LastChocolateCity.com

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, MR. PRESIDENT!

It’s May 1, the fourth anniversary of President George W. Bush’€™s triumphant “ÂœMission Accomplished"€ speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where he announced that major combat operations in Iraq were over. The US military had successfully overthrown a sovereign government and taken the Iraqi nation hostage. Champange for everyone!

Because of the deteriorating security situation there, the widespread corruption, billions of dollars in cash missing and the fact that many of the projects Bush bragged about are now falling apart, the public believes things are going poorly in Iraq. Despite the grumbling and moaning that we hear, keen observers will clearly perceive, through the 20/20 vision that four years of hindsight allow, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been highly profitable ventures for Bush, Cheney, their families and the neoconservatives who led us to war.

The mission has been accomplished indeed. Continue reading

Mission Accomplished For Real

Originally posted by Nadir on LastChocolateCity.com

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, MR. PRESIDENT!

It’s May 1, the fourth anniversary of President George W. Bush’€™s triumphant “ÂœMission Accomplished”€ speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where he announced that major combat operations in Iraq were over. The US military had successfully overthrown a sovereign government and taken the Iraqi nation hostage. Champange for everyone!

Because of the deteriorating security situation there, the widespread corruption, billions of dollars in cash missing and the fact that many of the projects Bush bragged about are now falling apart, the public believes things are going poorly in Iraq. Despite the grumbling and moaning that we hear, keen observers will clearly perceive, through the 20/20 vision that four years of hindsight allow, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been highly profitable ventures for Bush, Cheney, their families and the neoconservatives who led us to war.

The mission has been accomplished indeed. Continue reading

Bill Clinton, Barry Sanders and the Future of the NAACP

Originally posted by Nadir at LastChocolateCity.com

Billed as the biggest sit down dinner in the world, the 52nd Annual NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner attracted 10,000 to Detroit’€™s Cobo Hall on April 29. Dinner itself was unremarkable. (Reports confirm that each entree – cajun beef, some unidentified fish or a mushroom pasta – was equally mediocre.)

What was most important about this dinner though was the guest list. The governor, both of Michigan’€™s US senators, several congress members, the mayor and other public officials, business and union leaders, entrepreneurs and preachers all joined grassroots activists to honor and support the nation’€™s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

During the three and a half hour event, Lifetime Achievement awards were given to Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, attorney and politician Joel Ferguson and former NAACP head Ernest Lofton. But the main attraction was the keynote address from the man described by several of the night’€™s speakers as “€œour president”€, William Jefferson Clinton. Continue reading

The Berlinization of Baghdad

Well, this certainly didn’t work the first time it was tried in Berlin, Germany during the cold war… but then the Bush administration’s failed Iraqi invasion has often ignored the lessons of history, the advice of the military and public opinion in the occupied country and here at home.

How in the world could constructing a wall around the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya in Baghdad do anything but increase polarization and violence in the city? It shuts workers off from their jobs, separates family-members, and becomes a living symbol of imperialist dominance of an occupied nation.

The BBC quotes a Baghdad resident:

“The Americans will provoke more trouble with this,” one resident, Arkan Saeed, told the BBC. “They’re telling us the wall is to protect us from the Shia militia and they’re telling the Shia they’re protecting them from us.

"But it’s the Americans who started all the sectarian violence in the first place.” Continue reading

The Berlinization of Baghdad

Well, this certainly didn’t work the first time it was tried in Berlin, Germany during the cold war… but then the Bush administration’s failed Iraqi invasion has often ignored the lessons of history, the advice of the military and public opinion in the occupied country and here at home.

How in the world could constructing a wall around the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya in Baghdad do anything but increase polarization and violence in the city? It shuts workers off from their jobs, separates family-members, and becomes a living symbol of imperialist dominance of an occupied nation.

The BBC quotes a Baghdad resident:

“The Americans will provoke more trouble with this,” one resident, Arkan Saeed, told the BBC. “They’re telling us the wall is to protect us from the Shia militia and they’re telling the Shia they’re protecting them from us.

“But it’s the Americans who started all the sectarian violence in the first place.” Continue reading

According to U.S. Military Theory, We Can’t Win in Iraq

Originally posted by Nadir at Reformed Leftist & Friends

From Alternet, linked HERE and above:

A soldier in Baghdad, in town for the “surge” and wondering whether things really are as bad as they seem, might want to read FM 3-24, the U.S. military’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, released last December. On Page 1-29, our soldier will find a handy table — “Successful and unsuccessful counterinsurgency operational practices” — that outlines the Dos and the Don’ts.

In which column would one place the major decisions of the Bush administration? The dissolution of the Iraqi army, the de-Baathification of the civil service, the failure to guard important historic and cultural sites, the granting of reconstruction contracts to American firms, and the long-term neglect of legal due process — all correspond to the advice on the “Don’t” side of the chart. And that’s not accounting for atrocities like those in Falluja, Haditha or Abu Ghraib. The “Dos” column, on the other hand, reads like a list of what the United States has failed to do: meeting the population’s needs, expanding secure areas, politically isolating the insurgents, training and equipping Iraqi forces, securing the borders and so on.

If this table serves as a pocket-sized score card, the 280-page manual is a full-bodied treatise on the subject. This is the first new counterinsurgency field manual to appear in 20 years, and as such, it serves as a tacit admission that the American strategy in Iraq is simply not working. The manual’s perspective takes on additional significance since its chief author, Gen. David Petraeus, has just taken over as the top commander in the war.

The guy who literally wrote the book on US counterinsurgency tactics goes against his own teachings when he claims the war in Iraq is “winnable”.

So which time were you lying, General? When you told the American people that you could win an unwinnable war because doing so might help your career or when you wrote the manual that our troops must use when they go into battle?

If we don’t get this administration out of office and stop this war, the US and the Iraqi people are in for more bloodshed and more looting of their treasuries by Bush stockholders.

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi

I met Dr. Dahlia Wasfi at Camp Democracy this summer. As a medical doctor of Jewish and Iraqi heritage, she has a unique perspective on the Iraq war.

She has visited her father’s family in Iraq several times. Dr. Wasfi left a promising medical career to devote her life to ending the US war against the Iraqi people.

Click HERE to see footage of her speaking at an Iraq War forum.

Click HERE to visit her website, www.liberatethis.com.

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi

I met Dr. Dahlia Wasfi at Camp Democracy this summer. As a medical doctor of Jewish and Iraqi heritage, she has a unique perspective on the Iraq war.

She has visited her father’s family in Iraq several times. Dr. Wasfi left a promising medical career to devote her life to ending the US war against the Iraqi people.

Click HERE to see footage of her speaking at an Iraq War forum.

Click HERE to visit her website, www.liberatethis.com.

The Democrats are Punks Revisited

Charles Pierce’s post on The American Prospect and Greg Saunders blog “Don’t Vote Democrat” on Huffington Post are right on the money.

The Democratic Party allowed some so-called “maverick” Republicans to co-opt the torture issue, and we wind up with Bush getting exactly what he wants: the ability to torture and amnesty for his own human rights offenses.

As Pierce says:

… the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives – “Aggressive interrogation techniques” – the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

Saunders has the right idea about what our response should be:

Since the Democrats don’t seem to be interested in convincing the public to vote for them, then here’s a better idea : This November vote against every incumbent on the ballot. Whether they’re part of the Republican, Democrat, or Connecticut for Lieberman parties, throw out the whole damn lot of them. If the choice is between a party that openly supports the destruction of habeas corpus or a party that’s too timid to take a stand in favor of basic human decency, then I’d rather just roll the dice and try to start over with a clean slate. Continue reading

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© Nadir Omowale