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Invasion of Iraq: US troops revolt against Iraq war
Tuesday, November 14 @ 15:37:33 UTC |  by Simon Assaf, socialistworker.co.uk
"The longer we stayed there, the more I opposed the war. The more I know, the easier it is to support withdrawal." US Marine speaks to Socialist Worker
The growing crisis faced by the US occupation of Iraq was the key issue in midterm elections, taking place in the US as Socialist Worker went to press.
The rising toll of human suffering and violence has led millions of Americans to question the reasons for the invasion - and many now believe that the US is losing the war.
This shift in attitude has penetrated into the US army. Serving soldiers have found an unlikely spokesperson in Liam Madden, a 22 year old Marine Corps sergeant.
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Inside U.S.A.: Let the Pentagon Pay Off Those Loans
Sunday, March 06 @ 22:06:42 UTC | Lies Military Recruiters Tell
By Ron Jacobs
Recently, most students at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington received an email with the heading ARMY PAYS OFF STUDENT LOANS in their university email box. The general message of the mass mailing was that if a student was nearing graduation and wondering how they were going to pay off the massive debt today's US college students incur, they should join the army. In essence, this email was a college student's version of the poverty draft that entraps so many working class and poor young people into enlisting in the service. The sender was a military recruiter working out of the US Army recruitment office in the Burlington suburb of Williston. Given that the university has a very clear policy forbidding these types of solicitations on their email servers one wonders how the recruiting office was able to obtain the address list. The university administration has been reticent when asked this question by various faculty, students, and parents. It is fair to assume, however, that the email list was released to the recruiter under the compliance sections of the so-called Solomon Amendment. For those unfamiliar with this legislation, it essentially forbids Department of Defense (DOD) funding of schools unless those schools provide military representatives access to their students for recruiting purposes. It is this same law that enables military recruiters to set up shop in high schools across the US and to call students at their homes attempting to entice them into joining the military.
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War and Terror: US Military Contractors Target Latin America For New Recruits
Friday, December 24 @ 09:22:45 UTC | Democracy Now!
A New Poverty Draft: Military Contractors Target Latin America For New Recruits
Halliburton and other private military contractors have begun advertising campaigns in El Salvador, Colombia and Nicaragua to recruit ex-soldiers to work in Iraq.
With the situation in Iraq becoming more and more deadly and the resistance gaining increasing popular support inside the country, the Bush administration has begun sending thousands more US troops to Baghdad. But many question how many more troops the administration can afford to send, or more important, how many soldiers it can send. The US military is facing an unprecedented crisis in recruiting numbers and new enlistments. Meanwhile, new Pentagon statistics show that more than 5,000 soldiers have now been charged with desertion from bases in the U.S. and overseas since the invasion of Iraq in early 2003.
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War and Terror: Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating the Spooks
Wednesday, February 04 @ 20:13:11 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, www.kurtnimmo.com
Bush's so-called independent commission looking into "intelligence failures" will be handpicked by the administration. It will be similar to the 9/11 investigative commission -- that is to say it will produce results acceptable to Bush and the spooks. The chairman of the 9/11 commission is Thomas Kean.
Consider Kean emblematic.
"Thomas Kean is a director (and shareholder) of Amerada Hess Corporation, which is involved in the Hess-Delta joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia (owned by the bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi clans)," notes Michel Chossudovsky. "In other words, Delta Oil Ltd. of Saudi Arabia -- which is a partner in the Hess-Delta Alliance -- is in part controlled by Khalid bin Mafhouz, Osama's brother in law."
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War and Terror: Love the professional, but hate the profession
Tuesday, November 25 @ 12:28:33 UTC | By Gabriel Ash, yellowtimes.org
In the din of the sour festivities of Veterans Day 2003 stands out a common refrain of progressive voices, many of them veterans themselves. This refrain is epitomized in the slogan that a group of veterans brought a parade in Florida, "Honor the warrior, not the war!"
One can easily grasp the tactical advantage some seek in differentiating between the common soldiers and our corrupt rulers. The rhetoric is smart, pointed, designed to appeal to "the average American," who is suspicious of government, yet patriotic and proud of "our men and women in uniform." There is only one problem. This rhetoric is either dishonest or confused.
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War and Terror: This war was not worth a child's finger
Saturday, April 12 @ 22:43:46 UTC | By Julian Barnes, The Guardian
So, peacenik, you lost. We told you so. Sure, it wasn't exactly the pushover we'd war-gamed. The Iraqis didn't rise in rebellion as we promised, the flower-throwing was a little tardy, but that was just because we'd underestimated how terrorised they were. Still, a three-week campaign with a couple of hundred coalition dead; the end approaches, and the Iraqis are dancing on fallen statues. Soon your fellow peaceniks can start trucking in the relief and nation-building can begin. May I hear a squeak of rejoicing?
So, warnik, you think you've won? Please consider this. On Monday afternoon your guys thought they had found Saddam in a restaurant. A US plane dropped four very clever 2,000lb bombs on it. The next night, BBC News showed an enormous crater and its correspondent said that no one who might have been there could have got out alive. According to Peter Arnett, the sacked NBC correspondent, the targeted restaurant was still intact, but three neighbouring houses were reduced to rubble instead. According to most people, Saddam escaped. When asked about this, Torie Clarke, the US defence spokeswoman, said crisply: "I don't think that matters very much. I'm not losing sleep trying to figure out if he was in there."
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War and Terror: Iraqis have paid the blood price for a fraudulent war
Thursday, April 10 @ 12:08:46 UTC | Seumas Milne, The Guardian
The crudely colonial nature of this enterprise can no longer be disguised
On the streets of Baghdad yesterday, it was Kabul, November 2001, all over again. Then, enthusiasts for the war on terror were in triumphalist mood, as the Taliban regime was overthrown. The critics had been confounded, they insisted, kites were flying, music was playing again and women were throwing off their burkas. In parliament, Jack Straw mocked Labour MPs who predicted US and British forces would still be fighting in the country in six months' time.
Seventeen months later, such confidence looks grimly ironic. For most Afghans, "liberation" has meant the return of rival warlords, harsh repression, rampant lawlessness, widespread torture and Taliban-style policing of women. Meanwhile, guerrilla attacks are mounting on US troops - special forces soldiers have been killed in recent weeks, while 11 civilians died yesterday in an American air raid - and the likelihood of credible elections next year appears to be close to zero.
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War and Terror: War and Occupation: The Future of the World?
Monday, April 07 @ 00:43:47 UTC | By RON JACOBS, April 5, 2003
As the battle for Baghdad (or perhaps the siege of Baghdad) begins to take shape, we are left to wonder what lies ahead. It's looks pretty likely that the US's overwhelming killing machine will eventually destroy the regime, either by destroying most of Iraq or by making life so miserable for the Iraqis that the military will surrender. The occupation, however, is certain to be a different matter. Once Hussein is gone from power, there are bound to be several factions vying for power in Iraq. Amongst these various factions will be the occupying forces of the United States military. Iraqis intent on revenge for years of sanctions, support of the Hussein government, and other US misdeeds are bound to exact some kind of punishment on the Americans. Whether or not that revenge actually organizes itself into some kind of resistance force is another question, which is currently unanswerable from this vantage point.
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War and Terror: Hearts, minds and bodybags
Saturday, April 05 @ 01:37:34 UTC | by James Fox, The Guardian
Iraq can't be a Vietnam, pundits insist. Those who were there know better
In Vietnam in 1972 there was a hearts and minds programme called chieu hoi to entice the population in the south to rally to the government. The late Gavin Young of the Observer quipped: "I think the Americans have bitten off more than they can chieu hoi ." Is this the case with Iraq if, whatever happens in Baghdad, liberation turns to occupation and resistance?
To lose the hearts and minds, which the Americans have surely done so far in Iraq, would surely be to lose the war, whatever the strategic results. But don't whisper "Vietnam", and certainly "quagmire", the word with which the Iraqis daily taunt the Americans. To do so in print has invited the reflex denial that the topography - desert versus jungle - is different and not good for guerrilla war; that Vietnam took 10 years to lose and we've been here two weeks. One historian wrote last week that the Iraqis were not "politicised as the Vietnamese were by the Vietcong", a startling observation given the evidence of recent days.
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War and Terror: Back Off, Syria and Iran!
Sunday, March 30 @ 16:56:43 UTC | By Maureen Dowd, NY TIMES
WASHINGTON -We're shocked that the enemy forces don't observe the rules of war. We're shocked that it's hard to tell civilians from combatants, and friends from foes. Adversaries use guerrilla tactics; they are irregulars; they take advantage of the hostile local weather and terrain; they refuse to stay in uniform. Golly, as our secretary of war likes to say, it's unfair.
Some of their soldiers are mere children. We know we have overwhelming, superior power, yet we can't use it all. We're stunned to discover that the local population treats our well-armed high-tech troops like invaders.
Why is all this a surprise again? I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam, but didn't they, like, read about it?
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War and Terror: Dead people: Don't go there
Saturday, March 29 @ 17:16:25 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo
Naturally, most Americans dread the prospect of US soldiers coming home in body bags. It's not something Americans do well, this coming to terms with engineered mass murder -- and yet large numbers of Americans support Bush and his decision to invade Iraq.
How many dead GIs will America accept?
"I'm not going there, because I don't know," said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director.
"The president looks at this knowing that when the commander in chief talks about the use of force, the American people understand that it may entail the sacrifices he has spoken of. And the president also views this in the post-9/11 context, in which failure to act could lead to the taking of even more lives," explained White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer.
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War and Terror: The New Humanitarianism: Basra as Military Target
Thursday, March 27 @ 17:40:35 UTC | By RAHUL MAHAJAN
Iraq's desperate humanitarian situation has suddenly become a retroactive justification for the war, even for the attacking of civilian targets. The need to get aid into Basra has apparently prompted a British military spokesperson to designate it as a "legitimate military target," language reminiscent of Gulf War I, when the saturation bombing of Basra was justified on the same basis.
As verifiable civilian deaths mount toward 300 in this "war of liberation," the need to establish American moral superiority is growing rapidly. Thus Donald Rumsfeld's convenient rediscovery of the Geneva Convention and thus the American media hysteria over al-Jazeera, which has the temerity to provide balanced reporting of the war.
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War and Terror: What You Aren't Being Told About Iraq
Thursday, March 27 @ 04:55:30 UTC | by Firas Al-Atraqchi, YellowTimes.org
Remember all those "intelligence sources" who promised that Iraqis would be cheering as the U.S. and U.K. armies rolled into Basra or Nasiriyah or any major town in southern Iraq? Apparently, in day 7 of the invasion of Iraq, these intelligence sources and their data are proving to be fallible.
Unfortunately, the North American public is not told who the intelligence sources are. No, they aren't CIA, NSA, or the FBI. They aren't MI-5 or the SAS. They aren't even spies working in Iraq.
They are members of the Iraqi National Congress(INC), an Iraqi opposition group made up of millionaires and businessmen, former Ba'athist henchmen, and generals who aided Saddam in his formative years but felt threatened by him and defected. Most of the INC's ruling hierarchy is comprised of people who have not set foot in Iraq in more than 30 years. Some have never set foot in Iraq. And yet they claim to be experts.
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War and Terror: What would we do without Albania?
Tuesday, March 25 @ 18:24:02 UTC | By P.M. Carpenter, History News Network
The Bush administration's pathology of deception continues unabated. Its most recent outbreak of conning the already conned public is the claim that the United States' illegal, virtually unilateral and unprovoked military aggression against Iraq is but a partial expression of widespread international accord. France, singularly, is made out to be the global bad guy and martial party pooper; not the world's majority voice of opposition to America's depraved conduct abroad.
Why shoot, says the administration, we've got allies up to our eyeballs. The count has, at times, been a bit fuzzy -- how odd for this customarily precise White House when it comes to mathematics, especially on fiscal policy -- with diverse officials spouting diverse numbers. Aside from today's principal party line of 45 allies (which really means 30, because one-third, in a display of true solidarity with the U.S., prefer to pretend they've never heard of us), we have also been treated to allied counts of 35 and 40. In any case, all the estimates are within a comfortable 33-percent margin of error, a considerable improvement over the administration's budget forecasts.
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War and Terror: The Moral Calculus of Killing
Tuesday, March 25 @ 08:12:16 UTC | "Precision Bombing" and the American Definition of Innocence
by Tim Wise; March 24, 2003
Imagine if you will that an enemy nation--for the sake of argument, let's say North Korea, or China--were to attack the United States.
And let's say they launched missiles and dropped bombs specifically on Washington D.C., having targeted the White House, Capitol Building, and Pentagon, and destroyed these facilities.
And let's say that they took special care not to hit Georgetown, or Adams Morgan, or Tenleytown, or any of a number of residential areas surrounding the government installations that comprise an overwhelming share of the District's real estate.
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