Category Archives: Military

It Takes A Man …

Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Iraq, Just War, Military, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Ron Paul, War

My colleague Vox Day penned an important column about foreign policy, last week. Sadly, his “Better Late Than Never” WND piece will be ignored by the self-satisfied conservative Idiocracy, which has an allergy to truth and reason.

“The so-called ‘isolationist’ Right had it right all along. Neither Saddam Hussein nor the Taliban ever presented one-tenth the danger to Americans that criminal immigrants, legal and illegal, pose to them. And yet the conservative media has been willing to spend more than $1 trillion on replacing a secular socialist government with a radical Shiite one and expelling a Taliban government in favor of one that is merely Taliban-influenced while nonsensically continuing to call for more immigration.

“But the fact is that there is absolutely no past or present justification for the invasions of either Afghanistan or Iraq when considered from the perspective of the American national interest. One could make a much more rational national-security case for declaring war against Mexico, Canada or even Honduras. And there is absolutely no justification for the continued military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq nine and seven years on.”

Vox expresses regret for his initial support for the war and points out the signal significance of Joseph Farah’s recent renunciation of the current errant foreign policy.

The following words I especially appreciated:

Only a very few commentators, such as Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo and WorldNetDaily’s own Pat Buchanan and Ilana Mercer, can truly say that they were opposed from the start to the expensive, unconstitutional and ultimately useless abuses of the American military that have been inflicted upon it by Republican and Democratic commanders in chief over the last nine years.

It takes a man …

UPDATED: Portrait Of An Occupied Country (& Kids)

America, Just War, Middle East, Military, Nationhood, Republicans, War, Welfare

If my daughter was being looked over or even chatted up by frustrated foreign soldiers out on patrol, I would be worried. The image of this stunning, fragile, Afghan girl, dwarfed by the obviously “attentive” military men, conjures the fate of Abeer Qasim Hamza. (At least in the mind of this mother.)

Naturally, Republican deadheads like Laura Ingraham and James Hirsen railed against Brian De Palma’s depiction, in “Redacted,” of the girl’s rapists and killers.

“‘Redacted’: De Palma Tells The Truth”” serves as a reminder of the hazards to Their Children of Our Occupation:

“… A mop of hair, a delicate face and big black eyes: The only image we have of her is the one plastered on her Iraqi ID card. It was taken when she was a two-year-old tot. She lived with her mother, father and three siblings in the village of Yusufiyah near Mahmoudiyah.
Unfortunately for them, their farmhouse was situated near an American traffic checkpoint. The neighbors later said soldiers would watch the girl go about her chores, and gesture lewdly. The culprits, led by ringleader Pfc. Steven Dale Green—a school drop-out with a police record; recruitment standards are being lowered to fill quotas—would stage mock raids on the family’s home during which Green fondled Abeer.
Finally, Green, accompanied by Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Spc. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman, and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard, hatched a scheme to rape Abeer. In they went, shooting and killing Abeer’s parents and sibling, and then gang-raping her. When they were through with Abeer, they summarily executed her with a shot to the head.”…

In “Portrait Of An Occupied Country,” Al Jazeera intelligently analyzes how NATO (read the US) is rapidly replacing and usurping local Afghan societal structures.

UPDATE: Remember little, innocent Abeer and her family, who died a horrible death at the hands of American soldiers. May the family rest in peace; may the murderers be put to death for their crimes.

The Death Heads Are Just Dandy

Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

The New Individualist’s Spring 2010 edition doesn’t carry one of my columns (The Winter issue featured two), but it has a good, much-needed photo-journalism spread titled “This is War.” Iraqi family homes flatted by SCUDS (ours), streets in the aftermath of stupid bombs (from the US with love), the purest of the pure—the body of a beautiful little girl—washed for burial (“we love ya, democratized Iraqis”).

Scrutinizing the ever-so sad images of war brought back those horrible years during which, in vain it seemed, I pelted my readers with non-stop facts and doses of reality, the kind these images transmit with such ease. I tried the power of the Jewish teachings; these instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice; Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors. And I mentioned over and over again the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided: “A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

If you have a moral compass I ask you to patronize moral writers (provided they have talent, of course), not the apologists who supported this wicked foray, and are still unapologetic about it. All of them, I wager, are doing well—walking around, grins on their smug, death-head mugs, their claws dripping with blood, their wallets stuffed with wads, the Empire’s counterfeit currency. Incitement to murder and war profiteering are lucrative occupations in fin de siècle America.

The blowhards and blonds who slithered on their bellies for Bush (still do)—why do you read them? Buy their sick-making “Obama-this; Obama That” Micky-mouse books? (Okay, some like Coulter and Malkin have real talent, but the rest? Nothing but a T & A show all.)

It’s the story of Job, that Hebrew individualist, all over again; the wicked and the foolisher prosper, the righteous suffer, isn’t it?

War Party Inc. Rages At WikiLeaks

Foreign Policy, Glenn Beck, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, War

Here’s how you know the Republicans are the enemies of liberty and justice. Not a word have their megaphones among the media said about “the deaths of tens of thousands,” often at the hands of our forces, revealed in the release, by WikiLeak, “of over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.”

FoxNews focuses on the obscure Iran-extremism connection. Fox would never jeopardize an occupation.

The Washington Times took the side of the administration by choosing to belabor its warnings about the potential harm the truth could do “to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe” (namely the networks of criminals, terrorists, and warlords we are nurturing in that blighted part of the world).

Similarly—and predictably—The War Street Journal zeroed in on the administration’s hunt for a culprit, “Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst charged this month with leaking [the] classified information”— “thousands of military documents published Sunday by WikiLeaks.

I had to switch Glenn off; his sermons sans information are fit for packaging in a cheap, motivational DVD box set. But no, I heard nothing from him either that would indicate that he favored pulling back the curtain to show the facts of this war.

In fascistic fashion, other NEOCONSERVATIVES called for the arrest of the founder of WikiLeaks. “Julian Assange, once described as the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel of cyberspace, is uncompromising in his scrutiny of big business and big government.”

Kudos to Rachel Maddow’s program which told it like it is, with no regard for Obamby’s feelings.

“The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.”

“THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ BEGINS TO EMERGE FROM THE SHADOWS,” writes war correspondent Eric Margolis.

And that’s a good thing.