Category Archives: War

Dealing in Death

Foreign Policy, Iran, Just War, Middle East, Military, Morality, Political Economy, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

The US is better off in the imperial sense, says Lew Rockwell to Russia Today about the US government’s latest adventure in Libya. Americans using depreciated US dollars are not better off, but the “merchants of death” are doing swell—the Pentagon, the CIA, weapons suppliers, oil companies; every enterprise that is in cahoots with the government is living it up.

“We The People” suffer the impoverishment that comes with the Zimbabwefication of the coin associated with deficit spending (bailouts and war) in perpetuity. (To wit, the money supply has appreciated by 30 percent and QE3 is in the offing.)

Lew spells out the wealth-destroying nature of the obscene orgy enjoyed by our overlords in DC and their patrons and hangers-on.

UPDATED: Onward to Uganda!

Africa, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, War

I’ve never thought much of the president, as you know. But even I was overly optimistic about Barack Obama’s powers of discernment, having once ventured that in the so-called good war (Afghanistan), Obama had found a war he could call his own. BHO has fewer qualms than Genghis Bush himself about pursuing “wars of the womb” (Libya) and skirmishes for certain select causes (no congressional authority required): that’s the guy’s style.

Now, at the behest of B. Hussein Obama, US troops have joined forces with one Ugandan tribal entity against another, and are hunting for a war lord: Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. (I dilate briefly on this conflict in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”; it’s emblematic of most of the faction fighting that grips Africa.)

BHO, however, believes “that deploying these U.S. armed forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.”

I had failed to sufficiently appreciate both the depths of Obama’s stupidity and the breadth of his abuse of office.

UPDATE (Feb. 7, 2012): “Obama decision to send troops to Uganda comes under new scrutiny.”

UPDATE III: ALL The Victims of September 11

Iraq, Jihad, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

The “SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 VICTIMS” is a site dedicated to America’s victims of the September 11, 2001 assault. It is profoundly moving (even if the hyperlinks to each individual profile do not display). The list, however, is woefully incomplete. All told, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians have died due to the actions the American state took to avenge the murder of those who perished in the WORLD TRADE CENTER, on AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHTS 11 and 77, on UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHTS 175 and 93, and in the PENTAGON.

On 10.11.06, I made a point of clarifying a study in The Lancet detailing the direct and indirect casualties of our invasion of Iraq:

“In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: heart attack, stroke and chronic illness. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence, according to the report.”

Moreover, “since March 2003, Iraqis have suffered from an excess of deaths, if you will.”

The relative risk, the risk of deaths from any cause was two-and-a-half times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months. But ‘the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion.

In 2006, The Lancet cited a figure of 650,000 Iraqis, over and above the mortality rate during the Saddam era. Among these deceased Iraqis were thousands of individuals who had died because, since the invasion, the incidence of heart attacks, cancer, strokes, stress and displacement-related deaths, deaths associated with a lack of health care and potable water, etc had increased twofold, at least.

The total figure is now out of date.

Tomorrow, Sept. 11, think of our casualties—and of those innocent lives we shattered to avenge our dead.

UPDATE I (Sept. 12): NEED TO KNOW. “September 9, 2011: 9/11, ten years later” is a PBS program that offered decent 9/11 programing.

UPDATE II (Sept. 13): “9/11” by Nebojsa Malic of the “Gray Falcon” fame.

UPDATE III (Sept. 19): THE RECKONING: AMERICA AND THE WORLD A DECADE AFTER 9/11.

The Worst of Times

Bush, Economy, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Jihad, Liberty, Military, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

National Journal has had an aha Moment: “The 10 years since the terrorism attacks of 9/11 rank among America’s most troubled,” concludes the Journal’s Ronald Brownstein:

[George W. Bush’s] “mismanaged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapped U.S. strength and imposed costs vastly exceeding their benefits. Overstretched and in the red, America ends the decade weaker on many international dimensions than when it began… At home,… the median income is now lower than in 2001 and the number of Americans in poverty nearly one-third higher. Most incredibly, fewer Americans are working today than in September 2001—a decadelong record of decline matched since 1900 only during the 1930s. Faith in all public and private leadership is flickering.”

No doubt, it began with Bush, who was bad to the bone.