The Battle for Hearts and Minds Rages on.

Reuters reports that US soldiers shot and killed the 17-year-old son of Hamad al-Qaisi, the governor of Northern Iraq’s Salahuddin Province. The killing took place during a raid on a family home, where the governor’s son was staying. One other relative of the governor’s was also killed and three people were wounded.

A US military statement says that an al-Qaeda financier was wounded and captured during the raid. The statement also explained the killing of the governor’s son thus:

As they entered the target building, coalition forces encountered two armed men. Perceiving hostile intent … they shot and killed the men. It was subsequently determined that the two … were related to the governor.”

But it seems there’s some uncertainty around the circumstances that resulted in the killings. According to the Boston Globe, Hussam—the governor’s son—was shot in the head, stomach, and shoulder while he slept. Hussam’s cousin, Uday Khalaf, was killed as he tried to enter Hussam’s room.

This is precisely the sort of thing that makes the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq an unwinnable one. The deputy governor of Salahuddin province reported at least two other attacks that followed the same pattern, accusing US soldiers of using excessive force when conducting raids. The attack was also condemned by the Salahuddin provincial council as an indication of “how the American forces disregard the souls of Iraqi citizens.”

If Iraqis get the sense that US soldiers don’t value their lives, it’s going to be pretty tough to win their hearts and minds. After all, what happens when US soldiers storm a house in search of al-Qaeda operatives? Regardless of who the soldiers are looking for, when they enter an Iraqi home, they’re going to encounter Iraqis. Whether or not they’re armed or affiliated with al-Qaeda doesn’t change the fact that they have friends, neighbors, and relatives who are not going to be happy when they are captured, wounded, or killed. And the killing of any Iraqi has the potential to alienate and radicalize countless others, whose deaths will only anger and radicalize even more Iraqis. It’s worse than a vicious cycle: It’s more like an avalance that picks up greater mass and momentum as it moves down the mountain!

In the short term, brute force might carry the day in Iraq. In the long run, though, it’s a losing game unless the intent is to kill everyone in Iraq. The other option, of course, is to withdraw US troops and put an end to this war.

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A Crash Course on How NOT to Win Hearts and Minds.

I just came across this video from the Winter Soldier 2008 conference, during which veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave testimony about crimes committed against civilians. Here’s an example:

There are many others on Youtube.

The videos pretty much speak for themselves. I fail to see how anybody can seriously believe that the US military is winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Every Iraqi killed has a family of people who love him/her and who will want vengeance. The cycle will only get more vicious. The US public may see the troops in Iraq as liberators but I doubt very many Iraqis see them as such. Not anymore.

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Turkey Hits Rock Bottom.

Dear Abdullah Gul,

Is it me or has October been a particularly bad month for you and your country? First, the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States House of Representatives voted to condemn as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War. This made you guys so enraged you recalled your ambassador to the US and threatened to stop supporting the US occupation of Iraq. As if all this weren’t enough bad press for your country, you have been threatening to send troops into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish insurgents. And, just when you didn’t think things could look any worse, President Bush had this to say in your defense:

Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing a democratic ally in the Muslim world, especially one that’s providing vital support for our military every day.”

President Gul, it saddens me to see that you have fallen so low as to have George Bush defending your democratic credentials! After all, this is the guy whose administration came to power after disenfranchising Black voters in Florida; he cut funding for social programs and vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, despite its popularity; his administration openly supported the illegal and short-lived overthrow of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; based on false and falsified evidence, he launched an illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign country in spite of his people’s opposition to it; and his government arrests and tortures people in contravention of the US Constitution and international law. Your government could not have found a worse defender of your “democratic” credentials even if you had resurrected Attila the Hun himself!

Clearly, Mr. Gul, you and your government are clueless when it comes to public relations. But fear not, all is not lost! As a longtime supporter of Turkey’s attempts to join the European Union—and simply out of common decency—I cannot let you continue to damage your country’s image and reputation. Instead, I will break my rule against giving free advice to governments and give you some tips on how not to make yourselves look like a callous, genocide-denying, bunch of thugs. You’ll thank me for it.

1. Stop denying the Armenian genocide. It makes you look worse than evil. It makes you look stupid! I don’t know which dictionary you’ve been reading but when a government deliberately and systematically kills 1.5 million people of the same ethnic or national group, it’s a genocide no matter how you slice or dice it. Whether it happened in times of peace or war, in Namibia, Cambodia, Poland, Rwanda, or the Middle East, it’s still a genocide. No country that committed a genocide can ever hope to claim international respectability by continuing to deny it—unless that country is the US, of course, which Turkey clearly isn’t. Admitting genocide is easy and it will do wonders for your international image. After you acknowledge that the mass exile and killing of Armenians was a genocide, apologize for it. Express your deepest regret for the atrocity, build a monument in Ankara and also in every place that is in any way tied to the exiles and killings. Declare a day of commemoration and atonement. Make it a national holiday. Open your government archives and invite scholars to research, write, and speak about the genocide.

2. You modern Turks have been obsessive about distancing yourselves from the Ottoman Empire. You banned the fez, declared Turkey a secular state, and founded your legal and educational systems on European models. These are all very good decisions. Now you have a golden opportunity to further distance yourselves—in a huge way—from the Ottoman Empire. Acknowledge the genocide but make it perfectly clear that it was an Ottoman genocide, not a Turkish one. Emphasize the fact that modern, secular, fez-less Turkey is incapable of committing such a heinous crime. It will pay off. For example, France has declared genocide denial a crime. This means that France alone can keep you from entering the EU as long as you continue to deny the Armenian genocide. Is that what you really want? Think about how badly you want to join the EU. Think about how much you have already done to get into the EU. Although it must have been very difficult, you abolished the death penalty and un-banned the Kurdish language. These are both big steps. It won’t be a much bigger step to acknowledge and apologize for the Armenian genocide, and it’ll bring you closer to fulfilling your dream of EU membership.

3. Whatever you do, DO NOT invade and occupy northern Iraq! In fact, keep your army where it belongs; in Turkey. Between you and me, you guys haven’t exactly been the most popular country in that part of the world. I mean, your Ottoman predecessors occupied your Arab neighbors so they don’t like you very much. Not to mention, you control Syria’s and Iraq’s water supply. You were also a constant thorn in the side of the Russian empire and it’s successor, the Soviet Union. And, let’s not forget you killed 1.5 million Armenians during WWI so they’re not too crazy about you either. Let’s see . . . what else? Oh yes, you’ve fought Greece and you continue to occupy part of Cyprus, and Iran’s not too happy about having you as a neighbor either. And it seems your NATO allies dislike you more than everyone else because they are the most opposed to letting you into the EU. You must have noticed too that even NATO’s erstwhile Eastern-Bloc enemies—Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania—are already in the EU. Come to think of it, it seems your strongest ally is all the way in North America. It doesn’t look too good, does it, that you don’t get along with a single country that shares a continent—or even a hemisphere—with you? So what will people think if you start flexing your military muscle against Kurds in Iraq? I’ll tell you what they’ll think. Greece is going to be reminded of the times they were at the receiving end of your military might. Iran’s going to think, “Hmmm . . . we have Kurds too. What if the Turks decide to go after our Kurds?” As for Russia . . . well, let’s just say Vladimir Putin is not going to need much of an excuse to do something crazy. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, he was just in Iran expressing his opposition to Washington’s threats against that country. So, if you’re really concerned about maintaing normal relations with your neighbors, you’d stay out of northern Iraq.

President Gul, you and your administration need to get with the program. Times have changed, the world has changed, and Turkey has demonstrated its interest in being part of that changed world. Civilized countries are no longer impressed by cross-border demonstrations of military power. Stay out of northern Iraq. Also, you need to stop denying the Armenian genocide because it won’t win you any friends. Just remember, there’s life after admitting genocide. Look at Germany. Most importantly, accepting the genocide will help you recover from your post-Ottoman Self-Image Disorder, something I know you are very interested in. After all, acceptance is the first step on the path to recovery.

I wish you all the best in the coming days and months. I trust you will make more and more of the wise decisions that have characterized your rule thus far.

 Sincerely,

 Abdul Kargbo

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Rush Limbaugh Puts Big, Fat Foot Into Big, Fat Mouth. Again!

Sorry, I don’t normally resort to ad hominem attacks but the bullshit that spews out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth just pushes me beyond the bounds of decency. In his most recent outrage, he referred to American troops—including returning veterans—who oppose or openly criticize the Iraq war as “phony soldiers.” Naturally, the right wing’s most vociferous minions are coalescing in a cacophonous show of support (of Limbaugh) and denunciation (of his detractors). But regardless of what Limbaugh meant by his “phony soldiers” comment, one thing is clear: No statement is too inflammatory, too insensitive, or too hypocritical for this man when it comes to pushing the conservative line.

This isn’t, after all, the first time Rush Limbaugh has gotten in trouble for callously pandering to conservative elements in our society. In fact, extreme insensitivity has been the hallmark of his career. In 2003, as one of the hosts of ESPN’s NFL Sunday Countdown, he was forced to resign after making a racially insensitive remark about Donovan McNabb, star quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles. Limbaugh—who will never be as good at anything in his entire life as McNabb is at quarterbacking—had the nerve to say, on the air, that McNabb had recieved more credit than he deserved for his team’s successes because sympathetic media outlets were “very desirous that a black quarterback do well.” I guess in Rush’s fat eyes, it’s not actually possible for a black quarterback to be good enough to merit McNabb’s accolades.

Racial insensitivity is par for the course for Rush Limbaugh so his remarks on ESPN should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his show. But Limbaugh deserves accolades of his own when it comes to brazen hypocrisy. As a longtime advocate of the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key school of anti-drug law enforcement, Limbaugh’s own arrest and conviction on prescription drug abuse charges did come as a shock to many. It also gave yours truly a great deal of schadenfreude. Of course, it would have been too good to be true for the courts to lock him up and throw away the key, but I nonetheless let my imagination wander to a blissful fantasy world in which justice was actually done. In the real world, however, Limbaugh was out in no time and, after a stint in rehab, back on the air.

Not in the least humbled by his arrest—and exposure as a hypocrite of the first order—Limbaugh immediately went back to his trademark brand of inflammatory and biased broadcasting. During the 2004 presidential elections, Limbaugh was in the forefront of the campaign to cast a shadow over John Kerry’s military service, parrotting the exaggerated and outrightly false claims of groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This episode shows the size of Rush’s cojones (hint: cojones is not Spanish for gut) because he himself had never served in the military. When his nation needed him to put his life on the line, Rush Limbaugh managed to get a deferment because of a pilonidal cyst, a minor condition that can be easily repaired with an out-patient surgical procedure.

The “phony soldiers” remark is rightly generating a strong negative reaction precisely because Limbaugh, himself a draft-dodger (a term he liberally used when lambasting President Bill Clinton), now has the gall to refer to soldiers who oppose the war as “phony.” This man has never answered the call to serve his country and has never worn a military uniform. In fact, the only uniform Limbaugh has ever worn is that of a “a wiener salesman for the KC Royals baseball franchise.” Yet he now has the audacity to disparage these soldiers who have put their lives on the line and now have the courage—after having personally witnessed the fiasco in Iraq—to call for an end to the war. Only in a media climate totally dominated by right-wing pundits can someone like Rush Limbaugh actually believe he can get away with this sort of thing. Hopefully this will be the last time he does.

Because of this man’s track record, I don’t understand why there is so much argument about what he meant? We can pick apart his words and try to psychoanalyze him ’til we’re blue in the face but one thing is clear: He fully intended to disparage those soldiers who are critical of the war. Limbaugh has been a supporter of this war from the start, and has staunchly supported whatever line the Bush Administration has taken. When the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up, Limbaugh defended the soldiers who tortured and humiliated their Iraqi prisoners, saying on his show that they were just “blowing off steam.” After an active-duty soldier questioned then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about their lack of body armor, Rush Limbaugh called for that soldier to be busted for “borderline insubordination.” From day one, Limbaugh has done whatever he can to support the continuation of this war, and he will continue to do so.

It should therefore come as no surprise that he has now taken to insulting soldiers who have lost faith in this war. The man is a conservative ideologue, pure and simple. I can only hope that something good comes of this scandal. I hope that those Americans who continue to support this war will begin to question the sincerity of conservatives’ support-the-troops rhetoric. Maybe they will finally begin to understand that continuing to send American soldiers to die in Iraq while opposing the speedy return to their homes and families of those troops already there is not a show of support. It’s actually the opposite.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Long, long ago, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh regularly and I actually thought this fat piece of excrement made some good points. God, how blind I was back then! It must have been the OxyContin.

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Defying the Tyrant: Burmese Monks Attacked, Killed for Standing up to Military Government

The Burmese government made good on it’s threats to “take action” against the Buddhist monks leading peaceful protests throughout the country. The monks are protesting the government’s refusal ”to apologise for its actions during an earlier rally in the city of Pakokku, when soldiers and state-backed militia reportedly beat up several monks.” That demonstration was held to protest a sudden rise in fuel prices.  

The news coming out of Burma has been patchy since the ruling junta closed off the country to journalists but some reports are leaking out via the Internet and telephone calls to Burmese living abroad. These are in turn being picked up by major media outlets. The BBC is reporting that in Sittwe, Rangoon, and other areas, the military has been using tear gas to disperse the demonstrators, who number around 100,000. The BBC also published e-mails and other electronic messages from eyewitnesses inside Burma. Reports are also coming out about monks being killed.

First off, words can’t express my respect and admiration for these monks and the other Burmese demonstrators who are standing up to their brutal military government. The last time there was a similar peaceful, nationwide protest against the government, about 3,000 demonstrators paid with their lives. The memory of that massacre does not seem to be deterring today’s demonstrators, whose numbers have continued to swell as more people come out to support the monks.

They are really living up to the slogan of the 1988 demonstrators: Do-aye (“It is our task”). Monks are considered to be the highest moral authority in Burma so at first, the government seemed reluctant to use violence against them. After government warnings were ignored by demonstrators, however, the military moved to violently crush the demonstrations. Most of the international community, with the exception of China (which wields tremendous influence over the junta), has criticized the Burmese junta for its reaction to the demonstrations.

I’m heartened to see that monks, conscious of their respected position in Burmese society, have chosen to use their status to oppose the violence of the government. It’s truly uplifting to see so many Burmese citizens—monks, nuns, and laypeople—coming together peacefully to defy a brutal and repressive government.

I salute the Burmese people! They are setting a shining example for the world and justice-loving people everywhere should stand in solidarity with them.

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Iraq Pulls the Plug on Blackwater.

It looks like the Iraqi government has grown a pair of cojones and decided to take a firmer role in administering its territory by revoking the licence of the private contracting firm, Blackwater. The decision came after Blackwater soldiers killed Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of a car-bomb attack against a convoy they were escorting.

Unfortunately for the government of Iraq—and for anyone who believed the US was not running the show in Iraq—Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other power players in the US government are already turning up the pressure on Iraq’s Prime Minister to reverse the revocation of Blackwater’s license.

Iraqis will soon learn who is really ruling their country.

Read more here.

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Where There is Fear, There is Also Hatred.

The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a cartoon depicting Iran as a sewer with cockroaches crawling out of it and infesting neighboring countries. Enough has been written about how racist this cartoon is—and how reminiscent it is of Nazi and Hutu genocidal propaganda—so I won’t spend any time on that. What is missing from the hoopla surrounding this cartoon is any talk of how national–security rhetoric generally and inevitably dehumanizes entire nations.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush repeatedly assured Americans and the world that his beef was not with the entire Muslim or Arab world, that his quarrel was not even with the people of Iraq. Rather, we were told Iraq would be a stage of the global War on Terror because its leader was a dictator who was collaborating with Al Qaeda and could potentially put his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons at the disposal of international terrorists. Of course, we now know that there were no WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein—brutal and murderous though he was—had no links to Al Qaeda. Today, all Iraqis have to show for our trouble is a destabilized and increasingly violent country in which people have to do without recently available basic services like round-the-clock electricity and sewage treatment. Iraqi women are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being raped or worse, men are routinely kidnapped and murdered simply for going about their lives, and sectarian violence yields ever-increasing death tolls.

Yet the majority of Americans continue to hem and haw about the best way out. Opinion is divided on whether to send more troops, withdraw some troops, pull out entirely, and when and in what manner to pursue or abandon any course of action. The arguments over what to do or not do mostly revolve around the number of American casualties, how much the war is costing, and whether Americans are now more or less likely to be the victims of a terrorist attack. In other words, very few Americans are basing their opinions about what should be done on what’s best for the Iraqi people. The rightness or wrongness of this war is almost always judged from Americans’ point of view and almost never from Iraqis’ vantage point. One exception is the argument that if US troops were to leave Iraq, their departure would be followed by a bloodbath. But although this argument is constantly put forward, we never see any Iraqis who support a continued US presence in their country.

Why is this? Because what Iraqis think doesn’t matter to us. In the process of convincing ourselves that Iraq posed an existential threat to the US, we forgot that Iraqis are people too. National–security discourse is concerned mainly with the protection of one state’s population against attack by another state, so it’s inevitable that the people of the other state will gradually become devalued and eventually dehumanized. Take two hypothetical states, A and B, locked in a war of words. As the people of State A are whipped into a frenzy of fear and paranoia by continuous official reminders that State B poses an imminent threat, they can’t help but begin to fear, and then loathe, the people of State B. Having been convinced that they have to choose between their own survival and that of their “enemy,” the people of State A will not only ignore, mitigate, or deny violence done to ”the other side,” they will eventually welcome and celebrate it.  It becomes a matter simply of kill or be killed because the people of State A now believe that in order for them to live, others must be killed. Hermann Goering, Reichsmarshall and head of the Luftwaffe summed it up:

. . . voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Once the people of State B have been defined as a threat, it’s a short rhetorical step for them to be equated with other threats like viruses, cockroaches, snakes, poisonous mushrooms, etc. State B is a threat so it’s people are dangerous. Viruses and snakes are dangerous too. Ergo, the people of State B are viruses and snakes. What do you do to snakes and viruses when you want to protect yourself? You kill them. But such analogies are seldom made by official spokespeople. Rather, that task is left to journalists and radio personalities.

Ultimately, the essential ingredient for war is fear. Without fear, there can be no hatred. Without hatred, there can be no dehumanization. And without dehumanization, there can be no war. To be sure, organized international terrorism is a legitimate threat but international politics—constructed as a system of states versus states—makes no room for nuance so states can only make war on states. The human tendency to generalize also gets some of the blame. Thus, a nation that produces a handful of terrorists is seen as a nation of terrorists, in the same way that a nation run by a brutal dictator is seen to be brutal. In the international sphere, states derive power and legitimacy from their people. In order to break the power of a state, its power base (i.e., people) must be broken, and there are few better means than war for accomplishing this. Hateful propaganda, like the cartoon in the Dispatch, plays a pivotal role by paving the way to war. Long before the first bomb is dropped or the first shot fired, the people are primed to fear, primed to hate, and primed to tolerate unspeakable violence against their enemies. In other words, they are primed for war.

The cartoon in the Columbus Dispatch clearly shows that some in the US have decided that Iran is enough of a threat to justify a dehumanizing comparison between its people and cockroaches. We can only hope that as a nation, we Americans do not fear Iran enough to allow our government to start yet another war in the Middle East.

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Um . . . anybody seen my guns?

About 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces cannot be accounted for by the US military.

Hmmm . . . and here’s the Bush Administration blaming Iran for supplying the weapons that are being used against US soldiers. Would it be too much of a leap of logic or imagination to say that some, if not many, of those weapons probably wound up in the hands of Iraqi militants?

Good thing the US government didn’t give any really good weapons to the Iraqi military.

Read the full story here.

And, let’s not forget that in the absence of the WMD that formed the basis of the argument for the invasion of Iraq, it’s now looking increasingly like the whole war was nothing more than an oil grab.

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He did it again.

So, the President used his executive power to commute ‘Scooter’ Libby’s sentence because, in his opinion, the 30-month sentence handed down by the jury in Libby’s purgery case was “excessive.”

Big surprise!

I mean, did anyone really think this administration was going to obey the spirit—if not the letter—of the law and let one of their own go to jail? I certainly didn’t. This administration doesn’t exactly have a very good track record of . . . how shall I put this . . . adhering to the rules of transparency and accountability.

The Bush administration came into office under the cloud of controversy surrounding the 2000 election and the Florida vote recount, after it came to light that scores of Black voters had had their eligibility to vote challenged or outright denied. Then the Vice President held secret meetings with big energy companies and refused to release the proceedings of these meetings to the public. Then there was the 9/11 Commission interviews during which the President and Vice President refused to testify under oath.

What else? Illegal wire taps, sneak and peak, extraordinary rendition, reading Americans’ mail, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, firing federal prosecutors . . . the list of this adminstration’s transgressions seems endless.

But perhaps worst of all was the case for invading Iraq, which we now know—and some of us were saying back then—is based on lies. UNMOVIC just wrapped up operations in Iraq, stating that there are no weapons of mass destruction in that country, contrary to what our government told us. In order to bolster their case, the administration relied on flimsy information from the Blair government claiming that Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger in order to build a nuclear weapon. It was all a pack of lies.

Former Ambassador Wilson thought he was doing the right thing by trying to keep the country from embarking on a foolish military adventure in the Middle East. He traveled to Niger and proved that the uranium claim was false. For his troubles, the Bush Administration—in a stunning display of uprightness and moral fortitude—revealed that his wife was a CIA operative, thereby destroying her career.

Scooter Libby was intimately implicated in this plot to defraud the country and go to war on a false pretext. For his role in this scam, Scooter Libby was prosecuted for purgery and obstruction of justice but, thanks to the President, he will not be serving any time.

Which is just as well because, with a name like Scooter, I don’t think he would have fared very well in the big house.

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Salafis Gone Wild!!!

The London Times reported in May on new rules enforced by a group of Salafi militants now controlling an Iraqi province north of Baghdad.

Based in Diyala, the Salafi-dominated Islamic State of Iraq now enforces laws against smoking (repeat offenders have their fingers broken) and bars grocers from displaying tomatoes (considered a female vegetable) next to cucumbers. Farmers are also required to put shorts on their goats.

Good to know we’re not the only ones with wacky moral laws.

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