Stop the War with Iran

Stop the War in Iran before it gets started.

Bush and his Boys are not about to let this one go. We won’t be any safer from terrorism – quite the opposite – but their compadres, the CEOs at Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, Bechtel , Exxon-Mobile, etc, ad nauseam would be thrilled to death if the war widens to include Iran along with Afghanistan and Iraq.

CounterPunch.org is reporting President Bush has signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime. Bush’s secret directive covers actions from Lebanon to Afghanistan. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reports the directive is “unprecedented in its scope” and permits the assassination of targeted officials. http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew05022008.html

Of course, actions like this cost money. Not to worry. An outlay of $300 million has been approved with bipartisan support. Way to stand on your hind legs, Dems! So much for will of the people, you bunch of self-serving back-stabbing slackers.

Now, Hill the Pill is declaring she’ll unleash Armageddon on Iran if they attack Israel. Break out the testosterone suppositories! She’s gonna grow her some ‘nads!

'What’s wrong with saying that?', she asks in her campaign delirium.

“Why would I have any regrets? I’m asked a question about what I would do if Iran attacked our ally, a country that many of us have a great deal of, you know, connection with and feeling for, for all kinds of reasons.”

And stuff like that there…

Lord, Sister Hill, why are you buying into Cheney’s paranoid propaganda? Are you trying to get some wack-o swing votes from McCain supporters who think he’s ‘soft’ on terror? McCain has that area of Psycho-town nailed down with his 100 years in Iraq vision. Meanwhile, he’s getting spa treatments and taking meetings with Carl Rove clones while you and Obama dance the dance from ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’. Fire your advisors and stop shooting yourself and your party in the foot.

Let's all take a reality break!

As mentioned here a fortnight ago, Iran is in no position at all to attack Israel. They have no nuclear capability according to the current NIE report while Israel has hundreds of active nukes. That would hardly be stepping into a fair fight let alone provoking one. The old saw about bringing a knife to a gun-fight springs to mind.

Oh, and has anybody in the Clinton campaign or anyone else covering the ‘situation’ with Iran looked at a friggin’ map? Just how is Iran planning to attack Israel? (Sure, they’ve blustered about it. Look at all the trash talking coming from Washington and Jerusalem.) Let’s get practical: just how would the Iranians go about attacking Israel? March, unseen, 1200 kilometers across Iraq and Jordan to wage war against the second-best equipped army in the world?

That ain’t gonna happen.

Or would Tehran, just go ahead and toss all caution and sense of self-preservation aside and simply attack Israel with air-strikes – just to start a pissing contest? Right. No matter what the state of Iran’s air force, the US and Israel have them trumped, hands down. Especially when the Israelis have the capability to launch nuclear devices from their specially equipped, American supplied fighters.

Not a single Iranian plane would even be allowed to approach Iraq air-space unchallenged. How in hell would Iranian planes make it across Iraq to Israel? Even the attempt, even the feint of an attempt at such an insane self-destructive act of aggression would mean a shit-storm descending on Tehran.

And does anybody out there really think that given the chance, the Israeli leadership would think twice about letting a couple of tactical nukes find a worthy target or two for the sake of future deterrence? Not that the presence of 300 more nukes just like those aren’t deterrent enough.

I, for one, am inclined to think that Iran would rather err on the side of caution than seek the destruction of its republic and the death of a substantial number of its people.

Call me crazy.

Stop the War in Iran before it gets started.

A Constitutional

Here’s a little, selective stroll through the Articles and Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America. (Yes, we still have one.) These are pretty straight-forward and easy to understand. There’s very little here that‘s in ‘lawyer-ese’.

Article II. Section 4. The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

AMENDMENT IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

AMENDMENT V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

AMENDMENT VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

AMENDMENT XIV (ratified July 9, 1868)

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are Citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Which ones, in your opinion, have been violated by the George W. Bush administrations and how many would be applicable to Article II, section 4, impeachment of the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States of America?

The Never-ending War Story - the Prequel

6 months before the US invaded Iraq, Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion.

The PBS documentary ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact in June, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/
(Chapter three, ‘Embedded with KBR’; at 5:10)

To repeat:

The decision to invade Iraq had been made and Halliburton had been hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault of Iraq long before the fabricated evidence re: WMDs and Saddam/Al-Qaida connections were presented by the White House to the US people and their greedy, jello-spined representatives.

It might seem beyond credibility, given what we know now, that neither the director, Tim Mangini, nor producers, Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith thought to pursue a line of questioning pertaining to this fact in this ‘hard look at private contractors’. Too off-topic perhaps. (IMHO, the documentary quickly descends into a ‘human interest piece’. Perhaps the tragic story of ex-Navy Seal, Scotty ‘the Bod’ Helvenston and others was too alluring. Helvenston was one of the Blackwater mercenaries killed, burned and strung up from the bridge in Falluja.)

Call me naïve, but I would have thought that drilling to the core of the investigation to fathom the grand reason why we were truly at war in Iraq and in need of all these private contractors would have been the preferred tact to take. (Call it 20/20 hindsight, if you wish.)

If the reporter was correct, sometime in September, 2002, 6 months before the Bush Administration bullied the US into violating international law by invading the sovereign nation of Iraq on March 20, 2003, contracts had been signed and contractors were on the ground building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. This presumably included the ‘permanent bases’, and quite likely improvements on what is to be the largest embassy compound in the World. A ‘Vatican City’ to serve as the base of future operations in the Middle-east. Most certainly, they were busy building some of the more than 60 sites that KBR operated in Iraq at the time of this documentary.

In his January 28, 2003, state of the Union address, Bush denounced Saddam as “the dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons” and listed vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons. What Dubya didn’t tell us is that his cabal of war-criminals had already bargained away any peaceful, diplomatic solutions in a no-bid contract to Halliburton/KBR, three months earlier.

Lest we forget, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, a 26-year veteran of the agency, revealed to CBS’ Ed Bradley on ‘60-minutes’ which aired on April 23, 2006, that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director, George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States and was reportedly paid more than $100,000 by the CIA — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/60minutes/main1527749.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-09.htm

Mr Drumheller went on to say that the administration didn’t care about this revelation, no matter the source. Of course not, by that time, in September, 2002, the real decisions had been made by the people who truly matter, the high mucky-mucks of corporate America, and the ink was drying on the dotted line. The gravy-train was leaving the station with a full head of steam and no red flag was going to stop it.

You can almost hear an echo from the addled, collective brain-pan of Bush’s Inner Circle, ‘We can’t renege on the deals we’ve made with our friends at Halliburton. That wouldn’t be kosher. A deal is a deal.’ One must suppose that the ‘finder’s fee’ on the estimated umpteen billion dollars in no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton/KBR would be a handsome one. And if one had similar connections with other corporations that supplied materiel and services to Halliburton and KBR at inflated cost, one could wolf down the slop at both ends of the trough. Hog heaven, as they say.

That’s a mighty temptation. Mountains of cash up front and on the back end, lots of powerful friends who’d be happy to give you a corner office, a princely salary and a diamond parachute when you conclude your ‘service’ in the US government.

Beyond the dreams of avarice.

And all you have to do is undermine the Constitution, betray your solemn oath to uphold and defend the precepts of that document, lie to the US citizens you swore to serve, deceive the world with bald-faced falsehoods and steel yourself to live with the fact that the blood of thousands or even tens of thousands of human beings are on your greedy hands.

Such a deal.

So, General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, when can we expect to bring home our troops and our contractors? When will this war end?

The answer is simple.

The war will end when Dubya, Dicky-boy, Donnie the Rum, Condi, Wolfie, and all those of their sickening ilk can force themselves from the slop of the trough.

Then again, I’m an optimist.

Post Script:
I am very sympathetic to Mr Helveston's friends and family members. I also can understand the reasoning revealed by Mrs Katy Helveston, Scotty’s mom when she told PBS,”When you’ve been in Special Forces for 13, 14 years, you’re trained to do one thing. And there’s not a whole lot of jobs out there for people trained to kill.” Being a private contractor seemed to be a solution to the deteriorating US economy for many of the 10,000 who were in Iraq in 2005.

The Road to Hell

Let’s begin with a parable; the parable of ‘the boy, the bird and the stone’.

A small child throws a stone and kills a songbird. The child might not have intended to kill the bird; perhaps he meant only to chase it away or practice his throwing arm. Whatever the intent, whatever the boy’s motive, the bird remains dead. The Audubon Society would care nothing about the child’s motives. And neither would the bird.

The Brookings institution is a well-known Washington think-tank upon which many administrations of the US government have depended for non-partisan research for almost a century. Kenneth M. Pollack is the Director of Research at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He is an expert on national security, military affairs and the Persian Gulf, was Director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council and spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst.

In an article posted on the Brookings website on March 16, 2008, Mr Pollack had this to say:
“If we leave behind a raging civil war in which the Iraqi people are incomprehensibly worse off than they had been under Saddam Hussein and the Middle East more threatened by the chaos spilling over from Iraq than they ever were by the dictator’s arms, then no one will care how well-intentioned our motives.”

How well-intentioned our motives? Motives?

Mr Pollack, with all due respect, please re-read your statement. Note the words “…a raging civil war in which the Iraqi people are incomprehensibly worse off than they had been under Saddam Hussein…” and the part where you say “and the Middle East more threatened by the chaos spilling over from Iraq than they ever were by the dictator’s arms…”.

If that is a proper assessment of the situation in Iraq – and I think that it is, with little room for disagreement – what does it matter what our motives were?

A recent World Health Organisation report estimated that 151,000 civilian Iraqi men, women and children were killed between March 20, 2003 and June 2006. The estimated number of civilian Iraqis killed by violence in 2007 is in the neighborhood of 22,000 to 24,000 according to Iraq Body Count, a British firm dedicated to making this grim tally. Do you expect the surviving family members of the 175,000 Iraqis killed as a result of American foreign policy to care a whit about the motives of the US?

Neither the Brookings Institution, the Pentagon nor even the Red Cross/Red Crescent, to my knowledge, have offered an estimate of the number of Iraqi men, women and children wounded since the onset of the invasion. (Here’s quite the party killing parlor game: Pick a number. Twice those killed? Three times the number killed? Four times? A factor of 10?) What do the wounded and suffering care if our intentions were well-meant?

The ICRC states “five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.” The once developing nation of Iraq has been reduced to the dire, retched state of one of the poorest third world countries. Will the children dying of thirst and dysentery in the shell of a bombed out neighborhood clinic pause to weigh the pros and cons of our intentions?

Please, Mr Pollack, tell me what had the Bush administration intended when they rail-roaded the US Congress and the American people into this illegal war? The term ‘well-intentioned motive’ does not spring to my mind. ‘War profiteering’ does and that’s a matter that should be discussed along with war crimes and war reparations, but let’s leave that for another time.

To his credit, Mr Pollack has belatedly seen the light. Or at least, he’s caught a glimpse, for he goes on with this carefully worded under-statement, “…what I most wish I had understood before the invasion was the reckless arrogance of the Bush administration.” He then calls the Bush administration’s handling of the war “clumsy, careless and rash”. Clearly, Mr Pollack now thinks, like the majority of Americans, that waging war in Iraq was a blunder.

Better late than never?

Now, presumably, he and his fellow Saban Center intellectuals will spend months or years ciphering the tactics, strategies and operations to deduce where the fatal errors lay that lead to yet another less-than-successful, though valiant American crusade to bring the gift of freedom and democracy to an oppressed people.

Better luck next time?

The greater issue Mr Pollack and most of his profession seem blissfully oblivious to, however, is precisely the one which should be triggering red flag alerts and setting off klaxons and sirens of warning. Most of the rest of the world is aware of it. Much of the world resents it. Some of the world hates us for it. Some hate it enough to fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up in crowded markets to express their resentment and hatred for it. The issue referred to is not ‘our love of freedom’. It is not ‘our noble vision of a democratic world’. It is not our magnanimity, our wealth, our life-style, our sports heroes, our films or our music. The issue that gets under the skin of the rest of the world is the self-deluded, self-righteous, self-serving credo that the government of the US, while capable of the most egregious acts, is nevertheless motivated by only the most high-minded of intentions and ipso facto should be excused for its various transgressions.

(‘Transagressions’ is the euphemism that would be preferred in polite company. To come closer to the truth as understood by much of the rest of the world, transgressions should be read as ‘crimes against humanity’. Anyone with a shred of moral integrity need only recall Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti and Panama for past examples of such ‘transgressions’. )

It is said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” That might be, but the larger paving stones on the road to hell are undoubtedly greed, murder, torture, corruption and hubris.

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0316_iraq_pollack.aspx

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22537.pdf

http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/iraq-report-170308

Dub-ya & Wicked Dick

“The voters of Brattleboro, Vermont have voted to seek an indictment of the president and vice president and arrest them if they show up in town. No specific crimes are mentioned, but organisers of the anti-Bush effort have referred to perjury, obstruction of justice and war crimes related to the Iraq conflict.”

"Shall the Selectboard instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution and publish said indictments for consideration by other authorities....

"and shall it be the law of the Town of Brattleboro that the Brattleboro police, pursuant to the above mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro if they are not duly impeached, and prosecuted or extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them?"

Dub-ya and Wicked Dick are wanted men in the Vermont town – wanted for crimes against the US Constitution. With the great number of Iraqi civilians dead and wounded at the cost of untold billions of dollars, it’s time more moral and constitutionally-minded citizens follow Brattleboro’s lead.

Washington, D.C. would be a perfect place for such a measure to be introduced and enacted.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/05/georgebush.usa

http://www.rubyan.com/politics/2006/09/bushcheney_escape_war_crimes_p.html

http://www.peoplejudgebush.org/crimes.shtml

http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2005/10/war-crimes-act-of-1996-bush-rumsfeld.html

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/impeachment-demands-spread-across-usa

http://www.impeachbush.org/site/PageServer

Cost Analysis

$16 billion dollars is being spent every month on the undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

$43,835,616.00 per diem – give or take.

In 2007, Washington gave $6.8 million a day to Israel – mostly in the form of military aid. More than a quarter of a million dollars an hour.

The Pentagon plans to bleed the stone for $515.4 billion in 2009; $42.9 billion a month; $9.9 billion a week; $1.4 billion a day; $58.8 million an hour; $980,000 a minute; $16,000 a second.

The blink of an eye.

Tell us again about the cost of ‘freedom’ and the price of ‘national security’.

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp#InContextUSMilitarySpendingVersusRestoftheWorld

http://www.counterpunch.org/chretien04072006.html

Insult to Injury

You enlist in the US Army.

You want to serve your country, learn a trade, see the world, wear fatigues.

After training, you’re sent to Iraq.

Two weeks in country, you‘re sent on a patrol.

Your vehicle is struck by an IED. It’s not adequately armored because the DoD is trying to hold down the expense of bringing Democracy to the Iraqis.

You are wounded. In the disorder resulting from the attack, you lose your helmet.

You’re medevacked to Germany. One of your limbs is amputated.

You go home. A hero. You’ve sacrificed on the altar of Democracy.

After a while, you get a bill from the government for the cost of your lost helmet.

According to the book, The Three Trillion Dollar War’ by Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, that’s just what happens.

You defaulted on your contract with the government to serve three years by getting injured too soon, thus ending your service before the contract allowed.

Pay up you deadbeat.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/29/stream