Things Could Conceivably Change
OK, a dour preface here. The absolutely crappy system that has evolved out of the marriage-from-hell of Google and Blogger once again caused me to lose at least an hour of work tonight. It's easy to understand why so few mainstream blogs bother with these folks anymore. Simple picture uploads require multiple attempts. Having just gone through that it is a total pain in the ass to have the post itself just dissolve. Up you, Google assholes. Your service truly sucks!
But okay, I'm the last one in my neighborhood putting up with the crap from AOL too (one of the original progenitors of the "D-minus is plenty good" school of thought, along with virtually all of the Worst and Dimmest given their first job by 43 - and Google it appears), so maybe it is just my masochism? Still, it would seem that you would want to put some sort of a pretense of service out there, eh? I guess I should be thrilled that several primitive non-pic posts got through before the awful deficiencies of the mediocre facilities crapped out again.
I will try to regain upbeat state of mind starting over with the material I had saved.
One of the joyous, at-times titillating, features of the iPod for me (an entirely different category of technology!) is the idiosyncratic possibilities of the shuffle function with lots of varied and non-hidebound sound options available in the queue. Tonight on the way to the bus I finally managed to conjure up for the first time a track of the Peterson Field Guides' "Birding by Ear." I was probably doing a pretty good imitation of a street-denizen to the tune of the Poorwhill and Quail and all (this track focused on "name-sayers," the latter-named of which I happily got to see this weekend).
The segue was to Steppenwolf's "Monster." It's been a long time since I gave that tune more than minimal attention. Try this on for size:
Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching
Eerie, I'd call it. Or maybe not. At the very least Mr. Kay and company had a finger on a recurrent American theme. There's probably a post or more hidden in tunes with the "A" word in them, come to think of it: Starship, P. Simon, and N. Diamond are the first three more that leap to mind. Maybe some other time.
And, just so you know, I stumbled on a used copy of the Wonder Boys soundtrack today and couldn't resist. The movie thesis of early critical acclaim and subsequent blockage and the seminal Dylan tune have intrigued me for some time. So you'll find some of that in the weft here too. You might consider dropping another scoop of vanilla in that root beer - there's a few more words to come - not all mine, which may help.
Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through.
I hope some of you have already come upon the excellent Op-eds in two of the signature national papers this weekend. These are especially important as followups, in one case explicitly, to the Pollack and O'Hanlon clap-trap pro-Bush propaganda piece of a while back. I believe I posted on that nonsense once already, probably letting Glenn Greenwald at Salon do the heavy lifting he is so exceptionally good at. I will excerpt the op-eds here but you owe it to your self-esteem and me, at the very least, to check out the originals. Good stuff.
You can't win with a losin' hand.
Jonathon Finer had a great piece in the Washington Post on Saturday. He sets his cleats against the lazy, disingenuous P/O'H pair but does not stop there. In the interests of actual fair-and-balanced, you will find when you click through that he does some takedowns on progressives too, who have also dishonestly used a mere passage through Baghdad as some sort of vindication of their position. But we know where the real crime in this has and continues to occur:
Late last month the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, just back from a quick trip to Baghdad, proclaimed in the New York Times that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq." In June, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, fresh from his latest whirlwind tour of the war zone, described in the Wall Street Journal a "dramatic reversal" in the security situation in restive Anbar province. As Washington anticipates a September report assessing the troop surge, there is good reason to be skeptical of such snapshot accounts.
A dizzying number of dignitaries have passed through Baghdad for high-level briefings. The Hill newspaper reported this month that 76 U.S. senators have traveled to Iraq during the war, 38 in the past 12 months. Most never left the Green Zone or other well-protected enclaves. Few, if any, changed the views they held before arriving.
Reporters based in Baghdad rarely pay much attention to these visits, often skipping the news conferences that conclude most visiting delegations' itineraries. Since leaving Iraq last year, I've been surprised by the impact these choreographed tours have had on domestic discourse about the war. First come opinion pieces full of bold pronouncements of "what I saw" at the front. Next, the recent returnees appear on late-night cable programs or the Sunday talk . Those with opposing views respond, and soon the echo chamber is drowning out whatever's really happening.
This practice ought to have been (finally) discredited by Sen. John McCain's trip to Baghdad in the spring, after which he all but declared that Freedom had marched alongside him as he strolled through a marketplace, chatting with shopkeepers. That McCain had been trailed by an armada of armored vehicles and Black Hawk helicopters was only later reported by "60 Minutes."
-clip-
And Sunday brought what I think I recall Mr. Greenwald enshrining in terms like "the single best op-ed written on the [Iraq] war since it began." And I note in tracking down link there (and, indeed, h/t GG for drawing my attention to both of these in my weekend absence from keyboard) that Glenn has another remarkable rebuttal post today in his on-going series with the America-uber-alles Foreign Policy establishment.
If you're not sated by the end of this, by all means check it out. If you are, get up early tomorrow. He is with a handful of others having to take charge of what the old media used to do, namely being skeptical, not swallowing the propaganda, not genuflecting to those who get to rehearse rap numbers with Rove. As we know, the Endangered Species Act instead of being exfoliated needs to be expanded to cover independent reporting on and checks and balances on an executive run amuck. (And of course Greenwald is smart enough to have got the hell away from mediocre blogging systems.)
I’ve been walkin’ 40 miles of bad road
If the bible is right the world will explode
I’ve been tryin’ to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losin’ hand.
The Times op-ed, entitled "War as We Saw It," was authored by no fewer than seven actual soldiers having served time in Iraq. These are folks who demonstrate the loyalty/honor/service/honesty etc. principles so critical to the proper working of the actual serving military, as compared to the. the credo of greed, venality, and lack of scruples or devotion to either the Constitution or the wellfare of the electorate shown by Bush and almost every lacky he has promoted to power. It's interesting to contrast what they have to say with the P/O'H claptrap and keep in mind the Finer op-ed also.
Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.
Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.
However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.
-clip-
And in the interests of rekindling the embers, due credit to Digby. She got me out of any possible "used to care but things have changed" mindset about this whole business. This topic may not get the MSM attention it deserves, but we know there are options, ehh?!! I certainly hope I am only one of a multitude doing some catapulting of non-propaganda in hopes of spreading the word. This was the metaphorical last straw that led to this post:
I was just on the Sam Seder Show with Jack Hitt and we talked about this amazing op-ed in today's NY Times by seven non-coms currently deployed in Iraq. We all wondered if it will get the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that the O'Pollack piece did a week or so ago, at the clear behest of the right wing who were pimping them like hookers to any TV John who would have them. The consensus is no, unfortunately.
My feeling is that they will not get the coverage for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as Hitt pointed out on the show, the Dems don't seem to have any kind of apparatus to "catapault the propaganda" (or seemingly any desire to have one) and the second is because I think the right will go into overdrive to present these guys as good and decent patriotic non-coms (who-aren't-all-that-bright-if-you-know-what-I-mean-shhhh.) They aren't capable of seeing the big picture there with their big clumsy boots on the ground and their heads in the sand. They're very sweet, but let's get serious. Very Serious People know a little bit more about these Very Serious issues than these well-meaning boys.
-clip-
So, to reprise, let us not be preached to by coddled, pablum-fed disingenuous pro-surge disney-tour visitors to the Green Zone.
And, while we're at it, let us absolutely not extend any undue credibility to General Petraeus despite the head-fake business about how he was not going to testify directly and openly. That
fake concession by the brownshirts occupying the house-that-used-to-be-white might con folks at the NYT and WP and other well-habituated propaganda-slingers, but we know better, right? He's still a recidivist and repeat-bootlicker with a record of commentary on conditions in Iraq that Judas would be ashamed of.
Standin' on the gallows with my head in a noose.
Oh, and after Monster? Brown Sugar!
America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster
I'm so glad to know you are out there. We are much better together than apart.
But okay, I'm the last one in my neighborhood putting up with the crap from AOL too (one of the original progenitors of the "D-minus is plenty good" school of thought, along with virtually all of the Worst and Dimmest given their first job by 43 - and Google it appears), so maybe it is just my masochism? Still, it would seem that you would want to put some sort of a pretense of service out there, eh? I guess I should be thrilled that several primitive non-pic posts got through before the awful deficiencies of the mediocre facilities crapped out again.
I will try to regain upbeat state of mind starting over with the material I had saved.
One of the joyous, at-times titillating, features of the iPod for me (an entirely different category of technology!) is the idiosyncratic possibilities of the shuffle function with lots of varied and non-hidebound sound options available in the queue. Tonight on the way to the bus I finally managed to conjure up for the first time a track of the Peterson Field Guides' "Birding by Ear." I was probably doing a pretty good imitation of a street-denizen to the tune of the Poorwhill and Quail and all (this track focused on "name-sayers," the latter-named of which I happily got to see this weekend).
The segue was to Steppenwolf's "Monster." It's been a long time since I gave that tune more than minimal attention. Try this on for size:
Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching
Eerie, I'd call it. Or maybe not. At the very least Mr. Kay and company had a finger on a recurrent American theme. There's probably a post or more hidden in tunes with the "A" word in them, come to think of it: Starship, P. Simon, and N. Diamond are the first three more that leap to mind. Maybe some other time.
And, just so you know, I stumbled on a used copy of the Wonder Boys soundtrack today and couldn't resist. The movie thesis of early critical acclaim and subsequent blockage and the seminal Dylan tune have intrigued me for some time. So you'll find some of that in the weft here too. You might consider dropping another scoop of vanilla in that root beer - there's a few more words to come - not all mine, which may help.
Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through.
I hope some of you have already come upon the excellent Op-eds in two of the signature national papers this weekend. These are especially important as followups, in one case explicitly, to the Pollack and O'Hanlon clap-trap pro-Bush propaganda piece of a while back. I believe I posted on that nonsense once already, probably letting Glenn Greenwald at Salon do the heavy lifting he is so exceptionally good at. I will excerpt the op-eds here but you owe it to your self-esteem and me, at the very least, to check out the originals. Good stuff.
You can't win with a losin' hand.
Jonathon Finer had a great piece in the Washington Post on Saturday. He sets his cleats against the lazy, disingenuous P/O'H pair but does not stop there. In the interests of actual fair-and-balanced, you will find when you click through that he does some takedowns on progressives too, who have also dishonestly used a mere passage through Baghdad as some sort of vindication of their position. But we know where the real crime in this has and continues to occur:
Late last month the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, just back from a quick trip to Baghdad, proclaimed in the New York Times that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq." In June, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, fresh from his latest whirlwind tour of the war zone, described in the Wall Street Journal a "dramatic reversal" in the security situation in restive Anbar province. As Washington anticipates a September report assessing the troop surge, there is good reason to be skeptical of such snapshot accounts.
A dizzying number of dignitaries have passed through Baghdad for high-level briefings. The Hill newspaper reported this month that 76 U.S. senators have traveled to Iraq during the war, 38 in the past 12 months. Most never left the Green Zone or other well-protected enclaves. Few, if any, changed the views they held before arriving.
Reporters based in Baghdad rarely pay much attention to these visits, often skipping the news conferences that conclude most visiting delegations' itineraries. Since leaving Iraq last year, I've been surprised by the impact these choreographed tours have had on domestic discourse about the war. First come opinion pieces full of bold pronouncements of "what I saw" at the front. Next, the recent returnees appear on late-night cable programs or the Sunday talk . Those with opposing views respond, and soon the echo chamber is drowning out whatever's really happening.
This practice ought to have been (finally) discredited by Sen. John McCain's trip to Baghdad in the spring, after which he all but declared that Freedom had marched alongside him as he strolled through a marketplace, chatting with shopkeepers. That McCain had been trailed by an armada of armored vehicles and Black Hawk helicopters was only later reported by "60 Minutes."
-clip-
And Sunday brought what I think I recall Mr. Greenwald enshrining in terms like "the single best op-ed written on the [Iraq] war since it began." And I note in tracking down link there (and, indeed, h/t GG for drawing my attention to both of these in my weekend absence from keyboard) that Glenn has another remarkable rebuttal post today in his on-going series with the America-uber-alles Foreign Policy establishment.
If you're not sated by the end of this, by all means check it out. If you are, get up early tomorrow. He is with a handful of others having to take charge of what the old media used to do, namely being skeptical, not swallowing the propaganda, not genuflecting to those who get to rehearse rap numbers with Rove. As we know, the Endangered Species Act instead of being exfoliated needs to be expanded to cover independent reporting on and checks and balances on an executive run amuck. (And of course Greenwald is smart enough to have got the hell away from mediocre blogging systems.)
I’ve been walkin’ 40 miles of bad road
If the bible is right the world will explode
I’ve been tryin’ to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losin’ hand.
The Times op-ed, entitled "War as We Saw It," was authored by no fewer than seven actual soldiers having served time in Iraq. These are folks who demonstrate the loyalty/honor/service/honesty etc. principles so critical to the proper working of the actual serving military, as compared to the. the credo of greed, venality, and lack of scruples or devotion to either the Constitution or the wellfare of the electorate shown by Bush and almost every lacky he has promoted to power. It's interesting to contrast what they have to say with the P/O'H claptrap and keep in mind the Finer op-ed also.
Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.
Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.
However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.
-clip-
And in the interests of rekindling the embers, due credit to Digby. She got me out of any possible "used to care but things have changed" mindset about this whole business. This topic may not get the MSM attention it deserves, but we know there are options, ehh?!! I certainly hope I am only one of a multitude doing some catapulting of non-propaganda in hopes of spreading the word. This was the metaphorical last straw that led to this post:
I was just on the Sam Seder Show with Jack Hitt and we talked about this amazing op-ed in today's NY Times by seven non-coms currently deployed in Iraq. We all wondered if it will get the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that the O'Pollack piece did a week or so ago, at the clear behest of the right wing who were pimping them like hookers to any TV John who would have them. The consensus is no, unfortunately.
My feeling is that they will not get the coverage for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as Hitt pointed out on the show, the Dems don't seem to have any kind of apparatus to "catapault the propaganda" (or seemingly any desire to have one) and the second is because I think the right will go into overdrive to present these guys as good and decent patriotic non-coms (who-aren't-all-that-bright-if-you-know-what-I-mean-shhhh.) They aren't capable of seeing the big picture there with their big clumsy boots on the ground and their heads in the sand. They're very sweet, but let's get serious. Very Serious People know a little bit more about these Very Serious issues than these well-meaning boys.
-clip-
So, to reprise, let us not be preached to by coddled, pablum-fed disingenuous pro-surge disney-tour visitors to the Green Zone.
And, while we're at it, let us absolutely not extend any undue credibility to General Petraeus despite the head-fake business about how he was not going to testify directly and openly. That
fake concession by the brownshirts occupying the house-that-used-to-be-white might con folks at the NYT and WP and other well-habituated propaganda-slingers, but we know better, right? He's still a recidivist and repeat-bootlicker with a record of commentary on conditions in Iraq that Judas would be ashamed of.
Standin' on the gallows with my head in a noose.
Oh, and after Monster? Brown Sugar!
America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster
I'm so glad to know you are out there. We are much better together than apart.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 12:36 AM
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