Anti-war

I'm tired of hearing people with usually progressive views (like Mark Shields or John Kerry) complain the latest MoveOn ad in the New York Times asking if General Petraeus has Betrayed Us is counter-productive, "alienating those who would otherwise agree with us." It's the same bogus argument we hear about forthright atheists saying what needs to be said. I doubt anyone who genuinely questions this war will be led to support it because Move On ran an ad in the NYT some are uncomfortable with. Of course the Right Wing Noise Machine is in full throttle: A political group supporting President…
I just watched Dear Leader tell his fellow citizens why we will have to wait until the next President before there is any hope for extricating the country from the quicksand of the Iraq Debacle. It was not a surprise, but no less dismaying for being expected. But I've been dismayed before. Vietnam. In 1969 our leaders were the same kind of lying bastards who did whatever they wanted. That year Pete Seeger appeared on the David Steinberg TV show and sang this song. The country was divided on the war, much more divided than today, something he acknowledges when he says no one need sing with…
One of my colleagues (a clinical psychologist) was once asked the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. "You have to understand," he said, "that a psychiatrist doesn't have a PhD." It turns out there is at least one more difference. The professional association of psychiatrists have rejected the idea it is ethical for a medical doctor to be complicit in interrogation abuse or abusive conditions under which interrogations are conducted. The professional association of psychologists have twice declined to take that step. I think that's a more telling difference than the nature…
For all you Second Amendment-is-the-most-precious-freedom-we-have folks out there, take heart. We are spreading freedom in Iraq: The US military cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to the Iraqi security forces, an official US report says. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the Pentagon cannot track about 30% of the weapons distributed in Iraq over the past three years. The Pentagon did not dispute the figures, but said it was reviewing arms deliveries procedures. (BBC) Yes,that's right. 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols, along with 135,000 pieces of…
While you busy being scared by the Bush administration about phantom weapons of mass destruction, there are real WMDs and have been for many decades. We even know where they are (no, not north, west and south of Tikrit, as claimed by the cowardly Donald Rumsfeld). They are in the former Soviet Union. They made bioweapons. They had stockpiles. They even had a well-studied accident with anthrax from a weapons research facility that killed dozens of community residents when a fairly small amount was inadvertently vented in Sverdlovsk. But Putin's Russia is not a target in George Bush's "Global"…
I don't know what to say about this, except it appears at this point to implicate theuse of slave labor in the construction of the US Embassy in Baghdad, aided, abetted and with the knowledge of the US State Department (hat tip Boingboing) . You decide: The US State Department is denying the claims of occupational health and safety violations while at the same time saying they can't control how foreign laborers are treated: "At this time our reach does not extend to third-country hiring practices," said William Moser, the deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions. (Washington Post via…
Here is Max Blumenthal's Unofficial Tour of the College Republican Convention. It's both funny and appalling. Take your pick. Or just laugh through your tears. On the other hand, if you are offended and under the age of 42, you can sign up and take your anger out on the Iraqis:
Some federal money ($430 million) for pandemic preparedness is now being released to help states and communities "to respond to bioterror attacks, infectious disease, and natural disasters that may cause mass casualties." The bulk of federal pan flu money has been for procurement of vaccines and antivirals. Over the years money$2 billion has been released to increase acute care capacity. There isn't a lot of evidence we are in much better shape for all that. So do we think this new bolus of dough will help? The good news is that it isn't more procurement money for vaccine and antivirals. It's…
I hope the Democrats are successful in stopping the Iraq atrocity. Out of Iraq. Now. But I must once again disagree -- strongly disagree -- with the notion that Iraq has distracted us from the "real" war against terrorism, the one in Afghanistan. This is a talking point of virtually all the Democratic presidential hopefuls and a distressingly large proportion of the progressive blogosphere. I must say again: Afghanistan was wrong, too. That was the title of a post I put up in December 2005 at a time when Iraq looked less like the colossal screw up many of us knew it was. It was also a time…
I just learned via Ben Cohen at World's Fair that George Bush has joined the anti-war movement. Of course I'll believe it when I see it, but he is saying the right things: "Destroying human life to save human life is just not ethical." (President George Bush on his Saturday radio broadcast) I don't think of Bush as the anti war type, but really -- the words are quite plain here and he has always emphasized he is a man of his word -- what else could this mean? What else could this mean? George Bush is opposed to war.
We need to celebrate our victories, small as some are. I learned from my SciBling, Grrl, over at Living the Scientific Life that Elsevier is abandoning their ill gotten gains as enablers of international arms merchants, a role we and many others posted on. Her summary is excellent. Here's some more detail: As first reported by The Scientist, the Anglo-Dutch publishing behemoth, which puts out more than 2,000 journals and 2,200 books annually, has bowed to pressure from leading scientists and will no longer organize trade shows for weapons merchants. Despite the profitability of the company's…
Congress passed the supplemental spending bill last week and Bush signed it immediately. It was a terrible bill, both for what it contained and what it didn't. You all know what it contained: more money for this rotten war in Iraq. What it didn't contain was the paltry $650 million for pandemic preparedness that had been in an earlier version. Bush's Office of Management and Budget is being blamed in some quarters (CIDRAP: someone in the Office of Management and Budget or elsewhere in the administration "might have made the call that there was less of a sense of urgency"), but I won't let the…
I like the British medical journal, The Lancet. I like it a lot. I read it, subscribed to it and I've published there. More than once. So I sympathize with their terrible dilemma: Physicians from around the world urged the publisher of The Lancet medical journal to cut its links to weapons sales, calling on the editors to find another publisher if Reed Elsevier refused to stop hosting arms fairs. The doctors made their appeal in the latest edition of The Lancet, released Friday. Editors at The Lancet responded by backing the doctors, calling the situation "bizarre and untenable." They wrote…
Anniversaries may be artificial milestones marking a distance on a road from the past, but they also remind us of where we are now: enmired in the fifth year of a hideous and vicious war, a war whose disastrous consequences were foreseen by many but disregarded by a compliant press and credulous public. No one -- no politician or citizen -- should be able to say they were deceived. They allowed themselves to be deceived. Almost a quarter of the US Senate voted against the use of force resolution, without benefit of hindsight. Many of you understood, too. We started it, anyway. We should end…
It took four years, but the majority of Americans now realize the Iraq War is not winable. By roughly the same margins they want troops out of Iraq in a year or less and believe they were misled into the war. The only thing I wonder about is what took them so long. It didn't take the Prophet Daniel to see the handwriting on the wall. But this is an aggressive and war-making country, so it's not so surprising its citizens didn't mind the Grand Adventure at the outset. Now we and the Iraqis are reaping the whirlwind. And we don't like paying even a fraction of the price we've made others pay.…
There are so many sad and dismaying things about this story, not the least of which is that even without my telling you, you know how it will end: It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready. On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn. Family and friends had…
Brought to you bereft of comment: Source: New York Times, January 17, 2007 (h/t Attack Rate)
I am powerfully affected by music. I've sung in countless demonstrations, concerts, benefits over the decades and through all those years, We Shall Overcome has been perhaps the most powerful anthem in the many struggles against affronts to dignity and the battle against hopelessness. It rang through the black churches of the Depression years, the labor picket lines of the forties, the lunch counters in the civil rights years in the fifties, the streets during the anti-war movement of the sixties and so many other struggles, on through to today. Mostly I've sung it in the streets, in churches…
If you are old enough to remember the War in Vietnam, you remember escalation. If you missed it, you'll get George Bush's version tomorrow night. So what could be more appropriate than to bring back the classic song about escalation, Pete Seeger's Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Click here to see Pete perform it. Lyrics follow, below the fold: /p? Waist Deep In The Big Muddy by Pete Seeger 1963, planned for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967 but CBS objected to the blacklisted Seeger making obvious references to the"big fool" in the White House, finally sung by Seeger on the Comedy Hour…
If you want to know where the WMDs are, look no further. In fact in at least seven US communities you can see them by looking out your window. We're talking about our WMDs, of course. It's OK for us to have them. They won't get into the hands of terrorists from us. At least we hope not. They are a mighty tempting target, though, which is why Congress wanted them destroyed ASAP as "a homeland security imperative." Which isn't a problem because the US is committed to destroying them anyway by 2012 in accordance with the international Chemical Weapons Convention. Except we won't be doing that,…