Stopping the Iran War - after it starts

Jan 18, 2006
By Everest42

The big question on everyone's mind these days seems to be "when are we gonna go to war with Iran?"

It's kinda scary that we seem to be moving beyond the mere "will we go to war?" and breezing quickly past the "why should we go to war" to:

Who: Iran
What: Attack them
Where: In their country
Why: Islamofacism / WMD / because their former neighbor tried to kill my daddy / because historically we oppose Aryan nations / because Osama once visited Qom / because of Tehran’s scheduled opening of the Iran Oil Bourse on March 20, 2006 / because either Jesus or Frederick Kagan or my dog Barney told Dick and me to / classified, but trust me.
How: With good ol' American gumption (translation: we don't have the resources, but don't tell the American people that)

So that leaves
When: UNDETERMINED

Let's set aside the known unknowns (hah! And you thought Rummy was gone from the American consciousness! Hell no!).

Hey, let's also set aside all of those things we aren't even sure are unknowns. (The unknown unknowns).

And let's pretend all of the things we can discern are acknowledged (the known knowns).

Simply put: AFTER the war has started, and AFTER we've begun impeaching the relevant people, AFTER, perhaps, we've closed the purse strings in congress....how do we stop the war? How do we effectively back up and achieve a separation of forces? Will Iran let us back out after we begin wreaking havoc? Will they simply agree that it was the will of a single political creature, and not the will of the American people, who led us all down this insane path? And, even if they reach that point of agreement, will they allow for a separation of forces...will they allow us to just walk away?

Historically, Iran doesn't seem to be that kind of country:

FROM THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY ON IRAN:

Although Saddam Hussein's forces made several early advances, by 1982, Iranian forces managed to push the Iraqi army back into Iraq. Khomeini refused a cease-fire from Iraq, demanding huge reparation payments, an end to Saddam's rule, and that he be tried for crimes against humanity. Khomeini also sought to export his Islamic revolution westward into Iraq, especially on the majority Shi'a Arabs living in the country. The war then continued for six more years until 1988, when Khomeini, in his words, "drank the cup of poison" and accepted a truce mediated by the United Nations.

I don't think the Iranians are looking for that particular cup to runneth over. They know we are militarily at our breaking point, and may press for the advantage.

So how do you end a war that has already begun? Hell, I don't know.

How did we do it in Vietnam?

Stephen Bergman wrote a piece entitled From Vietnam to Iraq: How to stop the war back in November of 2005 where he analyzed how we ended the war:

The student resistance movement and the draft. The fact that every male student was eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam created great anxiety and, with time, organized resistance to the war.

The media. TV newscasts at that time showed an incontrovertible truth: Real bleeding bodies were brought into everyone's living room. Screams of the wounded were heard. Dead bodies were seen sprawled in the graceless horror of death. Both American and Vietnamese casualties were shown. There was a nightly tally of the dead and wounded.

Leaders. Both within and outside of Congress there were great leaders who spoke to the link between racism and classism and the obscene images on the TV and in the papers.

Bergman, of course, was talking about the current imbroglio in Iraq.

Stopping a war is difficult, especially given the hubris, spin, and tragic incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. Yet even Kissinger and Nixon were able to manage it, however clumsily and with a great cost of lives on both sides. We Americans can stop it in time to save many thousands of wounded and dead. Now.

He goes on to evaluate each of the three categories (from his quote above) as a feasible means of stopping the war:

The draft. Introduce legislation to institute the draft. At once, no exceptions, not even gender. Mothers, fathers, and their children would be in the streets. There might be a violent response. The resistance to the war would focus. Many returning soldiers and their families and loved ones would join in.

The media. Corporate controlled, it is probably beyond repair. Some of the alternative and foreign media are often more reliable truth-tellers. But there is one question for the TV commanders to which we must demand an answer: Why are you not showing the bloody bodies of the wounded and dead Americans and Iraqis?

Leaders. The only leader of national note is a dead soldier's mother, Cindy Sheehan. The Congress, with few exceptions -- Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Russ Feingold, and now John Murtha -- is as quiet as 500 invertebrates. In this silence is opportunity. Most Americans see Iraq as a mistake. If a leader of some stature stands up and asks, again, ''How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?" there will be an audible sigh of national relief. A simmering movement will ignite. This requires courage, probably from someone outside of Congress -- Wes Clark or John Edwards come to mind. It may seem risky to take that stance, but that person might well be elected president in 2008.

Obviously, leaders have stepped up since the article was written a year ago. But the President seems inclined to ignore them when convenient.

And you have to factor in the other side, when you speak of ending the conflict. And you have to factor in the Rah-Rah Go-USA mentality that we can infuse ourselves with. It took several years and over two thousand dead before the tide shifted here at home against Iraq. If the evil Iranians are killing our soldiers, we want them to pay, dammit! The self-fulfilling war machine.

So again, I ask the question: how do we stop the war once the shooting starts? Go on, flame away.

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Demolishing houses, would any American accept this?

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Destruction of homes by an occupying force is unequivocally wrong under international law; but so is building settlement/cities on land that is occupied, as is the imprisonment of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners that are held in administrative detention without due process.

How bitterly ironic it is that in the country which values "home ownership" as the epitome of the "American Dream," the United States allows (Caterpillar is also a US company) the wanton destruction of family houses. No American would allow this to occur in this country, at least not without a tremendous fight which would be supported by both the media and the population. Not so in Palestine where correspondent M. Abu Ghazaleh writes:

The husband, wife and 10 children had lived in the 100 square meter home house just six months after building it for 200,000 shekels. Neighbors called on the Red Cross and human rights organizations to assist the newly homeless family.

As for today's demolitions, the Jerusalem Municipal Court postponed demolishing Ghadir Abu Ghalia's Issariya neighborhood home for 24 hours yesterday after he paid 60,000 shekels to obtain a stay. Early last month Israeli forces demolished part of the house where Ghalia lived with his wife and four young children. At that time he paid 40,000 shekels to stop the demolition. His family built the 150 square meter three bedroom home for 350,000 shekels just four months ago. Israeli forces did demolish the home on Tuesday. [rest of report]

For a salutory exposure of Israeli war crimes, reported and publicized BY ISRAELI (!) visit the website of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD).

Have You Got What It Takes to Torture?

Peter Lee

January 16, 2007

Now that the Iraq adventure is officially a fiasco, the liberal hawks are crawling out of the woodwork and defend their early support for what is now irrevocably and safely Bush’s cock-up.

Max Sawicky and Kevin Drum are pushing the argument disapprovingly known as the incompetence dodge: that the Iraq war was a failure of execution and integrity by the Bush administration, not necessarily a repudiation of the whole “good war” theory of scientific pre-emption and humanitarian intervention.

That’s deluded and disturbing.

I’m one of those reflexively anti-war types going back to 2002, as documented by my archive.

I’m not a peacenik, because I’m too cynical about human weakness to believe that peace is going to solve the world’s problems.

But I am anti-war.

I’m anti-war, not just because I don’t like to see civilians, babies, and cute puppies in a distant land blown to bits.

It’s because war empowers the worst elements of our society, here at home.

When Bush rolled out his muscular response to 9/11, I thought, Oh my god, the same assholes who ran my high school—the narrow minded jocks and callous cadet frat boys—are now running the world.

When we marched into Afghanistan, ostensibly to claim justice for the victims of 9/11, I thought to myself, Military justice is to justice as military music is to music. Good luck with that.

No question that the post-9/11 war fever enabled the careers of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith, Cambone, Boykin, Yoo, Gonzalez, Libby, Addington, Hadley, and all the other administration dirtbags by removing the restraints that peace, moderation, and public decency had placed on their grand schemes and vile impulses.

And war fever gave us Iraq, by legitimizing the notion that our American democracy intrinsically possessed the moral stature and wisdom to wage war against a Middle Eastern dictator righteously and justifiably.

Ted Kennedy got it right when he wrote ''War should always be our last resort. Instead, the Bush administration made preventive war an option of first resort."

War is an expensive, destructive, and extremely risky enterprise. Absent an immediate threat, there are always cheaper, simpler, and safer ways to serve America’s interests and get its business done.

When a government pushes a war of choice—willfully prying open Pandora’s Box — as the preferred solution to a problem, there are always ulterior motives and secret agendas involved.

With Iraq, of course, it’s all ulterior motives and secret agendas. There’s no discernible national interest in the whole enterprise.

But the core of my argument is not that war is a risky, uncertain business. That framing ineluctably leads to the “we’ll get it right next time” dodge, because risks can be managed, uncertainty minimized, and the discount value of disaster pushed down until the suckers invest in the new product, just like they taught us in business school.

Wars of choice are profoundly corrupting, because they are dirty wars. Wars that we promise to conduct humanely and with restraint, but which rely on death, intimidation, and the threat of unrestrained violence to protect our soldiers and achieve our objectives.

Wars that have a good chance of slipping from the control of the muscular idealists clacking away at their keyboards and ending up under the control of opportunist creeps who exploit them for political power and profit.

Which brings me to the title of this post: have you got what it takes to torture?

I’m not going to taunt with the Yellow Elephant challenge, would you fight in the wars you profess to support? With the U.S. currently embroiled in a war we on the left abhor, the question is too abstract and too easy to answer in the affirmative.

My question is, would you waterboard for your war of choice? Would you sexually degrade a teenage boy in order to blackmail him and turn him into an intelligence asset? Would you render somebody to Egypt to be broken by the local security forces in order to intimidate a suspicious Islamic charity?

Forget about Jack Bauer at one end of the spectrum and due process at the other end.

You’ll have to mess up some innocent people who just happened to get in the way of what your war is trying to achieve.

When you embark on a war of choice you forfeit the moral high ground and the chance to play the innocent victim; and, with your troops and assets exposed to attack, you lose the luxury of folding your actions in the reassuring cloak of laws, ideals, and good-guy moderation.

Think of the muddle in the middle: trampling on people’s lives, rights, and dignity and compromising your personal honor in order to achieve results that are ambiguous and transitory, all in the service of an incompetent, amoral bureaucracy headed by a cynical and self-serving executive.

In other words, think of it as the worst job you ever had, except that at the end of the day there’s shit and piss on the floor and blood on your hands.

Have you got what it takes to torture?

Kevin?

Max?

If you don’t, think of the kind of people who actually have got what it takes.

And realize they are already in the front line of the “War on Terror”, starting with George Bush and going down the whole sorry list.

It’s not necessarily the best people who are itching to start wars, fight them, or profit by them.

That’s why “wars of choice” go bad. And that’s why they are bad.

Ex-Detainee Murat Kurnaz Describes Torture in Chains

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 18, 2007, 01:17 PM

MISTREATMENT IN KANDAHAR

The German-born Muslim Murat Kurnaz has made new allegations of mistreatment at prisons in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay in testimony to a German parliamentary committee.

The case of Murat Kurnaz has deepened as the former Guantánamo detainee testifies to a parliamentary committee investigating his alleged mistreatment at the hands of German soldiers.

Kurnaz made new allegations Wednesday of torture and human-rights abuses in the US coalition's jail in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was held in 2001 and 2002. Members of the German parliament who heard his testimony said they were shaken by the Turkish citizen's claims, although his account has not been verified.

He said Wednesday that he had been suspended for several days in chains while in Kandahar and inspected by a doctor only for his "fitness to be tortured." He claimed a German-speaking interrogator gained regular access to him in both prisons dressed as a Red Cross worker, and that other prisoners in Kandahar were exposed -- either naked or in thin clothes -- to extreme cold.

Parliamentary members reported Kurnaz's claims to the German press on Wednesday. Elke Hoff, a member of the business-friendly FDP (Free Democrats) party, said Kurnaz's story was believable, and wanted to call witnesses from the Red Cross to learn whether one of the group's members -- or just one of its uniforms -- had been used to help interrogate Kurnaz.

Left Party member Paul Schäfer said Kurnaz's testimony had bolstered his suspicion that the Kandahar prison was a "hell before the hell" of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Kurnaz's claims last October of mistreatment by Germans in Kandahar have led to a investigation of two members of the elite German Special Forces Command (Kommando Spezialkräfte, or KSK). The German parliament now wants to learn whether German officials knew enough about his case to free him during ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's term in office, which ended in 2005.

Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born and raised in Bremen, Germany, was arrested in Pakistan shortly after Sept. 11, 2001 and sent to prison in Afghanistan. He was transfered to Guantánamo Bay in 2002, the same year US officials suggested he should go free for lack of evidence. The US released him only after a personal intervention by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington in 2006. Kurnaz now lives with his family in Bremen.

Kurnaz, who turned 24 on Thursday, is an embarrassment to US and German authorities because he spent so much time in the terrorist prisons Kandahar and Guantánamo without ever yielding evidence of belonging to a terrorist group.

msm/spiegel/ap

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© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2007
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

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Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

The World from Berlin: Ex- Guantanamo Prisoner Vexes German Government (10/19/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,443537,00.html

Guantanamo Victim: German Special Forces Admit Encounter With Kurnaz (10/19/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,443493,00.html

Meeting Murat Kurnaz: A Visit with a Man Wrongly Detained at Guantanamo (09/14/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,437087,00.html

We, the Libby Jury

Marty Kaplan
Jan 18, 2006

Q: Do you have feelings or opinions about the Bush Administration or any of its policies or actions, whether positive or negative, that might affect your ability to give a former member of the Bush Administration a fair trial?

A: You mean, feelings like, it really pisses me off that they broke the law by wiretapping without FISA warrants, and then attacked the reporters who told us about it, and said Democrats were wussy traitors for opposing it, and now Gonzales is flip-flopping because Senate Democrats finally have subpoena power - you mean feelings like that?

Q: Your honor?

Judge: The juror is excused.

Q: Would the fact that former or present members of the Bush Administration will be witnesses in the case impair your ability to be a totally fair and impartial juror?

A: Well, when I found out this week that the Justice Department is firing federal prosecutors who're going after corrupt Republicans in Congress, and that they're putting in new prosecutors, like Karl Rove's oppo research attack dog, who don't have to be confirmed, thanks to a secret loophole in the Patriot Act, I didn't think that was totally fair and impartial.

J: The juror is excused.

Q: Would you have any difficulty fairly judging the believability of former or present members of the Bush Administration?

A: Like, when I read in the news that Interior Department officials lied about undercharging oil companies for billions of dollars' worth of leases, or when I saw that there actually were all these pictures of Bush and Jack Abramoff after all -- do you mean, would that have any bearing on my ability to be a fair judge of the believability of Administration officials?

Q: Your honor?

J: Next prospective juror, please.

Q: Do you have any feelings or opinions about Vice President Cheney, whether positive or negative, that might affect your ability to be fair in this case or that might affect your ability to fairly judge Vice President Cheney's believability?

A: Lemme see. He said Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, which he wasn't, and that Iraq was behind 9/11, which it wasn't, and then he said he never said that, which he had, and then he said it again. He said we'd be welcomed as liberators, which we weren't, and that the war wouldn't cost us anything, which it did, and that Halliburton --

J: The juror is excused.

Q: Several witnesses who will testify in this case are members of the news media. Would any of you have any difficulty fairly judging the believability of a person who is a member of the news media?

A: Hmmm. Like, a member of the news media who'd give Scooter Libby anonymity so he could leak a bogus National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's WMD that relied on double agents like Chalabi and lying drunks like that informer, Curveball? Or the believability of a member of the news media who'd tell Karl Rove what kind of questions the Special Prosecutor was asking, or who'd talk about the case on TV without revealing his own role in it, or who'd --

J: Thank you. Excused.

Q: Juror candidate #73, have you ever participated in any type of anti-crime activity, such as a neighborhood watch?

A: Does reading Murray Waas's columns in National Journal count as an anti-crime activity?

J: Excused.

Q: Juror #82, have you ever participated in any efforts to either increase or lessen the punishment of individuals who are convicted of criminal offenses?

A: Well, when the Iraqis decapitated Saddam's half-brother, I told my wife I thought that was going a little too far.

Q: Juror #91, have you, close friends, or close relatives ever been the victim of a crime, a witness to a crime, or someone charged with a crime, regardless of what may have happened in the case?

A: I think my nephew may have downloaded a talk-radio hate speech clip from YouTube that Disney didn't want him to...

Q: Juror #107, do you have any religious, moral or philosophical beliefs that would affect your ability to sit as a juror in a criminal case and be fair and impartial to both the government and the defendant?

A: Let me put it this way. My parents taught me to tell the truth, and that if I did something wrong, I was going to be punished for it, and that no one was above the law. Is that the kind of belief you mean?

Q: Your honor?

J: Excused.

Q: I anticipate there will be a fair amount of news and other media coverage about this case. One of the things you will have to do if you are selected as a juror in this case is to avoid all contact with the news or other media coverage in this case. Therefore, throughout the trial, if you are a member of the jury, you will not be able to read the newspaper before it is screened by court staff and you will have to avoid watching or listening to the news and any other media programs. Is there anyone who thinks they would be unable to do these things if you were selected as a juror?

A: You mean, like, give up O'Reilly?

Q: No objection, your honor.

[All voir dire questions can be accessed at i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/images/01/16/voir.dire.questions.pdf]

READ MORE: Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Iraq

Martin Kaplan, director of The Norman Lear Center, is associate dean
of the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
He has been a White House speechwriter; a Washington journalist; a
deputy presidential campaign manager; a Disney studio executive; a
motion picture and television producer and screenwriter; and a radio
host.

He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in molecular
biology, where he was president of the Harvard Lampoon, president of
the Signet Society, and on the editorial boards of the Harvard Crimson
and Harvard Advocate. As a Marshall Scholar, he received a First in
English from Cambridge University in England. As a Danforth Fellow, he
received a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford
University.

He was a program officer at the Aspen Institute; executive assistant
to U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer; chief speechwriter
to Vice President Walter F. Mondale; deputy op-ed editor and columnist
for the Washington Star; visiting scholar at the Brookings
Institution; and a regular commentator on National Public Radio's "All
Things Considered" and on the "CBS Morning News." As deputy campaign
manager of the Mondale presidential race, he was in charge of policy,
speechwriting, issues, and research. He worked at Disney for 12 years,
both as a studio vice president in live-action feature films, and as a
writer-producer under exclusive contract.

He has credits on THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN, starring Eddie Murphy,
which he wrote and executive produced; NOISES OFF, directed by Peter
Bogdanovich, which he adapted for the screen; and MAX Q, produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer for ABC.

He has hosted "So What Else Is News?", a nationally-syndicated
program on Air America Radio, which examines media, politics and pop
culture. He has also been a regular commentator on the business of
entertainment on the public radio program "Marketplace."

He is editor of "The Harvard Lampoon Centennial Celebration.
1876-1973"; co-author (with Ernest L. Boyer) of "Educating for
Survival"; and editor of "The Monday Morning Imagination", and "What
Is An Educated Person?".

The Norman Lear Center, located at the USC Annenberg School, is a
research, public policy, and advocacy center exploring the impact of
entertainment on society.

Jimmy Carter on the NYT Bestsellers list and er, missing from Amazon.com...

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Does Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos believe that deleting Jimmy Carter's bestseller Peace not Apartheid from their list of best-selling books decrease the number of books sold, make former President Carter disappear, or magically aid the zionist cause?

I saw this blogged on davereed.org site and decided to look for myself at this incredulous story only to find out that it is true!

Its common knowledge that Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is Jewish, along with many, many others. But would anyone imagine that this Fortune-500 company is this blattant in its public derision of Jimmy Carter in order to lend their weight to the zionist cause? Is Bezos truly as zionist as ADL's Abe Foxman? Or does being connected, Jewish (and extremely wealthy) have to include defacto support for zionism?

You decide after you read the following and see this jaw-dropping maneuver that this economic powerhouse engages (perhaps due to pressure from people like Abe Foxman and others.) I would venture to say that this is categorically worse than anything that a Reuters photographer does in "enhancing" a photoshop image. But we will likely never hear of this sleight of hand on the LGF site...

The actual NYT non-fiction list as of today

Amazon.com's list of the NYT non-fiction list as of today (missing #5 and Carter's book completely)

I mean really, do we now need to add Amazon.com to a large list that also includes Starbucks?

Some optimism on Afghanistan, none on Iraq

A Nato spokesman at a London thinktank talked up the Afghan campaign, but none of the sober suited specialists had hope for Iraq

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When is a war a winnable one? That, it seems, can depend on your perception.

Nato, apparently, remains confident that the Western intervention in Afghanistan, short on international attention and resources since the focus turned to Iraq in 2003, can still reach a positive conclusion.

Addressing a seminar today at the Chatham House think tank in London, Jamie Shea, director of policy planning in office of Nato secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, insisted progress was being made.

"Above all, we have recognised that this is a mission that is eminently do-able," said the now white-haired Englishmen, best known for his role as chief press officer and public face of Nato during various the Balkan crises.

Success would depend on improved cooperation between nations and other organisations, and could take as long as a decade, he warned, noting: "The business of state-building is a work in progress."

His cautiously optimistic view of a sustained, global effort to stablise the Afghan state, crack down on the drugs trade and gradually train a new force of domestic police officers was far too rosy for some of the academics, policy experts and journalists listening.

One BBC reporter with experience of present day Afghanistan called Mr Shea's version "absolutely extraordinary", saying: "I couldn't recognise the country from how you described it."

But while there was someone willing to talk up the Afghan campaign, the view on Iraq, the other main subject of the morning's talk, could be summed up as such: we're all doomed.

And this, it should be remembered, was no student debate but a room full of several hundred sober-suited, overwhelmingly middle aged specialists.

While Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador in Washington when the troops first went into Iraq, could describe Afghanistan as "winnable", he made no similar predictions for the other war.

Those who could speak more bluntly did so, with some vehemence.

Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at London University's Queen Mary College and author of several books on the modern Iraqi state spoke of a political vacuum now filled by militia groups.

"The thing to keep in mind is that the Iraqi state does not exist in a meaningful fashion," he said, warning that a rapid US troop withdrawal would make matters even worse.

It would be "morally repugnant to leave 26 million people to descend into hell - a hell that we have created," he said.

When the foreign troops eventually leave, they will leave "a collapsed state with a civil war, in one of the most important geo-political regions in the world".

By Peter Walker / World news 02:47pm