Rhinocrisy

So, Obama is in India, as the NY Times points out, to “lift longstanding restrictions on exports of closely held technologies”. It shouldn’t take a huge effort to read through the unfortunate lede-burying going on. Couple that with the recent well-publicized sale of arms to Saudi Arabia^* and draw the straight line.

The “high tech” industry is one of the few remaining robust American manufacturing sectors, and one of the only ones with a product that retails in the hundreds of millions of dollars. For a country starving to death thanks to oil imports (which constitute somewhere around 50% of the US trade imbalance) and non-existent manufacturing, a quick-fix tour peddling arms to unstable, nuclear-armed, war-prone regions of the world is clearly too good an opportunity to pass up.

The Times also points out that this is Obama doing his necessary kowtowing to prove to American business (i.e., the war industry) that, humbled by his defeat, he is fully prepared to be their lackey:

Still, one of Mr. Obama’s main audiences in many ways seemed to be America’s chief executives, many of whom spent the recent campaign accusing the White House of being antibusiness and pouring money into the coffers of Republican candidates and groups that aimed to defeat the Democrats.

…“It’s unprecedented,” [Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric] said in an interview, praising Mr. Obama for talking up trade, a politically risky move for a Democrat. “I don’t remember President Bush ever having a mission like this. I think it’s quite rare and I hope the first of many.”

Luckily the vicious skull-fucking and skin-melting will be reserved for our children's generation, along with the catastrophic drought and infrastructure collapse. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. You're doing the Lord's work.

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^* Thanks to Saheli for pointing out the excellent “War is Business”.

Yes, the world does hate you. Both the developing and developed world.

Your government won’t get you out of the hole you’re in. You need to do it yourselves. Take to the streets, damnit! Make it known, LOUDLY, that you disagree with past and current policy. Let the average Iraqi know that there are right-minded people in your country, people who do not condone such barbaric behaviour. Let them know you’re not a nation of airheads fed on a diet of inane TV and biased reporting, glorying in the destruction you wreak on weaker nations. Do it for children otherwise they’ll be the ones being shot at next.

Do something, for God’s sake!

– Angela, Athens, Greece April 6th, 2010

I agree. We need to stop this war.

A bit late, as usual, I finally got around to watching some of the “Winter Soldier” hearings, testimony by anti-war Iraq veterans about their war-time and post-war experiences. For the unlettered, the hearings were conducted by Iraq Veterans Against the War and mimic the eponymous hearings of yesteryear held by Vietnam veterans. As expected, the testimony is sometimes nauseating and sometimes heartbreaking, and quite often insightful. The sort of thing you should show to your mom. Check it out, if you have ten minutes to spare.

So, as you’re surely aware, the Iraqi government is apparently following up on my complaints about mercenaries. They’ve banned Blackwater, an American security company, from operating in Iraq, after they killed somewhere between 8 and 20 people. Blackwater insists that they were attacked and were merely returning fire. The US embassy more softly suggested that the Blackwater mercs were spooked by a car bomb and started shooting as a result (at what, I’m not sure). Iraqi officials, meanwhile, insist that none of these stories are true, and the Blackwater people simply opened fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians. The New York Times has the gory details on what sounds like Blackwater transgression followed by a firefight with confused Iraqi cops:

[Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh] said the convoy had initiated the shooting when a car did not heed a police officer and moved into an intersection.

�The traffic policeman was trying to open the road for them,� he said. �It was a crowded square. But one small car did not stop. It was moving very slowly. They shot against the couple and their child. They started shooting randomly.�

In video shot shortly after the episode, the child appeared to have burned to the mother�s body after the car caught fire, according to an official who saw it.

In interviews on Tuesday, six Iraqis who had been in the area at the time of the shooting, including a man who was wounded and an Iraqi Army soldier who helped rescue people, offered roughly similar versions.

The Iraqi soldier, who said he was standing at a checkpoint on the edge of the square, said he thought the convoy believed the small car was a suicide bomber and opened fire. According to the wounded man, recuperating in Yarmouk Hospital, the car with the family was driving on the wrong side of the road.

The convoy began throwing nonlethal sound bombs, several witnesses said, to keep people in the area away. That drew fire from Iraqi Army soldiers manning watchtowers that are part of an Iraqi Army base on the square. Iraqi police officers, witnesses said, also appeared to be shooting.

The Iraqi soldier, who did not give his name but said he was from a company of Iraqi commandos, said he saw another soldier trying to motion to the convoy to move on, but he was shot as well.

The Blackwater attitude, based on their statements, seems to be “we will kill pretty much whoever we have to in order to keep our clients safe.” Mercs are ostensibly subject to State Department rules of engagement, but there’s no oversight governing them, and per a CPA order from a few years back, they are completely immune from Iraqi law. Unsurprising that Iraqis have had enough of this kind of permitted lawlessness. The FUD from Blackwater that’s being passed around is that this is merely a shakedown for bribes from the Interior Ministry, but it seems readily clear, given the seriousness of the steps taken by the Iraqi government (including statements by al-Maliki) and the response on the part of the State Department, that the anger is genuine and something will have to change.

“I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.” — George W. Bush, January 10, 2007.

Statistical argument is the worst kind of argument.

Data courtesy of Iraq Coalition Casualties.

UPDATE: Self-correcting?

Data courtesy of Iraq Body Count.

Print this out and give it to your mom to read.

One in every 6.5 Iraqis is now a refugee (4.2 million out of 27.5 million). Normally that .5 would be a statistical artifact, but in this case, partial people are among the escapees. Which means that maybe the 800 allowed into the U.S. since 2003 made up as many as 1,600 individuals, if the statisticians were counting blown-up people as 1/2 a person each. Which would be very good news since that would mean we had let in 1 out of every 2,625 refugees, rather than just 1 in every 5,250. That would be cheery news, and I haven’t had any of that since the whales escaped Sacramento.

It’s not often you get to see an old-school Washington reporter tear apart a political operative. Th’other night 60 Minutes did that, and even if they were stabbing the mammoth that was stuck in the tarpit, it was still something to see.

Tenet: There’s lots of technical data. And you put all this together and it’s not evidence in a court of law. Remember, when you write an estimate you — when you estimate you’re writing what you don’t know down. You might win a civil case you’re not going to win a criminal case. In terms of evidence.

60 Mins: We’re going to war. Tens of thousands of people are going to be killed. And you’re saying you have evidence to prove a civil case but not a criminal case?

Tenet: …This was very painful for us…

60: A conservative estimate of 100 to 500 tons [of chemical and biological agents]? I mean, how can you be so wrong?

Tenet: Scott, we’ve gone through this. It’s what we believed. It’s what we wrote.

60: Where do these numbers come from?

Tenet: From our National Intelligence Estimate. You don’t make this kind of stuff up.

60: Wait a minute. You did make this kind of stuff up.

Now Tenet will sell lots of books and will enjoy a long career in the reality-starved hallways of Georgetown University. The residents of Iraq, which didn’t have any chemical or biological weapons, will live with his mistake.

I agree with the woman who wrote to CNN today who said he should keep his medal of freedom and should be required to wear it every day.

The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption saying he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!

Where I come from (a watery planet called Earth) this is news.

Congressman Kucinich Will Hold Press Conference to Announce Introduction of Articles of Impeachment Relating To Vice President Richard Cheney

But on this strange desert world, where the sand has blinded the rich, this impeachment is the action of an invisible man. It will be funny if it prevails.

It got a few minutes on CNN followed by senior political correspondent Candy Crowley, who spoke in a tone that said “he’s not one of us, we’re responsible, I’ve never even seen him before!”

“This is not what the Democrats were elected to do,” she said. Her tone made it sound like even honoring the news with a report was akin to holding soiled toilet paper. But I should give her credit — the cool kids haven’t even gone as far as her. The story isn’t on the web sites of the Washington Post, the allegedly “newspaper of record” New York Times, LA Times, or Chicago Tribune. It isn’t on Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. Not even the most liberal major newspaper website in the USA, SFGate (of the San Francisco Chronicle), has anything about it. But who can blame them? Even my favorite liberal blogs have blacked (tee hee) out the news. Nothing on Eschaton or Talking Points Memo.

I don’t care if the reporters and editors think this is a stupid move by a fringe candidate. When someone moves to impeach the Vice President of the United States, the public deserves to know.

Fortunately, they have these news sources:
CQ
Associated Press
AND
And blogs like Tiny Revolution, which I believe beat all but CNN, and the liberal uber-blog Daily Kos, which even (holy cow!) has a discussion on the topic.

I suppose the situation goes along with the rest of Kucinich’s “Invisible Man” campaign. The media love to say that none of the Democratic candidates have a comprehensive plan to reform the American health care system, ignoring Kucinich’s repeated call for a single-payer Canadian-style insurance system. And they say the Dems don’t have a plan for Iraq, ignoring his call to shrink the military and create a Department of Peace. Funny, I might even have to vote this year for an invisible man.

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Liberation, the U.S. has spent about $410 billion on the war. The head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office has said it will cost at least $1 trillion. Iraq had 26 million people in it at the beginning. So far, the U.S. has spent about $15,800 per Iraqi. In a country where the per-capita income in 2003 was about $255. The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years. Meanwhile Iraq would still have functioning industries, farms and infrastructure, which would give people there a much higher quality of life.

If the killing rates found in last year’s Johns Hopkins study have continued, about 730,000 Iraqis have now been killed, along with the UN’s new estimate of 2 million refugees. So to calculate it another way, the U.S. has spent about $562,000 per Iraqi killed. Which is pretty efficient compared to, say, California’s death penalty, which costs the state about $250 million per corpse, according to the LA Times (cited at Death Penalty Focus).

The next-generation U.S. bomber should be outfitted with bomb bays that release $20 bills. I am not joking.