Archive for the Iraq & Afghanistan category
July 19th, 2006
Remember when Right-wingers used to make the argument that the war was justifiable because of all of those people Saddam had killed? Remember how the death toll under all of those years under Saddam was much worse than anything we could do?
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — More than 14,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq in the first half of this year, an ominous figure reflecting the fact that “killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread” in the war-torn country, a United Nations report says.
Killings of civilians are on “an upward trend,” with more than 5,800 deaths and more than 5,700
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Tags: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, death toll
June 16th, 2006
Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:
- Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
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Tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity
June 16th, 2006
“I can’t help but feel through eyes of a combat-wounded Marine in Vietnam, if someone was shot, you tried to save his life. . . . While you were in combat, you had a sense of urgency to end the slaughter, and around here we don’t have that sense of urgency…To me, the administration does not act like there’s a war going on. The Congress certainly doesn’t act like there’s a war going on. If you’re raising money to keep the majority, if you’re thinking about gay marriage, if you’re doing all this other peripheral stuff, what does that say
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Tags: Quote of the Day, Wayne Gilchrest
May 31st, 2006
Every day we here in America are bombarded with the news that more Iraqis and Americans have been killed. Usually we’re just given a number, a total dead for the day.
37. 12. 53.
If one of the American soldiers happened to be local, in a few days, we might hear his or her name on the radio and television as well as the unit he or she served in.
But over here, we never hear the names of the Iraqis.
I kind of get the feeling that for the most part, Americans don’t really get that the Iraqis are actual
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Tags: blogs, Iraq
May 2nd, 2006
Maybe the reason that Americans think we’re so superior is because we don’t take time to realize we’re not actually alone and that there are actually whole other countries and cultures beyond our borders. Then again, we aren’t all that good with figuring out what’s in our own borders, are we? I recall my mother telling me that some friends of hers were on one of those game shows like The Price Is Right and it took them a year to get their prizes shipped to them because they lived in New Mexico and the show wouldn’t ship
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Tags: Iraq, education, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Gulf Coast, National Geographics, CNN
April 26th, 2006
I learned today that one of the people I work with, not a co-worker, but a user/cliet, has been “tapped” by the Reserves to go to Iraq. She didn’t seem particularly excited about it and “congrats!” really didn’t fit. I’m really not sure what to say to someone up close and personal when they tell you they’re going to war. She’s not a relative or a close friend; otherwise, it would have been easy as I would have been bawling and hugging her and praying to God for her safety, which is really what I wanted to
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Tags: Iraq, National Guard
April 24th, 2006
I watched 60 Minutes last night and I’ve been reading all of the related articles on Yahoo!News, The Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters. O.K. It’s all the same article. They all say the same thing. And really for those of us liberals who’ve been paying attention since 2002, it’s nothing new. In fact, there wasn’t anything in that report I hadn’t heard before, so it’s hard to get excited.
And I know none of the conservative right-wingers were paying attention anyway so it was just preaching to the choir.
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Tags: WMD, Tyler Drumheller, Fox News, Yahoo!News, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, White House, CIA, Intelligence, Iraq, 60 Minutes
April 12th, 2006
So, back to those missing WMD we never found…remember when Bush told us that we found evidence of mobile biological laboratories in Iraq which further proved Sadaam was up to no good? Apparently they were just “the biggest sand toilets in the world” and Bush knew it and yet he like the incorrect “evidence” he had Libby leak to Judy Miller, he pushed the “find” of the trailers on the media as a victory of the war.
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two
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Tags: George W. Bush, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Washington Post, lie, Conspiracy Theories, Iraq
April 4th, 2006
As some of you know, my cousin served in Operation Desert Storm, something I am extremely proud of, despite the fact that I am a self-proclaimed pacifist. He committed suicide several years later and though I’ve written that mental illness runs in my family, I do think that he was never quite right after returning from the Middle East. I don’t think he ever got the care he needed after coming home and maybe if he had, he’d still be at family “reunions” annoying the heck out of me.
It is a very brave thing our soldiers do
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Tags: Operation Desert Storm, American soldiers, PTSD, Iraq, Afghanistan, VA, Fox News
April 4th, 2006
I’m alway on alert for stories and reports about how things are going in Afghanistan. We hardly ever hear anything about how things are going over there since the invasion of Iraq started and, yet, supposedly, Afghanistan is really where all of this War on Terror stuff started. At the very least, Afghanistan is where the Taliban and Osama Bin Ladin was after 9-11. And we did a lot of bragging in the early days about how we were bringing them freedom and democracy and how we were going to rebuild the country. Remember all of that?
Now, Afghanistan hardly gets a mention in the news. Even when they had elections, it wasn’t even one of our top stories. Iraq has taken over our lives. Afghanistan is the forgotten bastard child. Kind of a shame really because apparently a lot has been happening while we weren’t looking.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Freedoms, Democracy, Taliban, Kandahar, Pakistan, al-Qaeda
March 31st, 2006
You remember the Vietnam War -er - Conflict, don’t you? O.K. Some of us are a little too young to really remember it. I have a vague recollection of the end of it and I studied it in school and, of course, I saw like every episode of China Beach and had my hair cut like Dana Delany for a whole year of college.
Anyway, the whole thing was a mess. Everyone pretty much accepts that now. Heck, I think the 2004 elections pretty much prove that we still are fighting our demons from Vietnam.
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Tags: American soldiers, protest, Iraq, Canada, Vietnam War
March 28th, 2006
You know, I’ve been thinking the last couple of days about Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man who converted to Christianity from Islam. The Muslims in Afghanistan, that country we freed from the restrictive Taliban, want to kill him for this “crime” against Islam.
Apparently, while we were cheering about all of those changes we brought to the country, no one was paying attention to the fact that there weren’t any real changes being brought to the country. We ousted the Taliban and we’ve had those nifty elections where we forced the Afghan men to let the Afghan women vote
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Tags: Abdul Rahman, Afghanistan, Women's Rights, George W. Bush
March 28th, 2006
Bill in Portland Maine on The Daily Kos reprinted this local letter from a local outraged parent, who’s son is serving overseas, and no matter what you think about the President and his policies and how he got us into the war and how he’s running the war, you have to agree that American soldiers deserve some sort of compensation for the risks they’re taking so we can sit in our comfortable chairs in the safety of our homes. I’ve always believed that American soldiers deserve that something extra — like in ancient Celtic times when the
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Tags: blogs, Maine, Iraq, American soldiers
March 28th, 2006
Yesterday, lots of leftist blogs were talking about The New York Times reporting on the “latest” memo revealing President Bush and Tony Blair’s nefairious plans to go to war in Iraq no matter what, even if it meant *gasp* tricking the world somehow.
Stamped “extremely sensitive,” the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair’s most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book “Lawless World,” which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several
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Tags: Iraq, Downing Street Memo, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, New York Times, Judy Miller, politics, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Conspiracy Theories
March 26th, 2006
O.K. I’ve been stewing about this whole Russia-giving-Iraq-U.S.-troop-movements-thing. I mean, I wasn’t for invading Iraq, but I hope this puts an end to those horrible Bush-Putin-Kiss-Kiss photo ops. I mean, Russia is not our friend and this playing buddy-buddy in front of the camera while painting targets on our soldiers should not be tolerated by our Commander-in-Chief.
And, of course, what I want to know is how the Russians knew what those movements were. My dad’s theory is that the Russians are somehow “listening in” through a base in Arizona. He tried to explain it
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Tags: Russia, Vladmir Putin, George W. Bush, Iraq, American soldiers
March 21st, 2006
Imagine living in a country where you cannot choose what god you want to worship or how you wish to worship or even if you wish to worship. Imagine living in a country where making that very choice could mean life or death. Imagine a country where owning a Bible or a Koran or a Torah could be a crime in itself. Imagine living in a country where you are considered a traitor or mentally ill if you convert to another system of belief.
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 20, 2006 — Despite the overthrow of the fundamentalist Taliban government
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Tags: Faith, God, Christian Zealots, Islam, Afghanistan
March 20th, 2006
Remember three years ago when the U.S. was invading Iraq and the media kept intercepting Iraqi news coverage of the whole affair from Baghdad?
The top advisor guy to Saddam came on when we first invaded and he was like “Oh, there’s no invasion. Nothing to worry about. Everyone go about your business. No one would dare invade Iraq while Saddam is in charge.”
Then like a day or so later, he was like “O.K. The Americans are invading but Iraq is strong and mighty and we are beating the vernim back and we are winning the war under
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Tags: Iraq, Civil War, George W. Bush, politics, Fox News
March 16th, 2006
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
–Voltaire
Without going back and digging through my own posts about Cindy Sheehan, I’m sure when she first arrived on the scene last summer in Crawford, Texas, I thought she was kind of nifty. I figured as long as she was participating in peaceful, anti-war protest she was doing a good thing and I pretty much backed her.
I’m all for Freedom of Speech. I mean, I have my limits of what’s good taste and what’s appropriate. I’m from the “harm none”
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Tags: Merrilee Carlson, Cindy Sheehan, politics, Freedom of Speech, anti-war, pro-military, Iraq, grieving mother, Minnesota Families United, Democrats
March 10th, 2006
Everyone on the Left and the Right over here in the comfort of our lazyboys is always arguing about whether or not the Iraqis love or hate the U.S. Mind you, we’re being fed stories from NPR and Fox News and accusing each other of only listening to biased sources.
Occassionally, it’s good to hear from actual Iraqis without the filter. The Real Ugly American interviewed two Iraqi bloggers to find out what Iraqis really think. It’s a mixed bag of news from the front line, a little bit of what both sides have
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Tags: Iraq, blogs, interview
