Last week, it was announced that NATO’s anti-Taliban raids in Kandahar province had killed approximately 50 civilians. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, let it be known that he is ‘losing patience’ with all the civilians NATO has been killing. As the US simultaneously denied that any such thing had happened and promised to look into it and insisted that it was entirely the Taliban’s fault, NATO officials insisted that in the future they would try to keep the civilian massacres to a minimum.
Needless to say, this is quite a messy situation. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema warned that the civilian death toll could cost the US the support of Afghanistan’s civilian population (to the extent they ever had it). This is one of those situations that needs to be treated with kid gloves.
Fast forward to Friday, and Afghan officials say that days after the initial killings: the very day NATO promised to be more careful in the future in fact, a US bombing attack killed 13 more civilians. Needless to say, the Pentagon once again had no information that such an incident had ever taken place, but they promised to look into it… again.
Right about now, a lot of you are probably thinking this story sounds kind of familiar. In fact, it happens with surprising regularity, the civilian body counts, the initial denial, the eventually admissions, Karzai’s mock outrage, even the part where NATO promises to make wholesale changes so it doesn’t happen again.
What efforts NATO has actually undertaken in the past (or will undertake in the present incident) I’m not sure, but one thing is painfully obviously to the civilian population living under their occupation, it’s not good enough. NATO troops have killed civilians in at least 12 separate reported incidents in 2007 alone: their bodycount since this ill-conceived war began must simply be astronomical. Most of us manage to get through our entire lives without slaughtering dozens of innocent villagers: is it to much to ask that NATO manage to go more than a few weeks in-between atrocities?
Three more names have just been added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC—thirty-two years after the war ended. One was actually killed by “friendly fire” in 1966. The other two died recently from wounds they received during the Vietnam War. There are probably hundreds of additional names that could be added, but Victims of Agent Orange and suicides from PTSD are not eligible. The total number of names inscribed on “The Wall” is now 58,256. And what did they die for? They died for the same thing that U.S. soldiers are currently dying for in Iraq—a lie.
Will U.S. soldiers still be dying thirty years from now because of the wounds they received in Iraq? Will we still have troops in Iraq in thirty years? Why not? We still have troops in Japan, Germany, and Korea.
Apropos yesterday’s “Tenet v. Perle” post, it might be useful to note that James Woolsey, Perle’s colleague on the Defense Policy Board (DPB) and fellow-board member of any number of neoconservative groups, was virtually ubiquitous on television and in the print media in the week that followed the 9/11 attacks, suggesting to anyone who would listen that Saddam was not only linked to al Qaeda, but may very well have played a role in the attacks themselves.
Given close and multiple associations with Perle, Woolsey’s remarks in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks make completely implausible Perle’s statement in his recent and controversial “The Case for War” production on PBS that, “I didn’t hear statements to the effect that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.”
In any event, here are some examples of Woolsey’s wisdom on the subject of Iraq’s possible complicity in the 9/11 attacks over the ensuing couple of day. I suspect he repeated that wisdom in the DPB meetings chaired by Perle a few days later.
“But I think the key thing is what David said earlier about nation states — because Iraq has a lot of incentives to damage the United States heavily. There was an FBI agent in charge of the early investigation of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Jim Fox, who had the view that there may well have been Iraqi government involvement in that. The Clinton administration, Justice Department, brushed that aside after the time but some of the information that came out at trial that had been under grand jury secrecy during the investigation looks as if there may well have been Iraqi government involvement. And this time this administration, I hope and trust, will not brush aside the idea that there might be state involvement. We may well find that Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist group in the MidEast or elsewhere, probably the MidEast, is behind this. But they may well be a subcontractor or a junior partner. There conceivably could be a state behind this.”
September 11th, ABC News Special Report: “America Under Attack”:
“But there is at least a plausible case that there was Iraqi government involvement in the World Trade Center bombing back in 1993. This all has to do with the identity, the true identity of Ramsey Yousef, who was the mastermind, who’s in prison out in Colorado now. At his sentencing the judge said, ‘We still don’t really know who you are.’ And if there was a chance that there was Iraqi government involvement in that, since Yousef was the mastermind of the World Trade Center and of a bombing plot in the Pacific which he was working on when he was caught, to have a lot of American Airlines in the Pacific blown up, what happened today is a sort of amalgam of the earlier two Ramsey Yousef plots. It’s at least, I think, interesting that that’s the case. And–and if some of the observers, Laurie Mylroie and others, are correct that there’s a reasonable chance that he was, in fact, involved with the Iraqi government, there could also be a chance the Iraqi government is involved here, even if bin Laden or other terrorist groups are as well.”
“But it’s not impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the government, that–the Iraqi government has been quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and–and on some matters has had contact with bin Laden.”
September 12th, NBC News, “Attack on America”:
“And one thing, again, coming back to Iraq, you need to realize is that a number of these fundamentalist groups and individuals, have increasingly close relationships with Iraq. The Bath Party, Saddam’s party, historically was like the Communist Party, was an anti-religious party. But a decade or so ago, that began to change, and Saddam has gone out of his way to make common cause with some of these fundamentalist terrorist groups, and they with him. It’s a–it’s a very unhappy alliance.
“And one final point here, Tom, we may not in this case be dealing solely with autonomous terrorist organizations. There are a number of indications that bin Laden’s group was involved–that may well turn out to be true, indeed they may have been the central operators, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be some state sponsorship or guidance or assistance behind them. And one candidate for that, one possible candidate, is the government of Iraq.”
“It may be all over these attacks. And I think that might make us a bit suspicious that is something else might be up. Certainly bin Laden may well have been deeply involved and may have been the operational figure and his people in this, but that doesn’t mean that he acted alone.
“When I see Bin Laden issuing fatwahs, religious edicts, putting out videotapes, issuing poems, having his subordinates talk about how they’re taking part in terrorism against the United States, I begin to think that maybe we’re supposed to focus solely on Bin Laden. And there might be something else in train.
“My suspicion – it’s no more than that at this point – is that there could be some government action involved together with Bin Laden or a major terrorist group. And one strong suspect there I think would be the government of Iraq.
“But he (Bush) used a word, ‘harbor,’ which he used last night. A harbor for terrorists might be, say, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But there may be more involved than harbors here, there may be a government other than a harbor, such as the Iraqi government, that is orchestrating this to some extent, funding it, working closely on it behind bin Laden or some other terrorist group. I very much hope the Bush administration, unlike Clinton administration, will not set aside this possibility and assume that everything is just a terrorist group, even a terrorist group as major as bin Laden’s. It really need to look carefully at the possibility there may be state sponsorship here, and I think the most likely, certainly not the only possibility is Iraq.”
September 12th, Los Angeles Times, “Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold” (op-ed coauthored by Woolsey and Mansoor Ijaz):
“The planning, coordination and access to information required to carry out the virtually simultaneous attacks in New York and Washington point significantly to the involvement of state sponsorship. The diplomatic cover, intelligence data and financial resources needed to conduct this war against the United States can only be offered by a regime whose track record against U.S. interests is proven, and Iraq comes immediately to mind.”
The Scottish people sent a message to formerly “Great” Britain in the recent elections:
“Scottish nationalists committed to independence from Britain became the biggest party in the Scottish parliament on Friday in elections which left a political headache for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s successor.”
I have an aspirin for that headache: Let it go, Brits. Secession is the wave of the future: one might as well try to hold back the tides.
National Review‘s T.J. Walker on the only authentic …. person in last night’s GOP debate:
“Ron Paul has the unfortunate distinction of looking and sounding wacky and impish, even when he says entirely reasonable things. He brilliantly and succinctly positioned his opposition to the current war within the context of Eisenhower getting us out of Korea, Nixon having a plan to get us out of Vietnam and Bush vowing not to start ‘nation-building’ (in the 2000 campaign) that must have left a lot of Republican viewers thinking ‘this guy makes a lot of sense.’ Unfortunately for Paul, he looks like a combination of My Favorite Martian’s Ray Walston and a comedian who habitually ran for president, Pat Paulsen; not helpful.”
Is it me, or is this, as the kiddies say, a bit too gay? Unsurprisingly, Senor Walker pronounces Pretty Boy Romney — “At six-feet-two-inches tall with perfect hair and impeccable tailoring” — the “winner.” So, is the Republican “debate” all about who is the … prettiest?
Speaking of Reason magazine being clueless and all: now that scientists have found significant abnormalities in the brains of veterans afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome and normal folks, will the magazine that increasingly doesn’t deserve its name apologize to all the veterans whose disability they not only denied but mocked by publishing all those pieces by the evil Michael Fumento — strongly implying that the sick vets are just plain psycho and afflicted with “Gulf Lore Syndrome“ — averring that Gulf War Syndrome was (and is) a “popular myth”?
