Antiwar.com Blog

“Son, all I’ve ever asked of my readers is for them to treat Bush’s ramblings as if they were the word of God.” Whoa, it’s getting a bit chilly up in Canada, eh?

Al Jazeera reports that the “Islamic resistance in Iraq” is offering a bounty for Rumsfeld, Sanchez and Kimmitt. This flyer is reported to have been distributed in Fallujah:

It says 15 000 000 $ as a reward who bring one of these three heads. It doesn’t say anything about the body being attached.

Guest Blog from Ken Wooley:

The one indispensable element that people such as you and “Faux” require to work their mischief is compliant flesh. Bush and his crew need their sweat, in the form of taxes, to finance their global escapades. They also need their blood, when required, to go out and put down anyone who does not agree with them. It appears that, in the most recent of their adventures, the Iraqis have not quite figured out that they are being “liberated” yet and it is requiring the sacrifice of young blood to convince them otherwise. Paul Roberts makes the excellent point in his article “Colonizing Iraq” that we have accomplished all of the stated goals for invading Iraq so why do we plan to stay there for years or decades? As more and more Americans begin to ponder that question the role of your “news” operation becomes increasingly obvious.

Your job, and choice, is not to do the fighting and the dying but to do the convincing so that the flesh remains compliant. WND has taken on the mantle of keeping the faithful convinced that America is on God’s chosen mission to make the world safe from whoever or whatever you depict as a threat or enemy. Should they begin to waver or doubt there are always fresh stories or “intelligence” that hints of finding the WMD or a new plot by Osama, etc., etc., forthcoming. On the home front there is the continuous flow of bile from the likes of Hugh Spewitt, Anne Coulter and other Republican hacks whose jobs are to demonize anything and everything about the Democratic party and their candidates.

The fundamental flaw in your reasoning is that, like Bush, you have to resort to, or in your case advocate, the wholesale killing and slaughter of those who do not agree with your ideas. Joe Farah is on record for calling for the killing of the inhabitants and the leveling of the towns of anyone who resists “Iraqi Freedom”. He has also endorsed the Israeli helicopter assasinations. Excerpt from “Advocating Terror”… :

Thus, in a rabid, but sadly not untypical, response to the murder of four Americans in Fallujah, the journalist Joseph Farah urged us ‘to make an example’ out of the Iraqi city. ‘We may need to flatten Fallujah,’ he wrote. ‘We may need to destroy it. We may need to grind it, pulverise it and salt the soil. … Here’s an opportunity to show that it doesn’t pay to resort to barbarism and terrorism.’ (Irony is not Farah’s strong point.)”

He is also on record calling for the silencing of anyone that disagrees with approved US policy and who is critical of the president.

Of course one will never find any of you out on the battle field with a weapon. Your weapon is the word processor and the poison that flows forth from it. The poison that gets impressionable young men like Pat Tillman wound up and eventually killed or maimed. The poison that keeps oblivious Americans putting bumper stickers and flags on their vehicles that say they “support the troops” while having little or no idea of what the troops are actually fighting for. The poison that keeps a large segment of the American public believing the lies that Saddam had WMD, Nukes and was in cahoots with Osama. The poison that gets them to elect naive dunderheads like Bush who believe that their calling is to save the world while the nation falls apart back here at home.

Joe Farah claims he wants to “take back America”… God save us all if Farah ever gets to be in charge. He would make Bush & Cheney look like pikers.

~ Ken Wooley

Pocket of Resistance

“Our military commanders will take whatever actions necessary to secure Falluja,” Bush said as U.S. Marines launched a fresh air and ground assault in the city.

Bush said there were “pockets of resistance” in the Iraqi city, but insisted that “most of Falluja is returning to normal.”

Ted Koppel intends to read aloud the list of 530 troops killed in action in Iraq, while showing a photo of each captioned with their hometown and age on Nightline. Koppel claims the inspiration for the program is the famous Life magazine June 1969 issue, which published the pictures of all the Americans killed in one week in Vietnam.

Neocon spokesbot William Kristol has denounced the program, calling it a “stupid statement.” Kristol claims to be offended because reading the names of the Iraq invasion dead neglects those killed in Afghanistan.

I agree with Kristol that it is unfair to leave any of the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq unnamed. I propose that Kristol and whatever other neocon warfloggers he can get to help him should be allowed to read the names of all the Afghanis and Iraqis killed in the WOT so far. Surely we can get someone to donate a few hundred hours of airtime for such a worthy project.

Atrios links the Washington Post story everyone’s talking about today about the horrific injuries that the military hospitals in Iraq are dealing with and the trauma it is causing for the doctors and surgical teams. Atrios says:

This stuff is just so horrible. I really hope Kerry gets out in front of this and proposes massive increases in VA funds. You can have my goddamn tax cut back. I’d rather pay out the money that way and get some quality care for these people than throw it into their change cups a few years from now.

I hate what these bastards have done, and I hate that they’d rather bankrupt the government than take care of the mess they’ve made. Assholes.

Which I think rather misses the point of the article. The problem isn’t lack of funds, it’s that these guys are surviving hideous injuries that would have killed them just a few years ago.

More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes — injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.

For months the gravest wounds have been caused by roadside bombs — improvised explosives that negate the protection of Kevlar helmets by blowing shrapnel and dirt upward into the face. In addition, firefights with guerrillas have surged recently, causing a sharp rise in gunshot wounds to the only vital area not protected by body armor.

The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. “We’ve done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months,” Poffenbarger said. “So there’s been a change in the intensity level of the war.”

With advanced surgical techniques and the military’s capability for moving casualties from the field to the hospital in record quick times, they are saving people with devastating brain injuries and people who are blinded and disfigured and paralyzed. There is nothing more money can do for injuries like this, which is what the doctors in the article point out.

“See all that dark stuff? That’s dead brain,” he said. “That ain’t gonna regenerate. And that’s not uncommon. That’s really not uncommon. We do craniotomies on average, lately, of one a day.”

“We can save you,” the surgeon said. “You might not be what you were.”

Accurate statistics are not yet available on recovery from this new round of battlefield brain injuries, an obstacle that frustrates combat surgeons. But judging by medical literature and surgeons’ experience with their own patients “three or four months from now 50 to 60 percent will be functional and doing things,” said Maj. Richard Gullick.

“Functional,” he said, means “up and around, but with pretty significant disabilities,” including paralysis.

‘Broken soldiers’

The remaining 40 percent to 50 percent of patients include those whom the surgeons send to Europe, and on to the United States, with no prospect of regaining consciousness. The practice, subject to review after gathering feedback from families, assumes that loved ones will find value in holding the soldier’s hand before confronting the decision to remove life support.

“I’m actually glad I’m here and not at home, tending to all the social issues with all these broken soldiers,” Carroll said.

But the toll on the combat medical staff is itself acute, and unrelenting.

In a comprehensive Army survey of troop morale across Iraq, taken in September, the unit with the lowest spirits was the one that ran the combat hospitals until the 31st arrived in late January. The three months since then have been substantially more intense.

“We’ve all reached our saturation for drama trauma,” said Maj. Greg Kidwell, head nurse in the emergency room.

The real solution to this problem is to get those Americans out of Iraq, not to throw money at yet another government program. Besides, if you want the best of care for these broken people why would you send them to a shabby hospital system like the VA anyway? Why throw money at the VA when there are thousands of state of the art hospitals all over the US? Let them go to real doctors at real hospitals, not government facilities which are all run as efficiently as Amtrak. Better yet, bring them home before any more get hurt.

Anyway, the point is, even if you gave the VA billions, it won’t help. The cases that are demoralizing the doctors are the hopeless ones like brain injuries and missing eyes. These are permanent disabilities. No amount of money will replace eyes or fix an injured brain or spine. A significant number of these soldiers are making the return trip only so their families can see them one last time before they pull the plug.