Antiwar.com Blog

Jo Wilding travels into Fallujah:

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that’s not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few possessions, heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people inside still inside Falluja.

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I’m on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he’d been bringing out children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the american checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we’d travel on. We’d take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.

I’ll spare you the whole decision making process, all the questions we all asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness, but what it came down to was this: if I don’t do it, who will? Either way, we arrive in one piece. … read more

Lawrence of Cyberia offers this quote, by Yossi Sarid MK, Former Israeli Minister of Education, in We cannot let death have dominion, as Quote of the Week:

We are still trying to count, and to remember them as individuals, but with so many dead, it’s hard to keep track. You wish you could remember them all, but you can’t. But we’re making an effort, because to lose count is to lose one’s humanity.

He juxtaposes this quote with a photo of the “Coffin Display” arranged by Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace.

I’ll add this quote to the mosaic of pain:

“We don’t do body counts” General Tommy Franks, US Central Command.

William F. Buckley sez we can’t leave Iraq just yet because:

1) The old concern that Shiites and Sunnis would fire up sectarian hostility to dismember the state is taking a back seat to the concern that they are forgetting their differences in order to fight jointly — for the expulsion of the American military.

2) Our program to train an Iraqi peacekeeping constabulary is in disarray. Many Iraqis trained and pressed into duty fled from the onrush of dissenters and terrorists, in some cases joining with them. There were reports of trucks and cars designated as equipment for Iraqi police which, in the pell-mell of midweek, were turned over to, or taken by, the terrorists for use in their anti-American war.

3) Sentiment in neighboring Arab countries that could be said to have been tolerant of the U.S. enterprise seems markedly to have turned. This is in part because our friendship in this quarter is the friendship of summer soldiers. But in part also because some Arab observers have concluded that the U.S. is not going to pull off the grand enterprise we took on. Some phrase their criticisms with no attempt to conceal their contempt. “Thank God that the American administration is too stupid to win the Iraqis over,” one Islamist lawyer in Cairo reported to The New York Times. “On the contrary, they create feelings of frustration and commit more mistakes, leading more Iraqis to rise against them.”

That manila folder labeled Things They Should Have Thought of Before Invading has long since burst from overstuffing. Who would have guessed that Iraqis might reject occupation on both religious and nationalist grounds? That creating and maintaining a collaborationist police/military force might be a tad difficult? That even the neighboring Arabs who weren’t furious about the invasion might turn on an unsuccessful occupation? Who woulda thunk all that?

Contra Jim Henley, I consider it not only acceptable but imperative to point out that the warmongers were wrong and we were right, because, like all good bureaucrats, they’re not going to stop at one failure. Since the American attention span is shorter than the childhood of a fruit fly, we had better take full advantage of this moment to emphasize just how wrong the warmongers have been.

A painful visual mosaic of our “War President,” courtesy of Joe at American Leftist who explains:

Given this image’s inflammatory nature, I posted it with a great deal of trepidation. I had a hard time deciding if it was the right thing to do and I am still not sure. No, I didn’t have the consent of the families of those pictured, and I apologize for any additional pain that this image causes them. That said, I must say that it is my belief that one distinguishing characteristic between art and other forms of speech is that art takes risks, and if we, as a society, value art we must allow it more leeway than other modes of expression to incite or offend.

‘War President’ is meant to be a satirical commentary, informed by the whole project of using the dead as political props. I’m not making a dime off the image, and never will attempt to do so. Given this lack of financial or other crass motives, other recent instances of the politicization of the dead strike me as more morally questionable: the coffins of the victims of 9/11 showing up in a political advertisement, the continued suppression of images of the funerals of those lost in Iraq from the mainstream American media, and images of the 9/11 disaster in a campaign ad. A certain party stands to benefit greatly from all three of those instances of politicization.

I’d also like to point out that ‘War President’ is an image. It is not a textual statement or rhetorical argument. An image is like an empty room and any message that one reads in that room necessarily came in the baggage one carried when one walked in the door. If I made a mosaic of George Washington composed of images of the American dead from the revolution, would viewers likely take that image as an indictment of Washington? I submit that they would not. It would be viewed as a monument to the dead and a celebration of a great leader, a somewhat maudlin monument maybe but surely not offensive. The fact that ‘War President’ is not viewed such a manner is not due to any intrinsic property of ‘War President’ but lies somewhere else.

I’m getting a lot of requests about usage rights etc. Use ‘War President’ however you want, but don’t use it for monetary benefit, and please don’t alter or modify it.

“WAR PRESIDENT,” view Image Here

Funny stuff from that notorious antimilitary rag the Marine Corps Times:

An Islamic civil liberties group has called for a Pentagon investigation into an apparent gag photograph of a Marine in Iraq taken during the last year.

In the photo, a smiling Lance Cpl. Ted J. Boudreaux Jr. is standing next to two Iraqi boys. All three have their thumbs up as one of the boys holds a cardboard sign that reads “Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, th[en] he knocked up my sister!”

I guess you have to see the photo* to grasp the full hilarity of the situation. Ha ha! Dumb savages–they can’t even read English!

*Is it a fake? Even the warbots who originally screamed “Photoshop!” now concede that it’s probably real.

Littlegreenfootballs posters or late German Fascists?

I was inspired to build this quiz when I noticed that comments on Littlegreenfootballs.com (a popular warblog) tended to be indistinguishable in tone and content from the writings of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and the other architects of the “final solution.”

Always indistinguishable? Well, maybe not – but close enough and often enough to be pretty disturbing. Yes, the quotes I’ve used here are all “cherry-picked” – from LGF and the Nazis both – but since the webmaster patrols LGF pretty thoroughly it’s fair to say that his site is as defined by what he allows (e.g., calls to “sterilize” the “subhuman” Palestinians) as it is by what he doesn’t (e.g., criticisms of Israel or George W).

Take the Quiz

Via Atrios