NY/Slaughter/Iraq/Criminal

[Chris R]

Bob Herbert Reaches End of

Rope in 'NYT': Labels

'Slaughter' in Iraq 'Criminal'

*Thu Jan-04-07

One day after fellow New York Times columnist (and former Iraq war supporter) Thomas Friedman came out against the coming U.S. escalation there, Bob Herbert labeled the enterprise "criminal" and called on politicians to end it.


"There must be a leader somewhere who can shake the U.S. out of this tragic hypnotic state, who can see that it is beyond crazy to continue our involvement in this war indefinitely, to sacrifice another 1,000 young lives, and then another thousand after that," Herbert wrote.

He called for others to find the "courage" to speak out, although his own paper's editorial page (and most others) has not yet clearly come out against the likely new "surge" in U.S. troops. Herbert concluded:


"The war has been an exercise in futility and mind-boggling incompetence, and yet our involvement continues — with no end in sight, no plans for withdrawal, no idea of where we might be headed — as if the U.S. had fallen into some kind of bizarrely destructive trance from which it is unable to awaken....


"This war is not worth fighting.



And if there were ever serious talk about enacting a draft or raising taxes to fight it, you'd see quickly enough that the vast majority of Americans would not find it worth fighting.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003527576
_____________________________________

[GenX]

Stupid/Threads/Get/Old/Fast

[stupefied]

Cut and run eh? Thank god this guy has no power. Only an imbecile would think pulling out with things as they are is in anybody's best interest.

Nice find Cyberfox but do you have any thoughts on it?

[GenX]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">but do you have any thoughts on it </div></div> /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/lol.gif /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/lol.gif /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/cry.gif /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/lol.gif

[Chris R]

Another Brain Dead CONservative thought Tim!

[stupefied]

I would have to agree the author of that article is pretty brain dead but I sure wouldn't call him conservative.

America has a lot at stake in this war and pulling out prematurely would be a huge mistake.

The Iraqi's are in no position to take over yet. What do you think would happen? You think things are bad over there now, imagine the chaos is they just left. Iran would love it that's for sure. So would al-Qaida. What a mess that would be.

Let's face it, this war had nothing to do with WMD or Saddam Hussein. It also had nothing to do with oil. Right or wrong the reason for going to Iraq, IMO, was all about bringing a territory to the fight with an enemy that has no land.

It was a risky idea, and it will be many years before we can really judge whether or not it was the right idea though I believe any battle based on a false premise is not a good idea.

Also, never mind the chaos in the middle east if they pulled out now, the hit to what's left of US credibility in many parts of the world would be disastrous.

I'm still curious though if you have any thoughts on it other than the fact the author of the article is brain dead.

[darryl smith]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: tiny_tim</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Cut and run eh? Thank god this guy has no power. Only an imbecile would think pulling out with things as they are is in anybody's best interest.

Nice find Cyberfox but do you have any thoughts on it? </div></div>

Tiny Tim! Cyber never has any thoughts on the crap he posts, he just posts it and then attacks anyone who disagrees with the garbage.

[Chris R]

I can see why Barracks attitude would be:stay the course of Kaos with-out changes to the Government or any other creative solution.

More blood-shed!

To say the Al-Qaida were there pre Illegal Invasion would be just as wrong to further let the alleged Cave Dweller and master-mind of 9-11 roam at large.

Rather than stamp out Usama and his followers;the US and Coaltion of dupes under the Deciders Command, Illegaly Invaded IRaq.

Is it any wonder why Leaders like Chretein turned their back to the faulty so called Intelligence.NO.

Chetein made the RIGHT Decision;and not give in to the prefabricated charge laid out by the Bush admin.

Its no wonder why respectable Countrys ignored the false charge,and further Invading Iraq had nothing to do with Usama.NOTHING.

Bring the war to them.


What GREEN baloney,bring the war to them.

The Taliban and further AL-Qaida could of been fought in Afghanistan quite respectably and where it ought of been done;thus catching and killing the Alleged master-mind on his turf would of made sense.

Going into IraQ was to snuff out the person responsible for paying Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel.

OIL,and further destablizing the area.

The evidence is there!

Its happening right now!

[darryl smith]

You cant seriously be applauding the actions of Jean Chretein! OMFG you have left the realm of reality and totally slipped into an altered state.

Afghanistan is just as big a mess as Iraq!, impossible to control the influx of muslum extremeists from ****stan nearly impossible to get ****stan to do anything about the fact they are harbouring osama and completely insuffecient manpower to fight that conflict.

If you want a creative solution here you go. Pour 1 million troops into iraq from all of the western countries (get in there and help), encircle the entire country with military power and STOP the influx of Syrian and Iranian backed muslum extremeists. Lock the country down tight for a few months and it will stabalize. Then direct these forces towards syria and Iran and put a stop to those rogue states as well.

In afghanistan its quite simple, bomb the snot out of the hills on the boarder of ****stan, relentlessly and definitively kill anything that moves on that boarder! Do this for a few months and that country will also stabalize.

But of course this wont happen because no one really has the balls to fight a war anymore.

[Chris R]

*
U.S. won't soon forgive the UN

&gt;by Linda McQuaig

January 4, 2007
Last month, NATO got a new top military commander: American general Brantz Craddock, who formerly ran the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, where terror detainees have been stripped of their most basic human rights.

So Canadian troops, serving as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, will ultimately be under the command of a U.S. general who ran a notorious political prison in defiance of international law.

This underlines how far Canada has moved in recent years, abandoning its former role as a leading contributor to UN peacekeeping missions and embracing a new role as a prop for the U.S. in its "war on terror."

A key goal of the Bush administration, with which the Harper government has co-operated, has been to downplay the significance of the United Nations, where U.S. power is sometimes challenged, and expand the role of NATO, the Western military alliance long dominated by Washington.

To justify this move, there's been a concerted effort on the part of the Bush administration and right-wing commentators to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations.

This campaign has involved portraying the UN as hopelessly ineffective, pointing to its inability, for instance, to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

But the UN is only as effective as its members allow it to be.

The tiny UN force in Rwanda, led by Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, called out desperately for additional troops and the right to intervene to protect civilians, but the UN Security Council declined to act on the requests.

Overall, however, the United Nations may be more effective than acknowledged.

According to the Human Security Report 2005, produced by the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia, there has been a significant, but largely unreported, decline in the number of wars, genocides and international crises over the last decade or so — a decline which the report attributes to increased international activism through the UN, as well as through NGOs.

The right's hostility to the UN springs not from its ineffectiveness, as they claim, but rather from the UN's role as a potential restraint on U.S. power.

In fact, Washington has often managed to get the UN to do its dirty work.

In Haiti, for instance, a UN force (including Canadians) helped prop up a brutal right-wing regime after Washington overthrew the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
But Washington has indeed been frustrated by the UN at times, most dramatically in March 2003, when members of the Security Council indicated they wouldn't support U.S. plans to invade Iraq.

This didn't stop the U.S. invasion, but it denied Washington the international legitimacy it craved, and instead championed the principles of international law.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan later described the U.S. invasion as illegal.

The UN's willingness to resist pressure from Washington over Iraq ranks as one of its finest hours. It's also one that powerful people in Washington won't soon forgive.
Originally published by The Toronto Star.
*
*

[darryl smith]

That post is full of rubish! I am amazed that the left would support a butcher like Aristide, but then again you lefties liked Sadam as well. I dont know how you sleep at night.

[Chris R]

Your comment appeals to the Darker side of me Barrack!

How can we appeal to other countrys to pitch in to a US led war on Terror,when its seen as the Terrorist?

Your suggestion could of been more than "Common Sense" especially if the US would of waited for the santion by the UNs Security councils decision pre Illegal Invasion of Iraq.

The United States is left to its own devices, and, the few remaning token armies represented by each country paticipating there in.
If the United Nations were to step in and claen up the mess it created,the US should take a back seat to the chosen representative of the UN led war on Terrorists in Iraq.

Hey;may-be you qualify for the job?

I agree,NO [censored] footing around!

First off,the United States is compelled set out under International law, to restore infastructure etc at its own costs.


The country is complete ruins,and set back to the Stone age,another priority reneged!

[stupefied]

The Chretien governments position, or lack of, leading up to the Iraq invasion was embarrassing. Why he didn't just stand up and say Canada would not participate instead of hiding beind the UN was transparent and disgraceful.

Suggesting they have purposely not captured Osama is just silly. You also suggest the goal of destabilizing the area, smoke another one.

Should the US have invaded Iraq? Who cares, doesn't matter now. Was it on false pretenses, yes. Cut and run, that would be disastrous. Put the UN in charge to clean it up, you must believe in Santa Claus.

[Chris R]

Below are the results for the Americans ONLY,if we take into account those INNOCENT Iraqis killed, wounded let alone, the Duped Coaltion minus Brtian,we quicky can see the seriousness in a failed policy compounded by the announcement below.

The insurgents account for another surge higher than those Americans killed etc.

All this could of been avoided should the trigger happy, "Decider" went along with UNs Security concils decision!


Iraq Vets Left in Physical and Mental Agony

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Jan 3 (IPS) - On New Year's Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000.

By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 -- 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.

Advances in military technology are keeping the death rate much lower than during the Vietnam War and World War Two, Dr. Col. Vito Imbascini, an urologist and state surgeon with the California Army National Guard, told IPS, but soldiers who survive attacks are often severely disabled for life.

"If you lost an arm or a leg in Vietnam, you were also tremendously injured in your chest and abdomen, which were not protected by the armour plates back then," he said.

"Now, your heart and chest and lungs and heart are protected by armour, leaving only your extremities exposed."

Dr. Imbascini just returned from a four-month deployment to Germany, where he treated the worst of the U.S. war wounded.

He said that an extremely high number of wounded soldiers are coming home with their arms or legs amputated.

Imbascini said he amputated the genitals of one or two men every day.

"I walk into the operating room and the general surgeons are doing their work and there is the body of this Navy SEAL, which is a physical specimen to behold," he told IPS. "And his abdomen is open, they're exploring both intestines.

He's missing both legs below the knee, one arm is blown off, he's got incisions on his thighs to relieve the pressure on the parts of the legs that are hopefully gonna survive and there's genital injuries, and you just want to cry."

According to documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, 25 percent of veterans of the "global war on terror" have filed disability compensation and pension benefit claims with the Veterans Benefits Administration.

One is a Jul. 20, 2006, document titled "Compensation and Pension Benefit Activity Among Veterans of the Global War on Terrorism," which shows that 152,669 veterans filed disability claims after fighting in
Iraq or Afghanistan.

Of the more than 100,000 claims granted, Veterans Administration records show at least 1,502 veterans have been compensated as 100 percent disabled.

Pentagon studies show that 12 percent of soldiers who have served in Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The group Veterans for America, formerly the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, estimates 70,000 Iraq war veterans have gone to the VA for mental health care.

New guidelines released by the Pentagon released last month allow commanders to redeploy soldiers suffering from traumatic stress disorders.

According to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, servicemembers with "a psychiatric disorder in remission, or whose residual symptoms do not impair duty performance" may be considered for duty downrange.

It lists post-traumatic stress disorder as a "treatable" problem.

"As a layman and a former soldier I think that's ridiculous," Steve Robinson, the director of Veterans Affairs for Veterans for America, told IPS.

"If I've got a soldier who's on Ambien to go to sleep and Seroquel and Qanapin and all kinds of other psychotropic meds, I don't want them to have a weapon in their hand and to be part of my team because they're a risk to themselves and to others," he said.

"But apparently, the military has its own view of how well a soldier can function under those conditions and is gambling that they can be successful."

Robinson said problems with the policy are already starting to arise.

On Christmas, for example, Army Reservist James Dean barricaded himself in his father's home with several weapons and threatened to kill himself.

After a 14-hour standoff with authorities, Dean was killed by a police officer after he aimed a gun at another officer, authorities told the Washington Post.

Veterans for America's Robinson told IPS that Dean, who had already served 18 months in Afghanistan, had been diagnosed with PTSD.

He had just been informed that his unit would be sent to Iraq on Jan. 14.

"We call that suicide by cop," Robinson said.

After his death, Dean's friends told the Washington Post that the reservist enjoyed hunting and fishing but had lost much of his enthusiasm for life when he found out that he was being deployed to Iraq.

"When Congress comes back in session we're looking forward to accountability hearings," Robinson said.

"We want to see veterans helped in the first 100 hours of the new session.

We want to see the word 'veteran' somewhere in that first hundred hours."

Robinson says his organisation has also documented the existence of at least 1,000 homeless veterans of the Iraq war.

"We need to get on top of the problem of homelessness," he said. "It's too soon to be seeing homelessness.

I want to be seeing a commitment from the Democratic Congress to dealing with the war and the needs of the soldiers in the first hundred hours of them coming to power." (FIN/2007)
_____________________________________

[darryl smith]

Where do you find this garbage. The result of the US invading Iraq are simple.

Alqueda on the run, muslum extremeists dying every day making the whole world a safer place, the spotlight is on the terrorists and now everyone knows their game plans (to kill us! and take control of the world), Sadam has no pulse! and the people of northern Iraq (the kurds...remember them...the ones that Sadam gassed by the tens of thousands) are experiencing for the first time true peace and advancement as well as freedom.

Your refusal to look at the situation rationally and in total is the problem cyber. You left wing fringe folks see everything in a negative light unless it was your idea. And here inlies the problem, you never have any ideas, so everything is negative.

[GenX]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> Your suggestion could of been more than "Common Sense" especially if the US would of waited for the santion by the UNs Security councils decision pre Illegal Invasion of Iraq.
</div></div>

Cyberfox...there were 17 sanctions implemented by the UN before the US even went to Iraq!!

What, give him 17 more, and then move in on him?????

[Soundbear]

"...Syrian and Iranian backed muslum extremeists..."

I was under the imprssion that most of the Iraquis dying in the last year were either Shiites or Sunnis.

Why would Syrian and Iranian backed muslum extremeists kill them?? Why would they care??

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: cyberfox</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> Your comment appeals to the Darker side of me Barrack!

How can we appeal to other countrys to pitch in to a US led war on Terror,when its seen as the Terrorist?

Your suggestion could of been more than "Common Sense" especially if the US would of waited for the santion by the UNs Security councils decision pre Illegal Invasion of Iraq.

The United States is left to its own devices, and, the few remaning token armies represented by each country paticipating there in.
If the United Nations were to step in and claen up the mess it created,the US should take a back seat to the chosen representative of the UN led war on Terrorists in Iraq.

Hey;may-be you qualify for the job?

I agree,NO [censored] footing around!

First off,the United States is compelled set out under International law, to restore infastructure etc at its own costs.


The country is complete ruins,and set back to the Stone age,another priority reneged! </div></div>

I see Cyberfoxs comments are relevant to-day as when posted..

[Soundbear]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: barrack</div><div class="ubbcode-body">That post is full of rubish! I am amazed that the left would support a butcher like Aristide, but then again you lefties liked Sadam as well. I dont know how you sleep at night. </div></div>

Yer as bad as Speedo. POST A REBUTTAL WITH FACTS IF YOU THINK IT'S RUBBISH.

I'd be glad to look at them!

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Barry Morris</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: barrack</div><div class="ubbcode-body">That post is full of rubish! I am amazed that the left would support a butcher like Aristide, but then again you lefties liked Sadam as well. I dont know how you sleep at night. </div></div>

Yer as bad as Speedo. POST A REBUTTAL WITH FACTS IF YOU THINK IT'S RUBBISH.

I'd be glad to look at them! </div></div>


It would be like trying to revive the dead Barry...NOT going to happen.NOT..These guys get on here where they can assult us..and then dissappear..reivent them selves and do it over with out care
for rules...

[GenX]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Barry Morris</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: barrack</div><div class="ubbcode-body">That post is full of rubish! I am amazed that the left would support a butcher like Aristide, but then again you lefties liked Sadam as well. I dont know how you sleep at night. </div></div>

Yer as bad as Speedo. POST A REBUTTAL WITH FACTS IF YOU THINK IT'S RUBBISH.

I'd be glad to look at them! </div></div>

Good lord, coming from Barry Morris, this is just too funny!

[Wrangler35]

UP&gt;

[Wrangler35]

Apparently the Lame duck.."War Criminal" Bush and gang will leave the mess to the next President..