War Handwavium

I am old enough to remember way back to 1979 when the Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Iran and started what would be the 444 day hostage crisis. I was a little bit naive at that time. Naive and uninformed.

And I had zero context in which to view the hostage crisis. As far as I knew we, the United States, were minding our own business when suddenly, out of the blue, some evil people who hate us for no reason decided to attack us and harm us.

My response was to become a strident attacker of all things Iran. Carter had botched the rescue mission. But then Reagan was elected and I thought his tough talk and ass-kicking was what the world needed to restore justice and fight these evil people.

It wasn’t until about ten years after the Iranian Revolution when I was having a discussion about the middle east with someone (Who I viewed at the time as a peace-nik, tree-hugging, useless hippy). I said something about the attack coming out of the blue and they hated us because we were so great, and they responded by saying something like “they hate us for Operation Ajax”.

I looked at them as if they had 40 heads. I had no idea what they were talking about.

I then went to the library and started looking for information about operation Ajax. The short of it was that in 1953, the CIA overthrew the government of Iran and installed a dictator, the Shah. The shah was a brutal dictator and tortured and killed tens of thousands of Iranians so he could keep himself in power. The US did everything it could to keep the shah in power for decades. And it wasn’t until 1979 that the Iranian people were finally able to overthrow that brutal dicator.

It was at that point, I had to admit that if I had been born in Iran and lived through that, I would have supported the revolution.

The Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979 had made me hate Iran. And it wasn’t until 10 years after that event that I got the context that, had I been born into their shoes, I would have hated the Shah and hated the US for keeping him in power for a quarter of a century.

It was probably another ten years after that realization that I was finally able to sort things out to my satisfaction, and understand all the events in the larger context of history.

1979 -> The event
1989 -> Learn I had been looking at the event with no context
1999 -> learn at least a minimal level of history about the event to understand it all.

The 9/11 attacks are this generations “event”. Today is the ten year anniversary after those attacks. And I just wonder if today’s generation is now starting to go through some realizations that their original view of the event was a view with no context.

I wonder if people who in 2001 believed President Bush when he said they hate us for our freedom, I wonder if those people today might be looking at 9/11 and realizing that Bush was lying.

It will be interesting to see how it unfolds over the next 10 years to see if we can get to a point of looking at 9/11 with enough historical context to truly understand that day.

Year: troop levels in Afghanistan (year: troop levels in Vietnam)

2001: 1,300 (1959: 760)

2002: ? (1960: 900)

2003: 10,000 (1961: 3,025)

2004: 17,000 (1962: 11,300)

2005: 20,000 (1963: 16,300)

2007: 26,000 (1964: 23,300)

2008: 31,000 (1965: 184,300)

2009: 82,000 (1966: 385,300) (Obama sent 20,000 in the summer and approved 30,000 in December)

General McChrystal’s 2009 report estimates Afghanistan will need 500,000 troops over the next 5 years.

2010: ? (1967: 485,600)

2011: ? (1968: 536,100)

2012: ? (1969: 475,200)

2013: ? (1970: 334,600)

2014: ? (1971: 156,800)

McCrystal’s 2009 report estimates that troop withdrawal will occur around this time.

2015: ? (1972: 24,200)

2016: ? (1973: 50)

Anyone else see a pattern???

http://www.warhw.com/2009/08/10/us-troop-levels-in-afghanistan-by-year/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/U.S._Troop_levels_in_Vietnam_War

Dick Cheney can’t remember a damn thing about Valerie Plame.

Now that we’ve gotten the “amnesia episode” out of the way, we’re still waiting for the “Evil Twin” episode, and the “Dream Sequence” episode. Dick Cheney, after all, is a soap opera.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/10/22-things-dick-cheney-cant-remember-about-plame-case

A little while ago, Obama said that he wasn’t going to do a knee-jerk reaction to Afghanistan and simply send more troops without a good strategy to go with a surge. Within the next day, someone leaked a military report that said America will “fail” in Afghanistan if we don’t add more troops.

The gossip going around is that someone in the Pentagon leaked the report to put pressure on Obama to do the knee-jerk reaction and send more troops.

What has been leaked *since* is that the report says that Afghanistan will need a total of half a million American troops and will take at least 5 years

If true, I’m definitely in the “need a strategy” camp before sending more troops. Half a million troops and five years is just plain crazy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

http://news.aol.com/article/the-point-afghanistan-mcchrystal-report/681449

I succumbed to Bush’s war handwavium without realizing it. The Bush administration refused to use the term “prisoners” because it would tie into the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Instead, Bush and his pals invented a non-existent class of humans called “detainees” who were not Geneva Convention “prisoners” of war. Thereby justifying through legal handwavium that these human beings captured during a time of war and held in American prisons were not prisoners of war.

It is similar in concept to the way Israel refuses to refer to the West Band and Gaza Strip as “occupied territories” because the Geneva Convention also has requirements as to how a military force must treat civilians in an occupied territory. Israel doesn’t want to follow these requirements, and indeed, has not followed these requirements since it captured and occupied these territories since the 1967 war. So Israel calls them “disputed” territories, not “occupied”, because they don’t want the linguistic connection to the Geneva Convention. Because they haven’t been following the Geneva Convention.

But today, I realized I have been duped. I’ve been referring to people being held in Guantanamo as “detainees” rather than “prisoners”. So, going forward, I will be refering to the people held in Guantanamo, and the even larger number of people held in Bagram, Afghanistan, as “prisoners”. It is an effort to remove the war handwavium put in place by the Bush administration and continued by Obama.

They are prisoners, not “detainees”.

Obama is the first president to suggest that he ought to be able to preventively detain anyone, for any reason, for as long as he wants, without any evidence of an actual crime, just in case that person might commit a crime in the future.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/22/preventive_detention/index.html

Some people with a sense of civil liberty saw this coming.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/09/guantanamo/

This isn’t saying we want to hold POW’s until the end of the war. POW’s are captured on a battlefield. POW’s do not include civiliians and are limited to armed combatants. And the “War On Terror” is a propaganda campaign with no end in sight. We’re still waging a “War on Drugs” decades after it started. Politicians will be waging a “War On Terror” for decades into the future.

This is Obama saying he wants to detain anyone, foreign or American, whether they committed a crime or not, whether there is evidence or not, on the grounds that maybe, perhaps, possibly, they might commit a crime in the future.

Obama is proposing America’s first Pre-Crime unit.

The reason, and I mean the only reason, anyone is proposing this is because every single detainee in Guantanamo has been tortured, and torture makes evidence inadmissable, which means none of these detainees can be convicted in any legal court of law. Not to mention that torture creates a demand that the torturers be prosecuted for torturing. Had Bush and Company not been so hot to trot to cut a man’s testicles and repeatedly bring men close to death via drowning, we wouldn’t have this problem now.

But now it’s Obama’s problem. And the right thing to do is to return to the rule of law, not invent laws that say there is no law. Obama wants to maintain his popularity, and Cheney and other psychopaths will howl murder if a single detainee is released from Guantanamo. And because Darth Cheney has tainted the evidence against every detainee, we cannot secure any convictions unless we submit to Darth Cheney’s notion of Rule of Law: It’s legal if I say so.

If this becomes “law”, America is doomed.

Glen Greenwald has an excellent article about the recent death of Bruce E. Ivins, one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, and how it relates the the anthrax scare of 2001. You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html

The gist of it appears to be that the anthrax scare was, at the very least, Ivins own personal attempt to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks. The anthrax letters all came with a letter saying some variation of the following:

09-11-01

This is next.

Take Penacilin Now

Death to America

Death to Israel

Allah is Great

 Worst case, however, the anthrax letters were part of a larger government attempt to “Tonkin” the country into attacking Iraq for 9/11.  The Washington Post‘s columnist, Richard Cohen, in an article had stated “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official” Cohen was warned, by someone in the government, to get Cipro before the anthrax attacks had started.

The implications of this whole mess deserve a war-handwavium entry or two. What I wanted to point out right now was a bit about John McCain’s reaction back in October 2001 when the anthrax scare was going full throttle. McCain appeared on the David Letterman Show on 18 October 2001.

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

There was no indication that the anthrax used in these attacks had come from Iraq. Ever. John McCain had zero evidence to support this at the time. And now as more information keeps coming out about Bruce E. Ivins, it is now known that all the anthrax used in the attacks came from a US Army bioweapon research facility. Towards the end of the interview, McCain not only beats the war drum for Iraq, but reveals his idea of foreign diplomacy.

“The crunch time will be if – and emphasize if – we have to go after Iraq.  … World power politics is very interesting. People are very friendly when they know you’re the most powerful kid on the block.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/01/mccain-anthrax-iraq/

Not only was McCain wrong about the anthrax being from Iraq, not only did he have zero evidence to link it with Iraq, not only does he beat the war drum to invade Iraq, but he shows that his view of diplomacy is little more than war or the threat of war.

Three days later in an interview with Tim Russert, McCain and Joe Lieberman are again trying to connect Iraq with not only 9/11 but also bin Laden and al Queda.

LIEBERMAN:  There is some evidence to suggest that Saddam Hussein may have had contact with bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network, perhaps even involved in the September 11 attack.

Lieberman is wrong on all three counts. Later in the interview:

MCCAIN: Recently, in Rio, I believe, an envelope was received, which gives me the idea that perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America.

McCain is wrong here too. Later on in the same interview:

RUSSERT: Would you have any problem expanding President Bush’s orders to the CIA to go after Osama bin Laden to include Saddam Hussein?

LIEBERMAN: Well, I leave that to the president. But as a matter of principle and morality, of course not.

RUSSERT: Senator McCain?

MCCAIN: I think Joe’s right.

McCain also puts in some suck-up time to President Bush Jr.

MCCAIN: I think the president is doing a great job in leading America and making us aware of the challenge we face.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/nbctext_102101.html 

This country can’t survive another four years of a war-mongering president at the helm. There will be nothing left of America but a smoldering ruin.

Someone is trying to Tonkin the Iranians.

This article is an example: “U.S. forces may be close to unlocking the mystery of who is behind a deadly innovation in Iraqi insurgents’ weapons, a ‘lob bomb’”

What’s a ‘lob bomb’? It’s a rocket, most commonly 107mm in diameter, with a range of around 8,500 meters (5 miles), a total weight of 19 kg (41 pounds), and an explosive charge of 1.3 kg (3 pounds) of TNT. This article contains some specs on one common example of these rockets.

What’s so different about a “lob bomb”? Iraq insurgents commonly use mortars. 60mm mortars have a range from 1000 to 3,500 meters (0.5 to 2.0 miles), and a total weight of 1 to 2 kg (2 to 4 pounds). Both motars and rockets are unguided, so generally only work against large targets, like an entire base. Mortars can be fairly consistent, though, from one shot to the next, so an insurgent might fire a mortar round from a distance, and then another insurgent might act as forward observer using a radio or cell phone and dial the rounds in. However, if the US forces have Counter Battery Radar, then radar can pinpoint the position of the mortar and send troops to counter attack.

Rockets are different in that they can be set up to fire several shots at once, such as four to twelve rockets. And they can be set up to fire either by remote control or by timer. But they’re still unguided, and since they’re fired all at once, or if they’re fired by timer or remote, there is no “dialing in” as with a mortar. This means they’re only about as effective as mortar rounds are, just applied differently.

So the article says there is a mystery as to who is behind the “innovation”. First of all, it isn’t an innovation. Insurgents have been using rockets for a while. And there isn’t much mystery as to where they come from. As this article points out, “A U.S. explosives expert, Maj. Marty Weber, confirmed in April 2007 that most 107mm rockets found in Iraq were Chinese-made.” So, insurgents have been using rockets since before April 2007, and most of those rockets are made in china.

So, why does the article call it an “innovation” when it’s been around from the beginning of the insurgency? Why do they say it is a “mystery” as to where these rockets are coming from when they knew the source over a year ago or more?

Later on in that same article: “American officers said in interviews that the group is Shiite and may have links to Iran.”

Well, it’s no mystery that Bush Jr. has been beating his little war drum to fight Iran for some time, and it seems that now someone is trying to Tonkin the Iranians so we can bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb bomb Iran.

Just remember, the Administration that is telling you now (2008) that Iran is shipping arms to Iraqi insurgents to be used against US troops, is the SAME Administration who lied to you in March 2003 that Saddam had a massive stockpile of WMD’s, was linked with al Queda, and was behind 9/11.