30
Apr
Iraq Worse Than Vietnam Experts Say. Is there a turnaround?
PRESIDENT BUSH’S POWER TO IMPOSE MARTIAL LAW
SHOCKING: SHOCK AND AWE GENIUS NAMED IN DC HOOKER SCANDAL
Harlan Ullman was named as a client of the DC Madam, He became a columnist for the NY Post while Baghdad was bombed. The Washington Post notes: “Harlan K. Ullman, an academic whose main claim to fame was a scholarly paper he wrote more than a decade ago on the military strategy known as “shock and awe.” Responded Ullman: “It doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.”
THE PLAY’S THE THING
IRAQ WORSE THAN VIETNAM
JEWS AT ALJAZEERA
I love theater but somehow I never get to go. For years, I worked literally on Broadway and rarely found time (and admittedly the money for ever escalating ticket prices) to see many of the plays that tourist descend on New York to savor. While many are big ticket entertainments some offer sharp and biting commentary on the world we live in and under.
Thanks to my Steven Green, a producer and colleague on some of my films, I was able to see a revival of Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio” now featuring Liev Shreiber who masterfully plays Barry Shamplain, the Late Night Talk show host/shock jock on a Cleveland station who alternatively blasts the system and takes issues to the edge of irony and insult with non-stop banter but, then, also takes on his own listeners.
The show offers a window into the profit motives that led broadcasters to feature more and more outrageous programming and how it in turn provokes and dumbs down listeners.
New York Magazine asked actor Chris Noth about his radio listening habits after attending the premiere. His reply:
None. It sucks. There’s no art in radio these days. Most of talk radio is right wing. It’s part of the cultural boneyard, along with everything else. It’s a lot of chatter that is meaningless. When’s the last time you mouthed off? I never really got in trouble on the radio. But I did an interview on an FM station in Australia, and they told me I could play any song I wanted, but then they said “We can’t play that!” What song? A Jethro Tull song. It’s because they have a playlist on FM now, and if a song’s not on it, they can’t play it. That’s how fucked up things are.
Meanwhile the show that practices free speech is also testing with their advertising as their website explains:
Ads for the Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian’s play have been rejected by a number of radio stations. The reason is that the spots contain a phrase from the play: ‘pet’s orgasm’. Maybe they should try satellite radio where pretty much anything Howard Stern-ish goes”. Should we be protected from discussions of pet orgasms? We want to hear from you
If Talk Radio is more factional than fictional so was the other theatrical production I saw. It was by the legendary Living Theater which is back with a twenty year lease to a new basement facility on the Lower East Side’s Clinton Street. The venerable loved and admired doyen of this globally important institution Judith Malina (termed a “femme fatale at 81” by the New Yorker directs a faithful recreation of their l964 production of The Brig (Filmed by the Living’s late co-founder and uber actor Julian Beck).
In the age of Gitmo, the Brig is an important corrective to those who thing the United States military only abuses foreigners in its detention facilities. No, they started out torturing Americans—as many prisons continue to do in the United States of Incarceration—as this two hour non-stop depiction of what life was like for US Marines in a jail in Japan in l957. The Internet Movie Data Base carries this description:
Marine prisoners are awakened and put through work details for the course of a single day, submitting in the course of it to extremely harsh and shocking physical and mental degradation and abuse.
Yes, but with little dialogue and two hours of non-stop “action” in which sadistic guards turn prisoners into “maggots” The Brig gives us the kind of feel for whats going on everyday in brigs and secret prisons worldwide, a reality that TV rarely conveys and, hence, the power drama to penetrate truth.
I begin this blog at April’s end because the news is often so repetitive and predicatablle as political rituals and military disasters continue to dominate. So much so that the ONION takes aim at what it calls “the blah, blah, etc. etc.
Middle East Conflict Intensifies As Blah Blah Blah, Etc. Etc.
MIDDLE EAST—With the Iraq war in its fifth year, the war in Afghanistan in its sixth, and conflict between Israel and the rest of the region continuing unabated for more than half a century, intelligence sources are warning that a new wave of violence in the Middle East may soon blah blah blah, etc. etc., you know the rest.
Those of us who don’t know the rest can read about it in the weekend newpspapers.
First the NY Times
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling
“Inspectors found that in a sampling of eight projects declared successes by the U.S., seven were no longer operating as designed.” (of course, the newspaper of record says the Iraqis share part of the blame without reminding its readers that the country is under occupation.
And then, for “balance” of course, there’s positive story—or at least it looks positive with its headline and page one placement, until you read more:
Uneasy Alliance Is Taming One Insurgent Bastion
Sunni leaders have united with U.S. and Iraqi forces in Anbar “Province, heartland of the Sunni resistance.
After an upbeat impression is conveyed, you read on:
“Yet for all the indications of a heartening turnaround in Anbar, the situation, as it appeared during more than a week spent with American troops in Ramadi and Falluja in early April, is at best uneasy and fragile.
Municipal services remain a wreck; local governments, while reviving, are still barely functioning; and years of fighting have damaged much of Ramadi.
Translation: The situation sucks.
Over at the Washington Post, Tom Ricks continues to speak truth about power if not to it since no one in power seems to read or listen.
WP: SUNDAY HEADLINE: WAR CALLED RISKIER THAN VIETNAM
Military Experts Fretful Over Long-Term Consequences
Deferential words like “fretful” soften the critique, here it is:
President Bush recently said that “there’s a lot of differences” between the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War.
As fighting in Iraq enters its fifth year, an increasing number of experts in foreign policy and national strategy are arguing that the biggest difference may be that the Iraq war will inflict greater damage to U.S. interests than Vietnam did.
“In terms of the consequences of failure, the stakes are much bigger than Vietnam,” said former defense secretary William S. Cohen. “The geopolitical consequences are . . . potentially global in scope.”
About 17 times as many U.S. troops died in the Vietnam War — the longest war in U.S. history — as have been lost in Iraq, the nation’s third-longest war. Also, despite widespread public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, the debate over it has not convulsed American society to the extent seen during the Vietnam conflict. However, Vietnam does not have oil and is not in the middle of a region crucial to the global economy and festering with terrorism, experts say, leading many of them to conclude that the long-term effects of the Iraq war will be worse for the United States.
“It makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk,” said retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, a veteran of the Vietnam War. The domino theory that nations across Southeast Asia would go communist was not fulfilled, he noted, but with Iraq, “worst-case scenarios are the most likely thing to happen.”
Iraq is worse than Vietnam “in so many ways,” agreed Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a retired Army officer and author of one of the most respected studies of the U.S. military’s failure in Vietnam….”
On the War at Home, The Post reports: Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed
Now those articles are in the press. But here’s a story on GI SPECIAL that isn’t. It is an email from an Iraq soldier whose name has been exercised to protect him from, retaliation. It features a picture of a smiling U.S. soldier and a smiling Iraqi. The Iraqi is holding up a sign in English that he clearly cannot read—ha ha.
[Sign says: “I fuck sheep when I’m not busy mortaring the base.”]
This photo arrived [xxxxxxx] last week.
I do not know any of the details about this photo, such as where and when it was taken, who the Marine is or his unit, etc., although I am fairly certain it was taken very recently here in Iraq. What is sad and sickening is that most, but not all, Marines around here find this to be humorous.
If we are truly here to “liberate” our “friends”, the Iraqi people, we would not find humor in mocking them this way.
This is only one photo, but the message speaks volumes.
We do not really give a rat’s ass about these people.
Members of the military who speak about the “good” we are doing out here are not seeing the bigger picture.
There is nothing “good” about our occupation of Iraq.
It is my opinion that they are just as delusional about this debacle as is the current occupant and his band of neo-cons.
Incidentally, I now have difficulty accessing www.militaryproject.org from my [xxxxxx] network.
I am not certain yet if it is a bandwidth issue, or if it might be getting filtered out somewhere along the way.
[XXXXXX]
DAHR JAMAIL: ONE UNEXPLODED BOMB PERSON
IRAN AND US TO MEET AT REGIONAL CONFERENCE, REPORTS NY TIMES
Iran to Attend Regional Talks on Iraq Strife
The announcement sets the stage for the first cabinet-level meeting between Iran and the U.S. since the end of 2004.
Read Iran’s Rejected 2003 proposal to The US
MASSACRES IN MOGAGISHU
WSWS’s Bill Van Auken:
“The brutal military siege against the Somali capital of Mogadishu constitutes a war crime for which the US government bears the principal responsibility.
While the mass media in the US itself has largely averted its eyes from the carnage, Ethiopian military units, backed and advised by Washington, have unleashed an intense bombardment of Mogadishu’s crowded and impoverished urban neighborhoods, killing and wounding thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into homeless refugees.
This latest round of fighting has pitted the US-backed Ethiopian forces and, in a lesser role, forces loyal to the so-called Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of former warlord Abdullahi Yusuf against supporters of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which had administered the city and much of southern Somalia before the US-backed Ethiopian invasion last December. The siege follows a similar Ethiopian offensive against Mogadishu three weeks ago in which more than 1,000 people were killed, the great majority of them are civilians.
Long-range artillery, tanks and helicopter gunships have conducted ceaseless and indiscriminate shelling of the city for nearly a week and a half. Much of the capital lies in ruins, while hospitals, schools and housing have not been spared.
Since we have been focusing on war, here’s one you don’t read about, the economic war. It is an essay by Carolyn Baker featuring a book written by Michael Hudson, one of the lead experts interviewed in my film IN DEBT WE TRUST:
She writes: “As an historian, I believe that in order to fully appreciate the current tyranny of centralized financial systems, it is necessary to understand how they evolved within the past six decades.”
