Iraq vet suffering PTSD snaps, takes out sister, mother, self.
Army Spec. Abel Gutierrez. That was his name. George W. Bush is responsible for these three deaths just as he's reponsible for so many others. And there is no hell after he dies, just darkness, just like for the rest of us. There is no hell, other than the one George W. Bush created on Earth for our soldiers (amongst many other man-made hells), and GWB as a fortunate son will never experience that.
-- Badtux the Cursing Penguin
We won in Iraq. Which is why our last troops in Iraq sneaked out to Kuwait at 2AM without telling anybody.
So victory is celebrated nowadays by sneaking out at night, not by a big celebration and victory parade as you exit triumphantly? Gosh, things sure have changed over the last 70 years!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
If this is what victory looks like, what would defeat look like? Just askin!
So combat operations are over in Iraq, Obama said in his "Mission Accomplished" speech? Err, not so fast. Apparently combat missions are happening, just labeled "training missions". Huh, who could have predicted?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Just sayin'.
Anybody who thinks we're really leaving Iraq anytime soon is crazier than Weepy Beck. After all, there's oil in them thare sands... and Halliburton ain't finished suckin' it out.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Jason Isbell, Dress Blues. Sombre. Why are we still in Iraq?
-- Badtux the Grim Penguin
Israeli apologists say "if the Palestinians don't want to be slaughtered, they should expel Hamas."
And if the hostages at a bank robbery don't want to be slaughtered by the cops when the cops open fire on the bank robbers, they should, err, expel the bank robbers? Even though the bank robbers have guns and, err, they don't?
The average Palestinian doesn't give a shit for any of this. They just want to live their life in peace. A CARE worker and his six children sleeping on the street because they'd rather be blown to pink mist by a bomb than die a slow and miserable death under the ruins of their home is a typical Palestinian. What is this guy, a CARE worker who specializes in running women's programs, supposed to do? Go up to the Hamas compound, which is guarded by a bunch of people with AK-47's and RPG's, and do *what*? Blaming him and his children for their own brutal death at the hands of an Israeli bomb is an atrocity. They are hostages to Hamas as much as the bank customers in my example above are hostages to bank robbers. If Israel's beef is with Hamas, they should send in soldiers to homes where Hamas leaders are and execute the Hamas leaders. Expecting unarmed women and children and CARE workers to do something Israel's own soldiers are apparently too gutless and cowardly to do is just *wrong*.
And before someone accuses me of having a double standard, I feel the same way about the Busheviks and their war crimes in Iraq such as the rape of Fallujah (*twice*). The whole lot of them -- the Busheviks, Hamas's leadership, Israel's leadership who violated the cease-fire on November 4 and incited the war to time with the U.S. holidays and the end of the Bush regime -- should get a fair trial for war crimes, then hung by the neck to die, just like the Japanese and Nazi war criminals at the end of WWII. They're all war criminals, in the end. Sad to say, they'll all die of old age, instead of swinging at the end of a rope like they deserve. So it goes.
- Badtux the War Crimes Penguin
World Nut Daily ("we're batshit crazy because our readers are too!") proudly proclaims, "We won! Victory in Iraq!"
To which I can only say: Cool! Does that mean we can leave now?
Sad to say, the answer to that from World Nut Daily's Joseph Farrah is "Of course not!". Huh. Let me get this straight. We gotta keep our troops in Iraq whether we've won or not? So when do our troops come back from Iraq?
Oops, I forgot, John McInsane already had the answer to that one...
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The Boston Globe reports on yet another victim of Dear Leader's War on Brown People. This young boy was victimized not once, but twice. First he was paralyzed by American bullets that killed his entire family. Then, two years later, he was killed by a car bomb allowed by the chaos that occurs when you try to occupy a country with less than 1/3rd the forces needed to create order in a country.
His name was Rakan Hassan, and he is dead. Mishun Acomplished, Dear Leader. But of course nobody in America cares in anything other than an intellectual way, because he's not one of God's chosen people, the only real people, Americans. He was just an untermenschen, a darkie, a wog, a raghead, a haji, a sand nigger, not a real human being like you and me (well, I'm a penguin, but you get the point, right?).
-- Badtux the Saddened Penguin
So, as I explained in my previous post, there is no war in Iraq, only an occupation. What, then, about the violence you say? And isn't the surge working? And what about these "timeline" thingies -- what about the notion that setting a timeline is a "timeline to defeat"?
There is violence in Iraq, that much is undeniable. None of that has anything to do with a war, but, rather, with insufficient forces in Iraq to police the place. The Army manuals prior to the invasion of Iraq called for 500,000 troops to control the violence that occurs when civil order collapses. Think of what would happen if we had done Iraq right instead of half-a$$. If even the modest surge during the first part of this year managed such a significant reduction in violence, think of what would have happened if we'd *really* surged, and put the 500,000 troops in there that the Army manuals called for?
Of course, we did not -- do not -- have 500,000 troops to put into Iraq. But we could have. If the leadership of our nation had called for our nation to do so. President Ronald Reagan had 18 active duty divisions and 10 reserve divisions in the U.S. Army during the height of the Cold War, over a million men in arms, and these were all volunteers. Instead we had Donald Rumsfeld mumbling about "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had." Which might have been okay in 2003, but this is 2008 -- there has been plenty of time to build up the Army to the size needed to perform a successful occupation. I mean, 5 years is longer than our involvement in WWII, and we raised a military of over 10,000,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen during WWII!
In any event, talking about "winning" or "losing" in Iraq is nonsense. The war was over in 2003 and you don't win occupations, you end them after certain conditions are met or by simply ordering your troops to leave. So talking about "the surge is working" is nonsense doubled considering that neither Presidential candidate has proposed doing what's necessary to eliminate violence in Iraq so that civil society can re-emerge from the rubble -- which would require a *much* larger "surge" (the Army manuals called for 500,000 troops, as I mentioned, to police 20,000,000 people). If neither candidate is willing to propose that we do what it takes to pacify Iraq (probably because the American public are thoroughly sick of the place and want nothing more to do with it)... what's the point of quibbling over 12 months, 16 months, 24 months, whatever? It'll still be a mess at the end. A mess is a mess regardless of how long it takes, right?
-- Badtux the War Penguin
The war in Iraq is over, and has been over for many years. If we leave Iraq now, we haven't "lost", because we already won. The war was won on May 1, 2003. Dear Leader even had a big banner announcing "Mission Accomplished" in celebration. All that has happened since then is an occupation of Iraq. You don't win occupations, because there's nothing to win in an occupation -- you already won. The only thing you do with occupations is end them, sooner or later, generally when the host government says get out -- which apparently Maliki is doing. Maliki was democratically elected by the majority of Iraqis, so if America respects democracy, America should do what he wishes and get out. Why is democracy such a foreign concept to some Americans?!
-- Badtux the History Penguin
So much for the assertions that Maliki's earlier comments calling for a timeline for withdrawal were mistranslated... even Pravda on the Hudson has called bullshit on that one.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Army Spc. Joseph Patrick Dwyer dies of wounds from Iraq, five years after his service there.
There is an "official" list of those soldiers who have died as a result of the Iraq war. Then there are the thousands like Army Spc. Joseph Patric Dwyer who shall never be acknowledged as casualties of Dear Leader's war to make Iraq safe for... what? A democratically-elected President who spent Saddam Hussein's regime as a guest of the Iranians? Oil concessions for Big Oil? For what? I don't know, and nobody has ever been able to give me any reason that made sense. Is profit for Vice President Halliburton's company it? Is that all? I don't know. All I know is that too many have died, and so many of them, especially those whose injury was mental rather than physical, will never be listed on whatever monument of ignominy is ever set up for the veterans of the Iraq war.
-- Badtux the Memorial Penguin
Maliki says "Mission Accomplished", congratulates his own troops for defeating terrorism in Iraq -- and omits any mention of the U.S. Army.
I think Maliki wants us gone, and that's why he didn't mention the U.S. Army. Recent talk about a timetable for withdrawal tends to reflect that. Now that the Iraqi army has been purged of its Sunnis (other than the Kurds) and has basically become the Badr Brigade militia, and now that the police forces have increasingly become an arm of Maliki's militia, it may be that he feels he has enough boots on the ground to at least fight to a draw with Sadr's forces. Maliki is receiving substantial Iranian help, and it may be that he's decided it's time to throw in with the Iranians 100% and send the U.S. packing before the U.S. takes on his biggest backer, otherwise he has a big ole' target on his own behind when the U.S. bombs Iran.
Oh, if that scenario plays out, expect that Maliki will be calling on the Iranians for the logistical and air support currently provided by the Americans... and the Iranians will be happy to oblige, as well as happy to oblige with weapons and training (but not military forces, the Farsi-speaking Iranians would be as out of their depth policing in Iraq as the U.S. forces are). Maliki obviously thinks he now has enough boots to not need any more boots. If he has enough boots, then all he needs is the logistics, training, and air support -- and Iran can provide those as easily as the United States can.
-- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin
Hundreds, and probably over a thousand innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. troops running checkpoints. And what is the attitude of the U.S. high command here?
"If these fucking Hajjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen."
That wasn't a random cracker off the street. That was a full bird colonel, Col. William Rochelle, commander of an entire infantry brigade of 5,000 men.
So what why do we have these checkpoints, anyhow? It's not because they're somehow critical to defeating the Iraqi insurgency. We can't defeat an insurgency in a foreign and alien land using young soldiers who don't know the language and don't know the culture who are led by leaders who believe the answer to bad driving in the Middle East is to make them all into clones of Kansas City drivers. The answer that apologists for our occupation of Iraq make is this:
"If we didn't have checkpoints, thousands more Iraqis would die from suicide bombers."
And if wishes were ponies, we'd have a pony in every young girl's house!
Given that the checkpoints are a) demonstrably not stopping car bombers (and you better believe that if a checkpoint *ever* caught a carbomber, General Petroleum would call a press conference and announced that it was made with Iranian bombs and President Darth Cheney would immediately order airstrikes against Iran), and b) demonstrably have killed hundreds innocent Iraqis, I prefer to go with what can be seen and observed, rather than hypotheticals like "if wishes were ponies we'd have ponies in all young girls' bedrooms" or "if checkpoints didn't exist we'd have thousands more dead from car bombs." Sorry. It's that whole "reality" habit that I just can't kick no matter how much delusional thinking I'm exposed to -- I mean, who should I believe, your hypotheticals or my own two eyeballs?!
As for the notion that COIN ("counter-insurgency") makes any sense for the U.S. Army in the first place, the fact remains that we are an occupier in a foreign and alien land that we don't understand, and thus any sort of anti-insurgency operations conducted by our own military are, by definition, futile. Insurgencies are defeated via counterintelligence, not via military force. Even Joseph Stalin understood that one -- after the Red Army failed utterly to put down the Ukrainian insurgency after WWII, Stalin pulled them out and sent in the NKVD secret police and special forces, who then infiltrated the insurgency until if three insurgents met, two were probably NKVD moles. That strategy terminated the insurgency within four years. And note that the Red Army had the advantage that Ukrainians all knew and understood Russian due to hundreds of years of Russian rule, and due to the hundreds of years of Russian rule had basically the same culture as the Ukrainians -- neither of which applies to our Iraq adventure, where most Iraqis do not understand English and the average American has no more knowledge of Iraqi culture than he has of Martian culture.
Now, that said, there *is* a way to win against an insurgency using conventional military forces. It is the way that the British used against the Boer in the Boer War, or that the U.S. used against the Filipinos in the Filipino-American War. It is best described by Joseph Stalin, once again: "No people, no problem." I.e., genocide. Kill all military age young men, gather up all the women and children into concentration camps, and voila. Of course, then the women and children are dependent upon the logistical tail of your army for their food, water, housing, and clothing, which is most definitely not up to the task of providing these necessities for 20,000,000 people, so after a few months you end up with 15,000,000 corpses, but hey, what's a few million dead wogs, wot? We killed about a million Filipinos out of a population of five million on Luzon Island, mostly via starvation and disease in the concentration camps, but hey, we won, and that's all that matters, what's a little genocide amongst friends anyhow, right? Right?
So yeah, we could win in Iraq via military force -- if we wanted to surpass Nazi Germany as the biggest committer of genocide in world history. Is that what you want? If so... well, there's not much I need to say about that, hmm?
-- Badtux the War Penguin
U.S. officials claim Iran is training terrorists that attack U.S. forces within Iraq. Now, I could go and collect a buncha data about why that's absurd -- for example, Iran's man in Iraq is President Maliki, and it is not in their interests to undercut their man in Iraq -- but really. I mean, c'mon. This is getting absurd. It's just one lie after another, from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to "the surge is working" (right before the most deadly month of the war happens). It's like reading the 1970's Soviet press where they were claiming that capitalism was on its last legs and would, like, collapse within months, and that poor people were dying of starvation on the streets of America and being killed left and right by police forces exterminating "undesirables" and rich people in America ate babies and drank the blood of virgins, and etc. etc. etc... I feel like I'm stuck in a mirror universe where the Soviet Union conquered the United States and installed its government which then behaved in the same incompetent and lying fashion, except it's real.
But anyhow, I have one thing to say about any statement from any U.S. official today: Weapons of mass destruction, dude. Where's the weapons of mass destruction? Where's the thousand and thousands of *tons* of WMD that you guys said existed in Iraq? I'll make a deal with any right-wing ninny who happens to read this blog (not that any do, because I flog them with a limp herring until they go away, but ...). I'll believe something said by the U.S. government when you show me one ton of those weapons of mass destruction that existed in Iraq. Or when you show any of my hand-picked inspectors (hmm, I'll pay Scott Ritter to go) this one ton of Iraqi WMD. Then I'll believe the government's latest line of bullshit propaganda lies nonsense.
But until you show me that one ton (of the many tons these hacks said existed)... why should I believe anything these hacks say? They've already proven they're either incompetent, or liars. Why should I expect them to be telling the truth now, when they never have in the past? I ain't Charlie Brown. If Lucy holds a ball in front of me and says "kick it, Badtux!", the only thing I'll kick is her scrawny unsociable ass. There's a word for folks who continue to believe liars over and over and over again. That word is... uhm... morons?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
A Vietnamese fast food place just opened up down the road from me. So now if I want a fast food fix I can grab a quick bowl of pho or a quick rice plate, instead of an unhealthy burger or pizza. MUCH healthier than the American fast food. Yay!
I think that's probably the only good thing that ever came out of the Vietnam War -- Vietnamese restaurants. Unfortunately, our current racist government wants to keep little brown gooks out for fear they might be terriers terrists terrorists and won't let Iraqis in even if they've helped U.S. forces and now want a green card so they can become a Marine... so it seems unlikely that we'll get a big surge of Iraqi cuisine once the clusterfuck in Iraq-nam is finished. Bummer.
-- Badtux the Culinary Penguin
Dozens of mortar shells fall on Green Zone. Ah yes, the mighty, mighty Surge at work, with an erect member held up in response to U.S. claims of victory. So Baghdad is apparently secured. In some alternative universe. Mishion acomplished!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Lately I've noticed an interesting bit of pro-war propaganda hitting our newsstands. I'll call it "disabled war veteran porn", because that's what it is -- porn, just glossy images that in no way reflect reality.
Now, here's how it works. You get this war veteran who had shit blown off of him. Maybe his legs got blown off, or his arms, whatever. So here comes the porn part -- the inevitable story where some dude who got shit blown off of him is playing lacrosse, or running a race, or climbing Everest, or some shit like that. And then the American sheeple nod and say to themselves, "see, getting your legs blown off in war isn't such a bad thing after all! What a brave man" and go fucking shopping instead of doing something to end an illegal-ass war that's accomplishing nothing except educating a buncha goddamned jihadis in how to kill Americans, and killing and disabling a shitload of people who ain't done nothing wrong other than have the bad luck to be in the way of bombs or bullets intended for someone else.
Let me educate you on something here. That dude isn't playing lacrosse or climbing Everest or whatever because he's "a brave man" or some shit. He's doing it because the alternative is blowing his fucking brains out. Because when you're missing a piece of your body, that's it. You're never gonna have it again. And you goddamn well know it when you get out of bed every morning, you know that a piece of you is gone and it ain't ever fucking gonna come back. So either you whimper and whine, or you live the best way you can with what you got left and do what you fucking gotta do to keep yourself from blowing your fucking head off. And we're tough monkeys, so most of us don't eat a barrel. But I assure you, I might go off hiking in the middle of a goddamned wilderness even though I'm missing part of my foot, but I damn well know I'm missing part of my foot. And it ain't comin' back. But I do what I do, and what I can't do, I don't do, or I figure some other way to do it. That's just how it fucking works.
So next time you see one of those feel-good disabled war porn stories in the media, remember the real story -- the story of some poor bastard who is never, ever going to be the same person he was before he ended up in the cat box getting pieces of himself blown up, and all the brave-ass goddamned feel-good stories in the media ain't gonna get him whole again and he fucking goddamned well knows it even if the average American is too goddamned stupid and apathetic to know or give a shit. You see some disabled veteran climbing goddamned Everest or running a race or whatever bullshit the media is pumping at ya, remember this: you're looking at a dude who is doing that because the alternative is eating a bullet. No more, no less. But it ain't ever going to make him whole again, and he's never going to wake up the same person that he was five years ago. Never. Regardless of how many goddamned feel-good stories get written about his ass.
-- Badtux the Rude Penguin
I'm sure that the 1,000,000 Iraqis killed by our war in Iraq and the 3,000,000 Iraqis rendered homeless in Iraq (note -- this is as if 10,000,000 Americans were dead and 30,000,000 Americans had their homes destroyed) are glad that we are a nation of helping. Why, I bet they give us thanks every day from their shallow graves or their tent shanties with raw sewage flowing by that we're such a kind and helping nation, yessiree!
Oh wait, they're darkies, so they don't count... alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The Christopathic Rethuglicans destroyed all of Iraq's safety networks thinking that Iraqis would do like Americans do -- turn to their fundamentalist Christian churches for the charitable assistance needed to survive. Unfortunately they forgot that Iraq is a primarily Islamic country. The anti-U.S. movement of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is now Iraq's main humanitarian organization helping needy Iraqis.
Dumbest President ever, or just dumb? Your call!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
